DrContrarian

Dear Mr CEO You said your job is to develop a vision and create an organisation with the right values that will make that vision a reality, so I thought I would drop this note in your lap for consideration. It is my contention that what goes for ‘strategy’ and ‘best practice’ in the modern corporate boardroom is a terminal degree of “me too-ism”. I think you have bought into a narrative that is promulgated by people who have a gnostic view of the world and specific agendas that appeal to the pseudo-thinkers of the world, but are in reality going to lead your organisation to its premature demise. OTHER PEOPLE’S MONEY Over the years business organisations have been eaten away slowly from the inside by social justice warriors (SJWs). How this happened, requires us to go back a few years and in the evolution of the business organisation. Once you understand that, you will see how it has infested your organisation. Business organisations used to have a simple, clear obje...

  Dear Mr Mark Zuckerberg, I read with interest your appeal to people not to deface the ‘black lives matter’ logo. Really interesting dilemma you face. I must be honest and upfront with you; I don’t feel sorry for you in dealing with pernicious insubordination. That is what happens when you let the #SJWs run the agenda in the work place, but this is a real interesting leadership challenge. How do you lead when you are wrong? I only want to address the issue a bit more philosophically because I am curious about your thinking. I can’t comprehend how a smart guy got sucked into this vortex of stupidity. If I try and look for a single word to describe what lies at the heart of all the ‘social justice’ causes I conclude that it is the idea of tolerance . Would that be a fair conclusion? We should tolerate people who are different. We should tolerate different races and genders for instance. ‘Black lives matter’ is about fairness and justice and equality, it is about ...

1. Lapse in corporate memory. 2. Staff turnover.

One: Anything = Nothing, and Anything = Everything. Therefore, 'Anything' is the most powerful idea. Two: Outcome - (Objective + Action) = Zero.

Mandossian: " The only marketing genius is the customer." Price: "Every cent spent on marketing activities is an admission of failure."

Cliches are usually/ often mocked and derided. (See list below.) My take on it is that cliches (in a business sense) is really just the art of business grappling with becoming a science, and cliches become the language of the emerging science. Cliches are not bad because they are popular sayings, they are only bad if they don't add to the clarity and understanding of a discussion. Cliches only risk being a distraction if the through overuse the familiarity means that people don't listen. I don't deny that some people go overboard - every wannabe consultant usually wants to coin and own a new buzzword that will become their point-of-difference, but that is price worth paying for progress. Where would we be without the cliches such as "point of difference" and many others? Click through to see the plexo

Through my association with the MGSM (as an adjunct lecturer on the MBA program) I get access to really cool stuff. Now you can too ... and don’t say I never share :-) Find out how you’d perform running an Australian company for a week by taking up the online challenge at www.ceosurvivor.com

Failure to assess your own competence In many ways this related to the prior posting about inability to recognise weaknesses. But it actually goes further than that: people simply over-rate themselves. We have been fed an American diet of: over-achievement, positive thinking, self-belief, that we end up believing our own press. Capability and talent is distributed on a normal distribution curve. Half the world is below average. (Of course the readers of this blog do not fall into that half J .) But the reality is that not everybody gets to be no 1, gets to be the CEO or whatever. Because people believe they are better than they really are, they end doing poorly in jobs/ situations which they never should have let themselves get into. (May I confess that I am not exempted.) It has been documented a long time ago that there is a Peter Principle at play in the management ranks. ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Principle ) The phenomenon of overestimating our abilities is re...

The contrarian's view of winning at office politics. Rule 1 : Make friends and shape that into a network. You need them to help you win the war. No individual can beat the whole system. (S)He with the most friends win - no matter what stunt the other person pulls. Rule 2: Make friends by GIVING and sharing and helping without an expectation of anything in return. (A paradox, I know, but that is how you do it.) You may be cynical about this, but your connections are what keep you 'connected' to the system - to state the bleeding obvious. Rule 3: Good defense will win the day. Office politics is not about being able to trample allover someone else, but more importantly it is about protecting your own turf. This is often a cliched football analogy, but it is really true: good defense wins the game. And for fun guide to OFFICE POLITICS - check this out.

Part 5 in this short series. (Who knows how long it will be? J ). Initially I thought I’d stick to the fundamental, root causes only, but the reality is that most people will only read titbits, and not necessarily in one go, so I will simply highlight these reasons as they come to mind; whether it is primary or secondary cause… Inability to influence. Managers spend more than half their time influencing other people would be my guesstimate. Some time to do own work and some unproductive time etc. but the bulk of productive time is spent influencing people. The difference between a good manager and a poor one is directly correlated to their ability to influence others. Failure is usually a result of an inability to influence – especially an inability to exert upward influence. It is something we learnt as children, but many of us lose the knack for making people with more power do the stuff we want them, or rather need them to do. The psychology of influence is fascinating. But ...

I must be honest about the previous post and admit the weakness that I have fallen in love with. (Blogs should be about honesty, right? And besides, and can’t just point the finger at everyone else without acknowledging my own failures; that would be hypocritical and that is NOT one of my weaknesses.) My own weakness parading as a strength is that I can be am argumentative. This is because I believe TRUTH is paramount (at least my version of the truth). And I have been ‘truthful’ to the point of hurting people’s feelings: as long as the truth can prevail. It is not just a weakness; it is quite sadly more than that. But instead of dealing with the cause of it, I have learned to justify it to myself to the extent that I have even become proud of it and started justifying it to everyone else. It is quite easy to put truth on a pedestal; how can anyone argue against ‘honesty’ as positive attribute? But the fact is that no society can function properly without the small white lies tha...

Weaknesses parading as strengths Managers, myself included, often refuse to acknowledge that our personalities are defective; or at the very least that we have traits and attitudes (that are in essence weaknesses) but that we have become comfortable with and have grown to accept and even like. We often see this in interview when candidates are asked about their weaknesses. The response is usually to identify a weakness that can equally be perceived to be a strength; to wit: “I am sometimes too detailed orientated.” This is just another demonstration of how misguided people can sometimes be. The sad thing is, the candidate parades the ‘weakness’ only because they know some people might see that as a weakness, but deep down they do not really believe it is a weakness. I have interviewed 100s – and I am not exaggerating here – and I have NEVER met a candidate who has answered the question with anything that can remotely be considered to be a realistic and truthful representation of ...

There are a host of reasons. I have studies enough, learned enough and failed enough to have some compelling arguments as to why managers fail… Over time I’ll explore a few of those. The obvious one is incompetence – but I will ignore that as a reason. Arguably that is the error of the manager’s manager more than anything, but most importantly; I don’t believe that people reading this would fall into that category. And if you are incompetent – at managing only of course - The number one reason – without any doubt in my mind is misunderstanding or underestimating the nature of POWER. Do you have power? Do you know who (else) has power? Do you know what you derive it from? Do you know why you have it? Do you know how to use it? Do you know when to use it? Do you know how it is used against you? Are you super aware of how it ebbs and flows on a daily basis, from meeting to meeting, from person to person? Are you using power ‘prem...

Read an article by an ex-executive of Shell Corporation. It reports on material and significant findings of research project ( http://www.businessweek.com/chapter/degeus.htm ) that was designed to establish which factors account for the survival of companies (for more than 500 years). Read it - its fascinating. If you are in a hurry - here is a short summary of the findings: 1. Sensitivity to the environment represents a company's ability to learn and adapt. 2. Cohesion and identity, it is now clear, are aspects of a company's innate ability to build a community and a persona for itself. 3. Tolerance and its corollary, decentralization, are both symptoms of a company's awareness of ecology: its ability to build constructive relationships with other entities, within and out-side itself. 4. Conservative financing is a very critical corporate attribute: the ability to govern its own growth and evolution effectively. As usual the research raises further questions, b...

Managing conflict Had an opportunity to do some coaching today. Now it is not my natural/ day job, but I quite enjoyed the experience. The topic du jour was as per this blog title. Later I saw a vlog ( http://blogs.bnet.com/intercom/?p=434 ) on office politics, which referred to the fact that managers spend 42% of their time on this activity (managing conflict) – but no reference to how to actually do it. So here goes the d price methodology: The pre-requisites are: 1. Is it my conflict to solve? If you are fighting someone else’s battle, you are bound to lose it. Don’t go into bat for someone else in the office. You may think you are helping, but you are trespassing. 2. Take a positive view of the conflict. Don’t see it as a negative/battle, see it as an opportunity to clear the air and to rectify misconceptions or clarify an issue. You may well be wrong so you might just learn something. It will also help reduce the tension - before you start. Then stepping into the act...

Core competency? Benchmark? Key issues? Sustainability? Ask any manager and they will explain what these words mean. To the uninitiated it is buzzwords. To the literati, it is a modern day plight that will destroy the English language. X wrote The Death of Language. Y wrote. Weaselwords. Hundreds and hundreds of pages devoted to slagging management-speak. Courses on Effective Business Writing will advise strongly against using technical jargon or made-up words. These courses, of course are always run by literary types, never business people an managers. (We are way too illiterate.) Funny that. And invariably they will also tell us that of the 800,000 ordinary (non-technical words) in the Oxford English Dictionary, the average person only uses about 8,000: that is one percent of the available words. The implication of course, ‘we’ know many more. It is then followed by a joke that you should not use ‘pulchritude’ when the word ‘beautiful’ would do. Ha ha. Their strateg...

As part of the research that I am doing on a book that I am writing, I get to interview some really successful entrepreneurs. Today I conducted an interview at which I actually got a perspective on a very old concept - delegation - that I had never thought of. (Those of you who know me well, will know how rarely that happens :-)) We spoke about that hoary old notion of working IN the business vs. working ON the business. We shared a contrarian view - but he basically saw it as delegation. Then he raised the idea that when you (owner/manager) delegate a task, you are giving away a problem, but the person to whom you are delegating receives trust and respect and stature. WOW! Think about that next time...

Read an article the other day (somewhere) that the war for talent is hotting up (again?). It makes sense in Australia where unemployment is just on 4% - a 30-year low. Being a newly minted entrepreneur – in Aus at least – I wonder about that. How and where will I find good people? People who will care as much as I do about my customers? I care because I know very personally that they are the people who allow me to eat and look after my family. Can any employee care as much? As soon as you are an employee, the person who feeds you is the boss – one step removed from the customer, and employees will always act accordingly: please the boss before the customer – that is only human. Even when I consider myself as an (ex-) employee, I must be honest and say… ‘I guess not!’ As much as I considered myself to be a valuable employee (no comments required on this one, thanks) I still did not care as much as I care now. And it is only when you are the owner of your own business that you get tha...

I have had cause recently to contemplate what constitutes a toxic workplace – and in particular which factor is the biggest driver of creating such a workplace. There are many obvious contenders, but I’ll reference the front runners only: Highly politicised Politics (of the corporate kind) is often seen to be and made to be ‘bad’, but I think that it is a very good mechanism for keeping people on their toes and equipping them with the communications and observational skills necessary to progress in the corporate world. Being able to play the game is a skill needed when you are the CEO/ Chairman/ MD and you operate in a sphere where everything is the proverbial grey. What better training ground than middle management? Bureaucratic Also much despised is the overly bureaucratic environment, but again it should be - for any half-decent manager – a relative cinch to operate freely in that environment. Learning which rules to break and where to go in order to get things done actually ...

As an entrepreneur/ consultant/ author, you are always interested in finding a new angle to write about. As a free tool, I have created a marketing buzz-generator – for all to use… Pick-and-Mix one word from each of these tables, combine…. and off you go: Integrated Brand System Connected Market(ing) Solution Authentic Customer Theory Sustainable Consumer Framework Collaborative Value Platform Dynamic Communications Proposition Strategic Community Outcome(s) (Just don’t expect me to buy the book L )