Manifestos are the narratives that pull the future towards us as we lean into the unknown – Eddie Harran (@eddieharran)
Author: simongterry
What’s your manifesto?
The hardest part of disruption is disrupting yourself – R Ray Wang.
As the Industrial revolution changed society and new communication technologies were born, the western world experienced an age of revolution. Manifestos flew from the printers as advocates for changes in society sought to draw people to their causes and changes to society and economic activity. The passion for manifestos quietened after the shocks of two world wars. By then massive change had occurred to the level of social support, to the structure of the economy and to the power of social classes. Society had adjusted to new social models that mitigated (or in the case of totalitarian states suppressed) issues of the prior disruptions, our corporate business models were relatively static and a long boom drove western and global economies.
A new age of manifestos
We could be entering a new age of manifestos. With new communication technologies, disruption to traditional corporate models and the economic activity, change is required but we are not yet clear on what that change means. In recent weeks we have seen
- The Responsive Organisation manifesto
- The Work Revolution manifesto
- increased discussion of Holocracy:
- other new movements (like Change Agents Worldwide, Social Enterprise, New Economy, Social Value, etc) are growing, and
- hundreds of conferences blog posts and other papers on disruption, the future or work and social issues arising from disruption
The new manifesto is personal
If we learn one thing from that last age of manifestos, it should be that nobody should surrender themselves unthinking to a cause. The quote above captures the challenge of this new adaptive age. We need to disrupt ourselves as much as we need to disrupt the organisations, economies and societies we make up.
So what is your manifesto? Your changes are unique. You have a unique purpose. The changes you will drive will need to be social but before you join a movement be clear on what you want to see done. Make sure you are shaping the movement to your causes.
Take some time to reflect but start to write down your own personal manifesto. Feel free to beg, borrow and steal. Practice your new manifesto. Live your new disrupted self.
Adapt and change your manifesto as you learn from the work. Adaptation is not just a challenge for organisations it is a personal challenge. Will you have the capabilities required for the future of work? Will your role and your passions survive the changes ahead? You won’t know unless you adapt, experiment and change yourself.
The more you live your manifesto the clearer it will be, the more power it will have and the better guide it will be for others.
Start today. Others are waiting to see your contribution to the new age of manifestos.
The Responsive Organization Manifesto
I am very honored to be ranked as an influencer and quoted in the manifesto by the Responsive Organization movement. Excited to see so much enthusiasm for making organizations more innovative, more agile, more connected, more focused on customers and community and ultimately more human.
Success of these changes will depend on building new cultures, new capabilities and new leadership.
Texting while leading
This morning, a car passed in front of me as I drove through the traffic. The driver’s head was down looking a phone. An example of a driver taking risks by distracting their attention from a complex system in a rapidly changing environment. A driver who assumes that things aren’t going to change much and that the car can continue on business as usual while their attention is elsewhere. Importantly, they chose to put their attention somewhere that they can’t have much impact while driving a car.
We know driving and texting is dangerous. Studies show it impedes performance of drivers more than alcohol.
Do we ever consider how dangerous it is to lead while using a smartphone?
- Others notice your lack of attention to the issue that was worth your presence and that changes their attitudes and behaviour
- Things aren’t going to stay the same while you are distracted because the environment is complex and challenging. That’s why the issue was worth your presence
- You made the issue more challenging and complex by changing people’s attitudes and behaviour to the issue at hand.
- Great leadership requires presence and attention to others and to the detail of the situation.
- Great leadership is purposeful. Responding to emails, texts and calls is shifting from your agenda to the agenda of others.
- You can’t usually do much that has a meaningful leadership impact about the emails, texts and calls but you are surrendering a huge leadership impact on the task you have at hand.
So next time you feel tempted to pull out the smartphone while leading, ask yourself:
‘Is it really safe?’
Seek out criticism
An absence of criticism is not a good sign. Seek out the feedback that you are missing.
If you are not receiving regular criticism, then you may be missing out on valuable feedback. For a leader or an organisation, a lack of feedback usually means one of three things needs to be checked:
- Listening to the right people: Talking to fans and supporters is usually easy. They approach you and are eager to share their praise. You may need to seek out critics and the disaffected. Broaden your conversations and start asking for feedback. Look at the margins and look for information that is being discarded because it is incomplete, inconsistent or inconvenient.
- Encouraging feedback: We all recognise the signs of a leader or an organisation that asks for feedback but doesn’t want any criticism. It can be a simple as praise being recorded by you but all complaints must be put in writing by the other person. People know how to respond with caution when they see those signals. Make sure that your behaviours, systems and processes encourage and celebrate negative feedback as a learning process. Show how you have responded positively to negative feedback and made changes. Otherwise negative feedback will be actively concealed or actively discouraged.
- Stop pleasing everyone: You can’t satisfy everyone. People are dissatisfied with every change and every business. Everyone expect you to have a specific & unique point of view. There is a real danger that you don’t stand for anything, that you might not be taking enough risks, that you aren’t targeted enough and that you are sitting in the safe middle ground. Hearing the right criticism is an important sign that you are achieving your specific plan. Being generally good won’t get you where you want to go.
Voice is a critical component to guide our actions. We all need to encourage as much positive and negative feedback as we can.
Your change is unique
With the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington and Martin Luther King Jr’s “I have a dream speech” this is a week in which we are reminded of the power of people’s dreams to change the world and the power of individuals to bring those dreams to life.
How do you want to change the world?
Everyone does, at least in some small way. Everyone’s desired change is slightly different.
That is the work each of us need to do. The diversity of our unique visions is also the reason why the changes are not going to happen on their own.
Here is an exercise to try: Take the next five people you meet and ask them to describe specifically how they would like to change the world. Don’t settle for “achieve world peace” or “end poverty” or “achieve gender equity”. Ask them to explain how that world would look, work and feel in some specific detail.
The answers are diverse even if the themes are consistent. Ask yourself how you would describe similar changes. My experience is that each person’s method and inspirations for changing the world are driven by unique visions and their experiences.
This drives us to at least five insights for our personal actions to realise our changes in the world:
- You can’t leave it to others: Nobody else wants exactly what you want. Don’t you want your views to be considered and some part of your vision realised. If you are not involved you don’t get to shape the changes and the decisions will be made by others. As many people have discovered specifying requirements and sitting back generates a different quality of outcome to being a part of a change process.
- You can’t do it alone: Any change to the world, as opposed to ourselves, by definition affects others. You will need to take their goals, concerns and circumstances into account. You will need their help or at least an end to resistance. Plan for a collaborative and adaptive process to engage them in the change. There is always enough work to do and ideas turn into better action through discussion and debate.
- We need to use what is common: Finding common purpose, concerns and circumstances is how we engage others to move to new actions. We need to align around each of these before we can move forward in an engaged way. Differences are issues to be addresses. What is common is our way forward together.
- We need to embrace difference: Don’t sweep difference however small aside or under the carpet. It will only come back later more dangerously and more vehemently. Explore how the small differences in vision can be addressed or aligned in action. Difference is the source of ideas, innovation and growth.
- Use the ‘fierce urgency of now’: The best time to act is when you see the need for action. When you see a need for action, act then. Others will see it to and the common view of a need to act is important to leverage. Later, you will need to recreate the same level of energy and urgency or you and others will be endlessly debating when is the right time.
If you want to make your changes in the world, you will have to act, embracing the challenges that it brings.
Scaling enterprise sales
Selling to enterprise clients is the new black. However, enterprise sales rarely comes easily. The challenges highlight where businesses need to innovate to engage enterprise customers.
With the successes of organisations like Workday, Amazon Web Services, Yammer, Salesforce.com and others in selling to enterprises, many entrepreneurs are looking to generate revenue for their start-up by selling to enterprises. Over recent years I have spoken to many people, keen to sell services to large organisations. Like all good entrepreneurs they are keen to move fast and scale their businesses. However, few have invested time and effort in how they will scale their distribution to enterprises.
- Enterprise sales aren’t viral. You might be able to win enterprise users with a click, but money takes sales effort.
- You need a sales team to get the sale and you can waste a lot of time and money with a poor performing sales team.
- You need to know your buyer or you can waste a lot of time navigating organisations and dealing with many parties
- You need to shape your buyer’s perceptions
- The enterprise rarely has one mind and you may find conflicting agendas, decision rights, etc. It is not uncommon to have technical, finance, legal and other gatekeepers who need to be satisified before a check is cut by the buyer.
Sacks called for start-ups to put as much effort into innovating distribution as they do their product. Any business to business sales business should do the same.
These lesson reflect what any business to business organisation has known for years. Enterprise sales is a demanding body contact sport where the rules and the opposing players keep changing. So how do you do it better than the average depends on how your design your innovative sales model to leverage these insights:
- Be ready to be right first time. Enterprise buyers are time poor. If you don’t have your questions or your pitch clear, then don’t expect them to wait for you to sort it out. These are first impression sales so you want to create and maintain a positive momentum from the get-go. Plenty of great ideas died at the doorstep because the sales person wasn’t ready to sell. Make sure your team is capable of delivering the message. Spray and pray can do more damage to your reputation. In many cases, there are few buyers of your solution and unlike consumers they rarely forgive. In a social era, enterprise buyers increasingly know each other and collaborate on insights into vendors.
- Collaboration is better than going alone. Leverage internal change agents and partners who can help you understand the organisation, the agendas and find the buyer. Invest time in research before you act. There is enormous power in having someone inside the organisation who can work the system for you and supply you with the right information to go forward. Too many perfect fits fail because meetings don’t get followed up. Just like internal change agents, partners who have already done the leg work on that or similar organisations are ways to accelerate your efforts.
- Understand the buyer’s needs. What your product does is irrelevant. How much the users love it is irrelevant. Your feature differences to competitors are irrelevant. Your analyst ratings are irrelevant. Don’t confuse the tool with the result. What matters most to corporate customers is the problem that they are trying to solve today. Make sure your pitch is meeting their strategic needs.
- Help the organisation understand value by solving their need exceptionally well. The decision criteria in organisations can be as bewildering as the choice of solutions that the organisation faces. One thing is clear to every company the amount of money that they are being asked to put out the door. The better job you do demonstrating real value is a multiple of that specific cost, the easier your sales job is. We are not talking promises or soft benefits. We are talking demonstration of real hard value. If it can’t be demonstrated by a pilot or experiment in the organisation then you will need to invest in case studies with role model global organisations that everyone else wants to copy.
- Manage a pipeline of sales opportunities: Enterprise sales take time. Providing continuity of management over time is important to maximise your chances and minimise waste. Managing a pipeline enables you to assess continuously where each deal is at, assess prospects of success, kill bad deals quickly and shepherd customers through from suspect to prospect to opportunity to purchase decision to order and then through to implementation.
- Plan for and design for servicing of the account to realise value. Winning a licence fee or a service fee is well and good. However, unlike consumers you can rarely leave a enterprise client to its own devices to make the value from your product. The multiple agendas mean that there will be changes, new questions and always new agendas. If you want to retain and grow their business given all you invested in a sale, treat sales and service as a continuum. You will need to plan to support your customers to grow the use of your product and leverage that to grow your revenues.
As Sacks argues, you need to innovate in your distribution model. Enterprise sales don’t just happen. If you want to scale, enterprise sales you will need some new magic. My advice is to focus your distribution model innovation on the key issues because a better solution to these issues combining service design and sales will deliver big advantages down the track.
Leaders reach magic in people
“The great leaders are like the best conductors – they reach beyond the notes to reach the magic in the players.” – Blaine Lee
As a board member of Melbourne Chamber Orchestra, I have had the opportunity over the last 5 years to witness the power of leadership in drawing out the magic of exceptional personal and team performance. In that time, I have learned a great deal about leadership from William Hennessy, MCO’s exceptional Artistic Director.
MCO performs works both conducted and unconducted. A group from 8-30 performers is led either from a conductor’s podium or from within the orchestra. However the group is led, you see five elements demonstrated by the leaders in the best performances:
Passion: A great leader brings passion for the work, the players and for the performance. That energy is infectious inspiring the players and will be conveyed to the audience. This passion is inspired by a sense of creative purpose and a will to create excellence.
Preparation: Preparation runs from design of the program years in advance through rehearsals to the minutes before performance. Quality of preparation for performance is key to the results of the group. An audience only gets one chance to hear a great performance. Every thing must be done beforehand to maximise that outcome.
Attention: Great performances just don’t happen. They are shaped by a meticulous attention to the detail. No leader goes through the motions or relies on their big picture view of the desired result. Leadership of an orchestra cannot be outsourced. As lean organisations where everyone must pull their weight, the leader of an orchestra must pay attention to every aspect of performance to lead a great result. Their eyes and ears are constantly alert to the detail of the work and to their next intervention.
Communication: A leader does not need words to communicate. A tempo & level of performance can be set by role modelling. Coaching can be made with a glance or movements of the body. However delivered, the communication is continuous and two-way. Leaders receive feedback from the players in the same way and use that to shape the group together in a great performance. The leader is looking to ensure that the whole orchestra remain together at the peak of performance in the work.
Effort: Leadership of an orchestra is not a passive endeavour. It is physically and mentally demanding work. Beginning well before performance in planning and rehearsal this effort continues through until after the audience has left the hall. You don’t lead an orchestra through hierarchical position. You lead through sustained physical engagement with the players and music. It is not uncommon to see a musician using every spare moment to practice for a piece. The same applies to their leaders.
All leaders can learn from other domains. Come see MCO perform and be surprised by the magic of leadership in another domain.
Blossoms, green shoots & nature’s renewal – Spring is time for new growth!
What are you doing to grow?
The few & the many
Large corporations are challenged sustaining & retaining change agents. A handful of change agents can make an enormous difference to any organisation. Change agents are at the heart of the ability to innovate, to adapt and to remain externally focused. Change agents are often the gateway for new partners, explore the edges and conduit for new ideas into organisations because of their willingness to consider the new, to experiment and to get stuff done.
The ideal model is that leaders everywhere have the capability and the authority to drive change. Like many ideal models, this oft stated ambition is harder to find in practice. This difficulty is no excuse for not trying. However, many corporates deliberately, or unwittingly, adopt a 21st century demarcation between traditional managers who keep the wheels of business as usual turning and their contingent of change agents who transform the business.
The best outcome for corporates is to have a spread of change agents across their business. That way each function and division can be exposed to change. For major initiatives, change agents from different silos can collaborate to bring the business together in key initiatives. Sadly, this model is often the most dangerous for the change agents. Change agents must operate in the midst of large groups of more traditionally oriented managers, dependent on a tolerance for diversity and ongoing support for their efforts and occasional failures. As one change agent put it to me, this model means that they have to deliver 110% of the contribution of a traditional manager in the organisation & then deliver change just to make their position safe. The slightest slip creates an opportunity for backlash.
Commonly change agents will exist in clusters drawn to other similar individuals who are interested in new ideas and making change happen. Some change agents explicitly recruit and develop teams who support their change agenda. While this model can provide a safe haven to nurture change and change leaders, it creates a risk that the entire cluster can be lost at once with a change of leadership or a mass defection. Increasing fragility is not a sustainable solution.
So what can be done to foster the growth of change agents across an organisation? Here are 6 actions to help.
- Know who they are, what they are working on and show interest. Who are your ‘go to’ people if it is new, difficult or demanding? A simple cup of coffee or a phone call can do wonders in retaining and encouraging people to push for change. Clearly, if you run talent processes you can be more deliberate in investing in their development and careers.
- Value project work as much as line management. Change agents will be drawn to projects, but if it is a ghetto you will lose their impact in the rest of the business.
- Encourage diversity of individuals, allow diverse management styles and make openness to the new & different a key value in your organisation. Remember not all change agents are charismatic leaders and many will be far from traditional homes in edgy technology, creative or strategic business opportunities. The effective styles are as diverse as human nature. Some of the most effective individuals may be working in surprising parts of the organisation.
- Network your change agents so that they do not feel isolated, can share lessons, can collaborate and even use their collective power. Encourage change agents to share their skills and develop teams of others who can drive change. An enterprise social network will help if your culture allows it. Also encourage your change agents to network externally and to learn from others.
- Ensure your performance management systems reward people for driving change and do not fatally punish a single setback. Peer measurement and forced rank systems can exaggerate the impact of setbacks & can be vulnerable to politics if not well managed. If you only value delivery of business as usual results in performance and find comparisons to change agents hard, your change agents will get the message quickly.
- Foster a culture of working aloud & sharing of ideas. Working aloud provides protection for change agents. More importantly, it enables the change agents to role model their behaviours to inspire others across the organisation to embrace & lead change.
A little investment in change agents goes a long way. Too many organisations have missed their opportunity. They are the ones left wondering why change is suddenly so hard.