CorpU featured a fantastic presentation by Ling Sian Tan who leads the Capgemini Design Centre of Excellence, on how Capgemini is using social learning as a new platform for leadership development. A metaphor Ling used to describe organizations’ current adoption rate for developing social learning programs was a swimming pool, where companies are either:

• still sitting at the bar discussing the possibilities of social learning, (25%)
• about to dive in, (6%)
• wading in the shallow end of the pool, (47%)
• comfortable swimming well in the deep end of the pool, (24%) or
• already up in the lifeguard stand, the masters and purveyors of best practice (0%).

(Percentages next to bullet reflect statuses of audience participants)

Prior to Ling’s presentation, we shared:

CORPU ACADEMY’S 10 IDEAS FOR DESIGNING FUTURE LEADERSHIP DEVELOPMENT PROGRAMS using the new paradigm of social learning.  As leaders are facing unprecedented times of change and complexity, we’re beginning to see the opportunities for new technology to meet the demands of our time.

Number 1 – Build Organization Capability.

In your designs, consider how to build organization capability.  We want to build differentiated strength in areas like innovation, solution selling, logistics management, retailing and distribution for example. We have to understand how to design experiences that consider not just personal skills, but that contemplate cross-functional relationships and external network dependencies, systems and processes and culture. Using our past design ideas, research suggests we’ll get a small percentage of the leaders applying a few new skills.  With that approach, we can neither achieve critical mass or escape velocity to make a difference. Our designs
must contemplate the broader needs to build core organization capabilities
that truly are differentiating.

Number 2 – Reach More Leaders.

Technology allows us to reach more leaders, to broaden our discussions on strategy and execution to much deeper levels in the organization.  Technologies not only expand reach but reduce costs.  If it’s too costly to bring 5,000 managers together to hear expert lectures, bring the expert to managers through video or virtual classrooms.  Strengthen knowledge at lower levels to build trust, and strengthen capacity for distributed decision making.  As marketplace complexity increases, we need to support decision-making at the lower, at the local level where contexts are unique.  This will be essential to successful growth, and ultimately to the success of
innovation strategies.

Number 3 – Ensure follow-through.

Again, research suggests that a very small percentage of corporate training is ever effectively applied on the job.  Many barriers prevent true behavior change, thereby delivering minimal business impact.  Learning programs need to integrate follow-through.  We have to stick with people until we see they are achieving value. There are many factors to consider in designing the informal learning follow-on to formal learning.

Number 4 – Add Accelerators.

These are the activities that can accelerate learning and the creation of new knowledge.  Our programs need to encourage debate, and must help teams synthesize and expand new ideas to grow their collective knowledge.  We have to create immersive environments, and try to consider how seemingly unrelated subject areas might enable mashups to spawn originality.

Number 5 – Encourage and Support Experimentation. 

In a world of rapid change, many answers aren’t available to distribute to people through learning programs.  Even experts may suggest several or many possible ways forward. This is a time when leaders have to forge new paths.  The safest way is through safe experiments.  Our designs for leadership development must create environments that support experimentation. We have to help leaders identify experiments worth trying, teach them how to design and conduct safe experiments, and analyze and feedback stories of successes and failures, and help the group codify results so they can move together – a bit smarter.

Number 6 – Help To Tear Down Old Mental Models.

In many aspects of business, the old reliable models and ideas that have worked in the past are like anchors around the feet of leaders who are already treading water.  And sometimes leaders can’t see their old models are actually extra weight that’s pulling them down faster than they realize.  How can we help leaders break out of old models?  Can we discover and hold up examples – sometimes far beyond those we know and are comfortable with, to shed a drop, then a ray, then a flood of light onto new possibilities.

Number 7 – Design Around Leaders’ Immediate Challenges.

Too often development is focused on things we think leaders might need to know.  Perhaps they even misdiagnose what skills and knowledge they need for success.  If focus learning on the challenges they’re facing right now, it highlights their immediate knowledge gaps.  Once we design around their immediate challenges, we begin to make the first steps toward embedding learning into work – at some point, in some areas for some leaders, the two will be indistinguishable.

Number 8 – Invite Leader Teachers. 

Designers should definitely consider how to invite and integrate leader teachers (senior executives, functional leaders and others) to share visions and their teachable points of view on the business, the industry, the global marketplace.  Leader teachers should push the debate and add the pressure that’s required to spur new thinking.  We want to invite their wisdom into leadership discussions.

Number 9 – Provide A New Lens Through Which To See Problems. 

How can we help leaders reframe their problems and challenges? Sometimes they get stuck seeing the same seemingly impossible barriers in front of them.  Can we help them envision the future and work backwards?  Can follow THEORY U principles to help them work from the future?  When they continue to look at problems through a single or the same lens, they often can’t move forward.  Our designs can push them to reframe their problems to overcome their inertia and begin moving again – they don’t even have to move forward – they just have to move.

And finally, Number 10 – Help Them Lock Arms To Move Together Into an Unknowable Future. 

Our designs can create ways for the leadership team to lock arms as they move forward, sharing what works and what doesn’t as they go.  A core principle of social learning is to extend processes and tools for sharing an ongoing dialogue and continuous learning long after the formal learning has ended.

CorpU has designed a new CorpU Academy, new design methodologies and new social learning platform based on insights, discussions and research with its membership community who has been participating for the last 3 years in CorpU’s Leadership Development and Social Learning Institutes.  We’d love to get your feedback as to whether we’re on the right path, or if you’ve found something that’s working well, or just to chat about what we don’t know about what we don’t know.  Please comment below and we’ll begin a dialogue.

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 »

Here is how one newspaper began their report of John Wooden’s recent death. They weren’t even born when revered UCLA basketball coach John Wooden had his glory days and string of national championships. Yet hundreds of students still gathered on campus in his honor and mourned his death Friday night.

As word of Wooden’s passing spread, more than 500 students joined a somber, candlelit remembrance of the legendary coach across from the UCLA Ronald Reagan Medical Center, where he had died minutes before at the age of 99.

John Wooden has been a hero of mine for over forty years. He was a quintessential leader teacher…one of the very, very best.  He was also a coach and mentor of enormous stature and accomplishment.  John Wooden also cared deeply about all those for whom he had teaching, coaching and mentoring responsibility.

Yes, he was the coach who won more men’s college basketball games than anyone else in NCAA history.  He had a remarkable and unheard-of .804 win-lost percentage over the course of his career. His ten national basketball championships, including seven in a row beginning in 1967, are more than any other men’s NCAA program.  At one point, his UCLA Bruins won 88 consecutive games. He was the first person elected to the college Hall of Fame as both a player and as a coach.  These accomplishments and many other records are his for all to appreciate and strive to equal, emulate or even surpass.  But John Wooden was much, much, more.

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I am often asked the following question….”What is the most frequent concern you hear about starting and conducting a leaders as teachers program?” The two concerns or questions I hear the most from learning, development and talent management professionals and leaders are:

1. Will the approach take too much time?
2. How should we start?

In a formal sense, there are five broad categories that encompass dozens of ways that leaders can teach.  The five categories are:

• Identifying learning needs and learning solutions/design
• Live teaching
• Teaching through the use of media and technology
• Pre and post-program teaching and coaching to drive application and learning impact
• Recruiting, training, coaching and mentoring leader-teachers

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Over the years I have been delighted to find that if the right conditions exist, it is not nearly as hard to recruit leader-teachers as one might expect.  In fact, in many organizations, there are many leaders and talented professionals who are willing to teach, coach and mentor. Too often, we simply do not know how to find them or do not create the environment in our work organizations for these individuals to self-identify and volunteer. I have heard many stories from leaders who said something like the following. “I enjoy teaching and guiding the development of others, but there just are not opportunities at work so I find other places in my life to do it”. For example, many leaders coach sports teams in the community, teach at a church, synagogue or mosque. Others serve as big brothers or sisters or mentor youth or adults.

I was recently reminded of the untapped leader-teacher resources in so many of our organizations.  These are lost opportunities to contribute to building learning and teaching organizations. When the right conditions are present, it is not that hard to enable leaders to share their experience and knowledge with others.

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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 »