Category: Uncategorized

What questions build your community?

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

image

Why do we focus on Push communication?

Push communication is deeply ingrained in our way of thinking. We live surrounded by push messages. The triumph of push is so great in business that push functions, like marketing or PR, are simply called communications. We are used to models that tell us to “Always be closing”, “Get your message out”, “Build awareness” and ‘Be proactive’.  Networking has a bad name for many people because it is seen as the equivalent of cold-call sales.

Social tools are sold as media, driven by advertising revenues and promoted as a new method of advertising yourself. We obsess about follower size or measures of influence like Klout and Kred that are heavily influenced by the ability to push. The ‘Number One Mistake Everybody Makes on Twitter‘ is not to turn a reply into an message to their whole follower base. Do we need more messages when we are living in a period of ‘information obesity’?

Organizations worry about compliance in their employee base in the use of social communication because non-compliance might adversely impact the desired push media & reputation effects. The assumption that push messages must be preserved leads many organisations to ban their employees from sharing or tightly restrict their engagement. Even where social is encouraged many employees struggle with pushing their views forward. A reluctance to push and a reticence about the quality of their messages holds back adoption & use.

John Hagel, among others, has argued eloquently that it is time to move from Push to Pull.  We need to move from communication to community to get full value of the networks that we have built.

What’s your most valuable communication?

Ask any business which conversations are the most valuable and the answers are usually consistent.  The best conversations are where they get a chance to sit around the table with customers or key stakeholders, to let them talk to each other, to listen, to question and to learn. From these conversations come new product ideas, insights into customer drivers and customers taking on the challenge of explaining and even selling your business to others. The insights can be revelatory and the business value outweighs any speech, status update or advertisement.

For conversations to have this value, they must be authentic, reciprocal, valuable to all involved and intensely personal. The conversations aren’t driven by a message the business wants to share. They are driven by questions that bring out what customers want to share. The questions don’t always come from one source. They come from anyone in the conversation.  For that to occur it needs to be underpinned by the relationships, personal connections and trust.

What question is your push communication trying to answer?

When you unpick the next message you want to share as push communication, you will find at its heart a question. Your communication is trying to close off a question that belongs to the customer, an employee or another stakeholder. You are trying to supply an answer to your guess of a question that your push communication won’t let them ask.

Why won’t you let your stakeholder ask their question?  

Closing off a question may seem safe, but control is a false & costly form of safety. Control does not build trust, connection or value. It doesn’t stop the customer forming their own view by thinking of other questions. It simply denies them a way to share any connection with you.

How do you build your community with questions?

Community is the ultimate pull. Community is when your stakeholder choose to connect deeply with you, to work together to create value and to share of themselves for a common goal. Community is a layer of trust and connection that enriches the value of networks.

Community is built by questions, not statements. Asking someone’s name is the first step. Then we ask how they are going. We ask why they are here and what they are trying to achieve. We ask about their hopes and their concerns. We ask what they know and believe. In time, having learned enough, we ask if we can help.

What would happen if everyone asked a question?

Everyone in your business is connected. They have connections at work and in the rich world outside. Hopefully those networks grow each day. They won’t grow more valuable if they are just names and contact details. They grow richer with deep interaction and growing community.

It is hard work getting everyone in your business to master push communication. Many don’t want to use push communication and aren’t confident in their skills to do it well. This challenge of push affects the senior manager as much as the frontline employee. That’s why there are specialists in communication and convoluted communication policies.

Everyone in your business can ask a question. Practised consistently, that questioning develops into an ability to seek and make sense of their environment. Every stakeholder can answer that question if the connection is strong enough. Great questions get shared as people in the network become interested in the discussing the answers generating new questions and learning together.

Use your networks to share questions and you will find every part of your network is contributing to building a rich and valuable community for your business.

What great questions build your community?

Please share your answers.

Leaders Create Paths not Stone Walls

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

image

The most enduring & strongest form of leadership is the ability to constantly change yourself and change with your team.

Leaders as stone walls

In the western districts of Victoria, historical stone walls can be found.  These stone walls built by convicts and early settlers are carefully assembled piles of the volcanic rock that can be found in those soils.  These walls were built with are no foundations and no mortar. The walls stand where they stand, but they are lost when they fall down or must be moved. We lack the patience or skills to work replace them. Their strength comes only from the careful effort to lock all the pieces together under the force of gravity.

Some managers see demonstrating strength as the critical component of leadership.  These managers come across as carefully constructed and as immovable as one of these old stone walls. With strongly fixed views on the way things should be, they work hard to hold all the pieces of their world just so. They demonstrate a formidable power to resist and to hold their position. However, when they reach this point of strength, these leaders find they are no longer able to move without crumbling.

Managers like this confuse leadership with control and power. They focus on their own strength and consistency because they think it is necessary to maintain their power. Threatened by uncertainty and change they demonstrate consistency to deliver certainty to their teams. The burden of consistency falls on the manager alone.

But this view is self-fulfilling only on the downside, if you define strength by your inability to be changed, like a stone wall you will fall apart irreparably, if you need to change. There is no upside from this kind of consistency. It takes you nowhere in a world of rapid change. You will find yourself and your team irrelevant as you remain fiercely rooted to the spot.  Eventually someone needs to knocks you down to create a new path. The strength of consistency becomes fragility to external change.

Leadership as a path

Leadership is not about control, certainty and stasis. Leadership is work. Leadership is about influence and movement. More specifically it is about engaging others in change and encouraging them to work at the challenges and opportunities in front of them. Leaders create leadership in others, they don’t bear the burden alone.

You can’t lead as an immovable wall, however carefully constructed that wall may be. The work of leadership requires constant adaptation to change and that change will change the leader in the process. Leader and team evolve as they respond to new challenges and develop new approaches of working together.

The real strength of leadership is the inner purpose, self-awareness and connection to others that holds you and your team together as you all face into major change. It is that confidence, that enables leaders to empower their team to demonstrate their own potential to lead and to make change happen. 

Leaders help people to travel new and better paths. This means that they must embrace the change needed to move their teams forward.

Lead all the way through

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

The Maltese Falcon is one of my favourite films. The plot involves the classic example of a MacGuffin, a device that propels the characters’ actions, often with little explanation or rationale. In the Maltese Falcon it is a lead statue of a bird that the characters suspect has hidden riches.

Many organisations run on exactly this kind of MacGuffin. People are executing tasks to orders in pursuit of a little understood goal. Often there are vague promises of wealth and riches if the tasks are successful. Far too often at the end of their work the employees discover the MacGuffin is meaningless. ‘Exceeding market expectations’, ‘winning share’, ‘leading cost efficiency’, ‘achieving series A funding’ are all MacGuffins. Like the Maltese Falcon they prove to be lead all the way through.

Instead of a MacGuffin like an arbitrary and meaningless goal, have a conversation about purpose with the team. Discover the why that you share. Why your team does what it does matters, especially to the team. Be clear as a team on the impact you aim to have on others in the world. When the thrilling ride of work is over that purpose is far more valuable than any Macguffin.

You get to keep your purpose. A Macguffin just goes back in the prop drawer.

image

(Image source: Wikipedia)

Now!

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

image

When it comes for you digital disruption is quick and dramatic. Have a look at these charts:

Each of these charts demonstrate the phenomenon that Seth Godin described well as “gradually, then suddenly”. When the years of steady growth slowed, collapse was imminent.

In a world where organisations seek to deliver consistent revenue and profit growth, the extent of the decline is devastating. Each of these industries was left apologising while there were collapses in confidence, stability, strategy and ultimately dramatic reductions in the capital and other resources available to respond. 

Disruption will happen

In Silicon Valley alone multiple billions are invested each quarter in venture capital deals focused on disrupting traditional business economics and business models. Around the world and around the desks of your competitors and potential competitors people are considering how your industry can be rebuilt with digital means.

Disruption is not just an issue for digital media or technology businesses. It reaches the information intensive economics of distribution models, pricing, data exchange and knowledge work.  It offers new agility and new ways to rebuild the value chain in other industries. Collaborative consumption is looking at how we buy and use capital intensive items.  The internet of things, connecting devices to the internet so that they can exchange data offers even traditional industries new potential.  Just look at Google’s acquisition of Nest, a digital connected thermostat, for the extraordinary price of $3.2B, a signal of new opportunities.

Impacts will be widespread across the Australian and global economies. It is just the timing and scale of the impacts that are in issue.

Start Responding Now

Every business should start now to consider the scenarios of what digital disruption might mean for their business, their customers and their industry. Every business should be considering how it can make itself more responsive to the changing digital marketplace.

Here are three steps you can start today:

  • Design your future competitor: Ask a team from your business to design the disruptive competitor. Take a group of people from your business (include others from your networks if you need additional perspectives). Give them the challenge of designing a disruptive competitor from the ground up. Let them break the rules. Give them different constraints. Let them imagine product choices, margins, budgets, processes and technology free from your usual practices. Tell them not to come back until they can scare you. This is not daydreaming. Knowing what your future competitor might look like is a good clue to what you need to start doing and where you might need to invest to reduce their advantages.
  • Think digital capabilities: There’s a good chance that the team you assigned thought differently about the capabilities that underpin your business. They looked for people with different skills and experiences. They went looking for data to capture, to analyse and to use to create value. They connected customers, suppliers, people and stakeholders in new networks & new channels. They assumed a personalised, streamlined, connected, always on, always aware, algorithm-driven process. They assumed everything that could be digital was digital, everything was mobile, everything was social and almost all of it was free to roam the internet. If that list of capabilities seems fanciful, expensive or impossible, it is exactly where your new digital competitor begins.
  • Start becoming a more Responsive Organisation: Let purpose focus your organisation. Let experiments drive your decisions. Let customers drive your product strategy. Let employees drive your creativity. Let community drive your impact on the world. Read more about the Responsive Organisation and begin to experiment in your organisation.

If you are wondering what digital disruption means for your organisation, there’s a good chance someone else is already working on it.

Start working on your future now.

The Devastating Politics of Division

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

A house divided against itself cannot stand – Abraham Lincoln

A leader in any organisation needs to build cohesion in a team and commitment to the team’s mission. This unity can be a challenge when the environment is highly competitive, the team itself is diverse and the differences between one team and another are arbitrary. Many leaders are tempted to resort to the politics of division. The consequences for sustainability of the organisation are devastating.

The Politics of Division

Human nature has triggers for fear of difference (the “Other”). However what we choose to treat as alien is cultural and subject to manipulation. Fear of an Other can be used to unify a group of people. Weak leaders choose to manipulate this fear by creating and deepening divisions between their team and others in the organisation. ‘Divide and conquer’ as a strategy is as well known as it is old.

The divisions that define the Other within one organisation can be remarkably arbitrary. People of a different silo, team, sub team, group or even individuals can be identified, denigrated and demonised as the Other. The divisions in some cases are legendary:

  • Sales vs Marketing,
  • The Business vs Technology,
  • Head Office vs The Field,
  • Management vs Employees,
  • The Business vs a Specialist (Such as HR, Risk or Compliance),
  • Suits vs Creatives,
  • Us vs Competitors, Suppliers and even Customers.

Other divisions are more subtle, such as “We have by far the best team” or “We own these customers”. More effort must be invested in exaggerating the most arbitrary divisions which can lead to even worse outcomes.

The Consequences of Division

Anything worth doing in human affairs requires communication, community, context and collaboration. Attempts to divide us inevitably break down all four:

Lost Communication: Once someone is identified as an Other communication begins to break down. Communication is discouraged as consorting with the enemy. Messages from the other side are subjected to greater scrutiny, distortion and distrust rises. Measures of performance begin to differ creating challenges for feedback conversations. Driven far enough, the two teams will lose the ability to communicate, often developing their own jargon and own differing world views.

Lost Community: Great community is built in people sharing a common purpose and building deep relationships. Division makes it harder to bring people together for common purpose. Relationships across the boundaries will weaken. Talent will no longer cross the boundaries weakening all teams. Goals begin to diverge from a collective purpose to individual or team goals.

Lost Context: When we demonise any Other, we are distorting reality. We no longer are prepared to see people as they are. We no longer share a common context. This unwillingness to confront reality is as devasting in business as it is in any other sphere. Once you try to sustain a path of distortion, more distortion is required to maintain the illusion as life continues to present the contrary facts.

Lost Collaboration: Without trust and effective communication, collaboration begins to break down. “Collaboration” itself becomes a negative word, a sign of weakness and is seen as the dangerous way to get work done. It is not uncommon to find teams with divisive leaders to be blocking other team’s work and be duplicating knowingly the work of others rather than collaborate. At the same time there is a reluctance to share the learnings and the benefits of their work with other teams.

In a world in which context, communication, collaboration and building community are critical to an organisations ability to change and respond to its environment, the politics of division becomes a major barrier to effectiveness. 

Unite the Divisions

Bringing people together is not easy. Great leaders recognise that bring people together to collaborate, create change and solve challenges is the heart of great and sustainable performance. The more networked, complex and fast changing the environment, the more this holds. These leaders tackle the challenging road of seeking unity:

New Common Reality: Bring people together across the boundaries to confront the facts. Involve all the stakeholders, including those previously excluded as alien. Address the myths and different world views that have arisen.  Seek a common understanding of the world and its impacts.

New Common Purpose: Bring forth from all the people the purpose that brought them together in one organisation. Remind people that their connection to the greater purpose must be a part of individual and team goals.

New Common Action: Trust builds when people work together. There is no better way to build connection than facing a common challenge together. Help people to work in collaboration across the boundaries.

Taking these steps will begin to rebuild the communication, community and collaboration damaged by the politics of division.

Teamed and United

We can be connected closely to our teams and still be an active part of a wider community. Teams can have great differences but work together to leverage their different strengths and views. Collaboration is not about playing nice or papering over difference. Great collaboration demands the most honest assessments, fiercest frankness and hardest calls to be made fairly and transparently. Engaging others to deliver the best outcome  for the organisation and the team is the challenge for all leaders. Leading that way builds communities.

Success should never be at the expense of denigrating others or building walls. The politics of division may tempt leaders looking for a quick lift within a team but the longer term consequences are devastating for the organisation and its community.

The New-to-Social Executive: 5 Mindsets

Posted on by simongterry in Collaboration, Future of Work, Leadership, Uncategorized

Your mindset matters to how you are perceived and connect in social media. Whether internal or external to your organisations, the way you think and the way you lead play a critical role in your ability to influence others.  As a senior leader atop the hierarchy, you have power and influence in your organisation (Admittedly that’s rarely quite as much as you would like). When you take your leadership position into the realm of social collaboration whether internal to your organisation or externally, there are a few key shifts in mindset from traditional models of leadership.

Keep these in mind these five key phrases:

  1. “Be the real human (& sometimes flawed) you”: Nobody is looking to get to know your communication manager’s idea of you. People don’t need you to be the perfect model executive. You can’t have a conversation with a corporate cardboard facade or get help from a PR bot. This is an opportunity to be more human and to use deeper connection and communication. It will demand that you share more of you. If there is more than one of you, one for work and others, then social collaboration will test your ability to maintain the curtain of separation. Using social media works best when you bring your whole self to the activity. You will learn new ways to demonstrate your strengths and authenticity in the process.
  2. “Think networks”: Social media flattens out the playing ground. Your current fame, power and fortune won’t deliver worthwhile connections or influence immediately. In this environment, your voice competes with many others and those that are better connected and more trusted will have greater influence than you regardless of their status. Your voice & authority is much more easily challenged and even mocked. Influence works along networks of trust and connections. Valuable business traction comes from deepening connections to stakeholders and influencers in your own world. Start there and build your influence over time as new connections join in to the valuable interactions that you help create.
  3. “Listen & Engage others”: Listen first. The network doesn’t need to hear you. Mostly it won’t. The network doesn’t need another opinion; it needs your response to and your engagement in the conversations already going on. If you want to deliver on your strategy, the path is through helping others to better align, understand and deliver that strategy with you. How you engage with others is more important in building influence in your network than who you are or what you have to say.
  4. “Be helpful”: Make connections & help others find those who can help them. Set context. Guide others. Enable others. Share stuff to help others solve problems for themselves. Ask great, thoughtful & challenging questions. Work aloud and let others prove their value by helping you. Connect with people to deliver them value. People are looking to learn more and help themselves. As a senior leader you can play a critical role
  5. “Experiment, learn & change stuff”: The value of human networking is to learn, connect with others and change things. Embrace difference & the chaos that many opinions and desire for change creates. After a while you will recognise the appeal of ‘being permanently beta’, always evolving to better value as you experiment test and learn. If you want to hear your own views, build your personal brand, increase your control or resist change, don’t start in any form of social collaboration. That attitude doesn’t show much respect for the efforts of the others in the network. 

This is the first of two short posts on tips for the senior executive looking to move into using social collaboration tools inside and outside the enterprise. This post deals with mindsets. The next post will deal with how to start engaging.

Reversing work

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

What if your job was outside organisations and your work was inside? It is an increasing prospect in our networked world as organisations look to become more agile and responsive. At the same time, people are looking for more satisfying and purposeful work.

I was reading in Triumph of the City by Edward Glaeser about ‘reverse commuting’ where people live in cities for the amenities and commute out to go to work. Having done the same some years ago living in the Sydney CBD, it can be a great option. The lifestyle suited me and it cut down on traffic jams to always go against the traffic.

What if we reversed the logic of work?

We are used to job and work being synonymous. They need not be. Treating them as the same closes off options for other more amenable models of work

Many traditional organisations have problems with their amenities. Poor people management practices, command and control cultures, meaningless effort and bureaucratic process with a focus on preserving the status quo can create an uncomfortable environment for employees. In such an organisation, there are few amenities for people with talent, creativity and a focus on leading change. Ideally we would fix these issues, but organisations with the worst issues often lack the collective will. Many people work in large organisation for the scale of impact that they hope to have and the security of income. Both benefits are threatened by these challenges of traditional organisations.

Competitive pressures and rapidly changing markets mean organisations already need to look outwards for more and new talent. Fluctuating demands mean organisations need workforces to flex too. Attracting this talent will require organisations to offer new more flexible work options and more porous connections to the outside world.

In an increasingly networked world of talent, more people are looking to build portfolio careers inside and outside organisations but still dealing with the capabilities and challenges that matter to them and that they specialise in. These careers still offer the choice to go back and work inside organisations but this time helping with the worker’s choice of projects, challenges and change.

Like reverse commuters, amenity and convenience will drive new and different choices as people and organisations reverse work recognising that the job need not be where the work occurs. Inside or outside of organisations and formal jobs, talented people know their power in a networked world and can afford to increasingly realise their purpose and potential as they choose.

Increase the density of your organisation

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

When you increase the density, you increase the likelihood of collisions. Collisions of diverse people and ideas are a fertile source of creativity and innovation. Increasing the density of the ideas flowing in networks in your organisation will deliver a creative dividend.

Vibrant cities are rich sources of innovation because they bring together people and act as nodes in global transportation and knowledge networks. Into these cities pour people and ideas that collide to create new ideas, ventures and new activity.

The best teams that I have seen have this same dense, diverse and frenetic level of interaction. They are also equally creative. The constant collision of ideas and new interactions of people drives the growth of the organisation. These are organisations where people actually want more meetings and more talk because of the creative potential and the ability to leap forward in solving shared challenges. Creative interactions help people to do more, better or faster.

Through Change Agents Worldwide, I am currently experiencing the incredible creativity of a dense network of interactions, even though I am the most remote member of this global network of Change Agents focused on helping organisations transition to the future of work. Every day, there is a firehose worth of insight, interaction & creativity. In February we will publish an e-book of contributions of the members of the network that was only conceived in the last month. The same level of creative collaboration and inspiration powers work for clients and the creative output of the whole network. The first face to face meeting of this network has not even happened yet.

Increasing Density

Teams with dense idea networks and great creativity have a few things in common that can guide anyone seeking to increase the creative density of their organisation. Here are a few steps you can take:

  • Strengthen common purpose: purpose pulls people together and gives them reasons to connect and engage more. Purpose underpins the creation and sharing of ideas.
  • Increase connections: the more connected the organisation the more chance of a creative exchange. Knit your organisation together and ensure everyone is well connected.
  • Increase energy: the more energy, the more ideas move; the more ideas move, the more collisions will occur. The energy of meeting a challenge together will create dense connections. Don’t go for energy for its own sake. Create purposeful intent, energy in collaboration and willingness to collide in pursuit of a goal.
  • Be open: if you want interactions of people and ideas then the default should be open and transparent work. Put more ideas in flight and tear down barriers to the flow of knowledge. Openness also helps everyone to contribute and the group to pick up connections that might otherwise be missed.
  • Be diverse: more experiences and background means more inputs more ideas in flight, more conflict and less groupthink.
  • Orient outwards: there will be far more ideas in your conversations if you are drawing them in from outside. Let ideas out to return redoubled. New external provocations can help fire the creativity in a team.
  • Value learning if you know everything, you are an endpoint. You are choosing to sit outside others’ efforts to learn and grow. You are no longer connecting and building on others’ ideas.
  • Embrace chaos: a dense network of people connecting over ideas and action is never going to be neat and orderly. Bring order to the outputs if you need but don’t constrain the inputs or process in flight.

You can achieve these effects face to face in your organisation or you can use a tool like an enterprise social network to help your organisation increase creative density. Whatever you do, increase the flight of knowledge in the organisation and the creative collisions will follow.

Reputation: The Horse & the Tortoise

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

Reputation arrives on a tortoise and leaves on a horse. – traditional maxim

When it comes to social media, many organisations focus on the second half of this maxim. They stress about the damage that might be done by their people in social networks. That becomes an excuse for the organisation to play safe and stop both it and its employees from engaging.

Employees should be your best advocates. If not, then that’s an issue you need to fix ASAP.

Employees face a major constraint in influencing reputation. Too many organisations constrain employees by giving reputation little consideration. The bigger damage is when organisations don’t listen, don’t understand their current reputation and don’t think about social accountabilities. These organisation leave employees little positive to say in any medium.

The horse has bolted

You have a reputation. It is likely accurate to the experiences you deliver and well deserved. You will have a reputation whether you engage or not. The conversation goes on without you. The network is pretty good at sharing its information about your organisation.

Don’t worry so much about shutting the stable door. Make sure you have real substance to your reputation.

Don’t forget about the tortoise

Stop for a minute and think about the first half of the maxim:

A tortoise.

Slow. Very slow. Too slow for today’s networked world of business.

How important is reputation to the strategy of your organisation? Do you know your current reputation? When are you going to start building the reputation you need? How can you use everyone on the network around your organisation to help?

If you ignore reputation in the networks around your organisation until you need it, good luck moving the tortoise.

Bad Bosses are Survived or Escaped

Posted on by simongterry in Uncategorized

Nobody leaves a company. They leave a bad boss when there’s no other reason to stay. Great bosses who understand the value of networks, offer support, development and challenge are a critical part of your talent network. Are you addressing the core of what attracts the network of talent to your organisation?

Bad bosses are diminishers of the talent of their people.  They destroy what value their people create.

I worked for a diminisher once. After a year in which my business exceeded its goals, with help from a great team, favourable circumstances and my colleagues in the business, I was told in my annual performance appraisal that “a drover’s dog could have achieved that result”. (Drover’s dog is one of the more flexible bits of Australian idiom, but the phrase’s most recent meaning which comes from politics is that a drover’s dog is a non-entity).  I would have been happy to discuss the many contributions to my team’s success, but that phrase left me with nothing more to say. I thought it unkind when my boss repeated the phrase to my leadership team colleagues a week or so later in a meeting, but if you can’t take unkind words, then corporate life is not for you. However, the moment that hurt most was when it was used again to describe my and my team’s performance at the end of year dinner in a speech to the leadership team and spouses. 

Who did it hurt? My boss, not me. By that point, I was used to the comment. Remember the actions of a diminisher says more about them than their team. The dinner guests were disturbed by the comment, especially the spouses who knew how hard their partners worked. While the comment was directed at me, it was a signal of what everyone could expect from such a boss.

Because the issues with bad bosses are usually their own concerns, it is rare that a bad boss will change without a major personal catharsis.  Few employees have coached a bad boss to better performance. Sadly that means that employees of bad bosses need focus on survival or escape. Survival will require employees to leverage their reputations, their networks & their mentors.  They need to work more transparently and deliver stellar performance. These actions can help replace missing leadership and build support to survive the assaults. Survival is hard work because a bad boss will focus their attentions on survivors as a point of resistance. Escape is by far the easier and better option. The organisation is the loser.

Do you know the diminishers in your organisation? They are easy enough to find as your networks will tell you all you need to know. If your organisation has bad bosses, change them, remove them or avoid them.

Remember it takes great talent to survive a bad boss, but most won’t. Great talent has better things to do than play defence. The networks of great talent offer too much opportunity. Even a drover’s dog knows when it is time to run away.