Discussion
One of my clients is a long-time entrepreneur. He knows how to sell and promote his business; he’s not afraid to experiment and try new things; he’s approachable and helpful; and he provides inspiration and leadership to everyone in his company. However, I’ve been getting him to develop his own leadership capabilities so he recognizes that he has a major role in developing the leadership and managerial capabilities of his direct reports. For instance, we recently discussed how to work on developing better industry understanding in a relatively new executive. My client brought in this individual because of his extensive management experience in larger companies. However, he needs to develop certain other skills and knowledge so that he can be the most effective leader possible within the organization. It’s not enough to assume that newly hired employees already know everything they need to function within the company. They too must be developed through coaching and mentoring. This can be done with outside coaches, but executives, managers, and supervisors must also play a critical part in this process.

Tip
Do you know every one of your team members by name? Do you know their backgrounds? Where they are from, their goals and aspirations, their particular strengths and limitations? If you can’t answer these most basic questions about your people then you don’t really know them well enough to develop them to their full potential.

Richard Martin is a consultant, speaker, and executive coach. He brings his military and business leadership and management experience to bear for executives and organizations seeking to exploit change, maximize opportunity, and minimize risk.

© 2013 Richard Martin. Reproduction and quotes are permitted with proper attribution.

1. Have the intent, mission, vision and strategy been communicated throughout the company?
2. Have clear objectives and responsibilities been assigned all up and down the organization so everyone knows what their tasks are within the new strategy?
3. Have leaders and managers with key responsibilities conducted their mission analysis to properly determine their distinctive roles and missions within the company?
4. Has a full implementation plan with milestones and metrics been created at all levels of the organization? Have key execs and managers’ terms of reference or performance review process been suitably modified to incorporate these?
5. Is there a customer communication plan in place and have you assessed the initial impacts on them?
6. Are your organizational structure, processes, and systems well aligned with the new strategy and goals? What measures and plans do you have to assess and modify these as you implement the strategy?
7. Do all of your people, especially execs and managers, have the requisite skills to do the planning and operations to execute on this strategy? Do you have plans to provide this?
8. Do you have a regular review process in place with weekly/bi-weekly (if needed), monthly, quarterly meetings?
9. Have you conducted a quarterly after action review to assess progress and, more important, to identify lessons learned as you make the planned changes?
10. Is your initial assessment that the strategic changes you’ve undertaken are working? What are you and your senior leadership team doing to adjust and assess as you implement?
11. How are your customers reacting to the changes? Are they enthusiastic, blasé, engaged and willing to help, hindering?
12. How is your entire company and management team reacting? Are they fully engaged and onside, or are there areas where they don’t want to cooperate or get on board?
13. Are there key execs or managers who need specific coaching to help them raise their performance in line with their goals and missions?
14. Have you looked at your competitors’ reactions? Have you considered how you can shape the competitive landscape to your advantage?
15. What plans do you have in place to look at the next 6 months, 12 months, 18 months and beyond?

© 2013 Richard Martin. Reproduction and quotes permitted with full and proper attribution.

Discussion
Often, the best intelligence comes from ‘troops in contact’ with the enemy. They can see what’s happening and can provide ‘ground truth’ to corroborate or validate the opinions and assessments made through the intelligence estimation process. The same applies in business. All companies, even small ones, have sales people, customer service agents, and field service reps out in the marketplace. They can see things and hear things that might be highly significant from a competitive standpoint. They need to know and understand the company’s basic strategy, vision, mission and goals, as well as those of their own unit or division. Managers and supervisors must also brief them and debrief them on a regular basis to ensure that they are aware of the latest developments and goals, and so they can bring back critical competitive intelligence.

Tip
Managers and employees have to be on the lookout for opportunities and threats. They are the eyes and ears of the entire company, not just their own little part of it.

© 2013 Richard Martin. Reproduction and quotes are permitted with proper attribution.

Discussion
Warren Buffett, CEO and principal shareowner of Berkshire Hathaway just presided over his company’s annual meeting of shareholders. According to this morning’s Wall Street Journal, Buffett took the outstanding step of inviting a well-known investor who’s selling Berkshire’s stock short. Buffett’s point from this, apart from the obvious newsworthiness, is that he likes to seek contrary opinions. His main message according to the WSJ? Doubt yourself. Of course he doesn’t mean to lack faith in one’s means. Rather, he says to question your own certainties. This is a highly developed approach to management and leadership. Whether in war or business, the biggest mistakes come from irrational belief in the correctness of one’s progostications. It takes a big person to consider contrary opinions and views. Buffett’s success as an investor shows that this is a very prudent and wise thing to do.

Questions
What competitive threats are you facing? What capabilities do your competitors have? Can you estimate their intentions? Do you have advisors who systematically question your assumptions and provide a contrary point of view?

Richard Martin is a consultant, speaker, and executive coach. He brings his military and business leadership and management experience to bear for executives and organizations seeking to exploit change, maximize opportunity, and minimize risk.

© 2013 Richard Martin. Reproduction and quotes are permitted with proper attribution.

According to this morning’s Wall Street Journal, the new Blackberry Q10 launched over the weekend in the UK and demand exceeded expectations. The new smart phone has also garnered kudos from reviewers. It incorporates RIM’s latest version of its operating system, but more importantly it incorporates the BB’s traditional physical keyboard.

Apparently there is pent up demand for a ‘meat and potatoes’ BB smart phone, one that sticks with the company’s roots. As a Canadian, I hope RIM continues to sail through the doldrums it’s been in for the last few years. The company’s been hard hit by Apple’s iPhone and Google’s Android OS, but by sticking to the basics of what has made the BB’s success — a keyboard and peerless security — the company is building on its strengths.

© 2013 Richard Martin. Reproduction and quotes permitted with full and proper attribution.

Discussion
The subject of morale often comes up in my work with clients. Unfortunately, there is a very superficial understanding of the concept. As I’ve said before, morale is the willingness to fight and persevere, to make sacrifices to achieve victory or one’s corporate aims. People often confuse morale with other the other main components of organizational dynamics, such as mood, cohesion, and unity of purpose. They all go together, but are all different in focus and purpose. When we add the effects of leadership, we can get a much fuller picture of how to build an effective organization that can perform beyond expectations.

Questions
You can assess the morale in your organization through the following questions:

• Do people have hope of better days or constant improvement? Are they optimistic or pessimistic?
• Are your people making plans with themselves in the picture, or are they trying to abandon ship?
• Do they waste a lot of time or do they focus on ways to continually improve the organization and its performance?

Richard Martin is a consultant, speaker, and executive coach. He brings his military and business leadership and management experience to bear for executives and organizations seeking to exploit change, maximize opportunity, and minimize risk.

© 2013 Richard Martin. Reproduction and quotes are permitted with proper attribution.

Firestein notes that the pursuit of science appears to non-scientists as a very rational and systematic approach to discovery. In actuality, it’s much more like that old proverb than walking down a well-lighted path. The truth is that scientists have to explore many false paths and grope around in the dark room, hoping to find that black cat. But the dark room can be huge, and even endless, and there is no guarantee that there is even a cat in there.

I find that many things about business are very similar. We don’t know ahead of time if our new product ideas will work. Will customers respond the way we anticipate? Will competitors beat us to the punch? Will we be able to deliver on our promises? We can make assumptions about all of this, but that is just what they are, assumptions.

As I pointed out in my book, Brilliant Manoeuvres, assumptions must be validated and tested. Military strategy and tactics provide one model of the application of trial and error to discovery and success. But science also provides a useful model and template. As pointed out by philosopher Karl Popper, science is really a series of conjectures and refutations about the nature of the world and how it works. For instance, in physics, theorists propose new models of the world and experimentalists test them. Theories and hypotheses that have little or no empirical validation are cast aside in favour of those with experimental evidence. This process continues over and over until progress is achieved in understanding reality.

The same process applies in business. Innovation, whether new products and services, new markets, or new internal processes, is nothing but a form of conjecture about what will work in the real world of business. The marketplace is the crucible of experimentation that seeks empirical evidence to demonstrate that the conjecture is correct. Correct business models and innovations are successful to the extent that customers accept them.

Call it a form of un-natural selection. Companies and entrepreneurs put forth ideas based on their understanding of the market and competition, and then they are proved by the test of business success.

To carry this analogy further, businesses must apply the basic principles of innovation and trial and error experimentation.

•    A mechanism to generate new ideas. These can be innovative products and services, or they can also be new ways of viewing the market. For instance, before Henry Ford imagined the Model T, he was driven by the vision of automobiles for every average American family. Prior to the Model T, cars were hand-made toys for the rich. Henry Ford’s innovations explored new manufacturing techniques in order to make his car available to a market that up to then had been essentially ignored.

•    This generation mechanism must be wide-ranging and non-censoring. The perfect model for this is of course brainstorming, where you simply throw out ideas without initial regard for their apparent reasonability or feasibility. In fact, the more ideas appear initially irrational or unfeasible, the better they might be at disrupting the status quo, both internally and externally.

•    Good ideas can (and should) come from all levels and areas of the business. As an example, customer service agents and field service representatives often know more about customer concerns and suggestions for improvements than anyone else in the company. Sales people usually know what the competition is doing. Suppliers and distributors can often provide advance warning of changes in the marketplace and competition. These sources of ideas must be nurtured, encouraged and exploited.

•    Innovations can be external and internal. By this I mean that good ideas don’t just translate directly into new or improved products, services, or markets. It can be someone suggesting a new internal procedure that saves time and money. Or a production manager who finds a potential new supplier at lower cost for equivalent quality. In other words, everything is subject to innovation.

•    Selection should be reality based. Too often ideas are rejected or put out of bounds because ‘that’s not how we do things around here,’ or ‘that’s never worked before,’ or even, ‘because I said so.’ The latter is probably the worst one, but I’ve observed this type of innovation selection by fiat and nothing is more stultifying of growth and continuous improvement. The only truly effective selection mechanism is successful implementation in the external and internal competitive and organizational marketplace.

This is why I advocate trial and error in innovation and change management. No one can predict the future, what will work or not, before it is actually tried. For this reason, we need to find ways to try different ideas and approaches while managing the associated risk. What have you tried lately that is new and innovative?

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Discussion
I’m breaking my deliberate policy of not commenting on political issues this week in order to comment on reactions to the Boston Marathon bombings last Monday. My personal opinion is that the response of government and law enforcement agencies at all levels has been brilliant in the circumstances. However, there are already Monday Morning Quarterbacks saying that the government overreacted by shuttingn down Boston on Friday and part of Saturday. The problem is that the ones responsible for making these decisions can only plan and act based on information available at the time and the factors they felt they needed to consider. Just throwing out there that they overreacted without knowing those things is pure speculation based on specious counterfactuals or a personal hobby horse. If there is something I learned from a 26-year military career and my study of military strategy and history, it is that decisions that can look sub-optimal in hindsight may have been the best at the time given the circumstances of friction, uncertainty, and the fog of war. In this particular case, only a full after-action review will permit the systemic learning to occur. Saying it was an overreaction is nothing but pure hindsight bias.

Tip
The more complex and risky the undertaking, the more likely that friction will wreak havoc. We must compensate by building robustness, resiliency and redundancy into our plans and systems.

From the Vault
A Superb Example of Crisis Leadership in Action

By the way…
My ideas were featured in the March 25th Globe and Mail: A military approach to business.

Richard Martin is a consultant, speaker, and executive coach. He brings his military and business leadership and management experience to bear for executives and organizations seeking to exploit change, maximize opportunity, and minimize risk.

© 2013 Richard Martin. Reproduction and quotes are permitted with proper attribution.

Discussion
One of my clients hired me to help grow sales and improve processes within one of his company’s business lines. However, he hadn’t told the people in that division what was happening and why he had hired me. The rumour started going around that he was planning on closing that business line, which was, of course, completely false. People are not mushrooms; they don’t grow best in the damp and the dark. You have to let in the light so they know what is happening, why it’s happening, and what needs to be done, both individually and collectively. People and teams perform best when they know what the mission and objectives are, what the leader’s overall intent and plan are to achieve them, and what is expected of them as members of the organization. Moreover, when they know what the mission and goals are, what the overall situation is, they can use their abilities and initiative to work towards the most effective and efficient achievement of the mission.

Tip
Periodically get your people together to tell them how things are progressing towards achieving objectives and the overall mission. Let them know how they’re doing, and let them ask any questions they want so you can provide the answers. You can also hold a lessons learned session and ask for input and suggestions for improvement. In the army this is known as ‘platoon commander’s hour.’ When he ran GE, Jack Welch would also do exactly the same thing, although at a much higher level.

Richard Martin is a consultant, speaker, and executive coach. He brings his military and business leadership and management experience to bear for executives and organizations seeking to exploit change, maximize opportunity, and minimize risk.

© 2013 Richard Martin. Reproduction and quotes are permitted with proper attribution.

© 2013 Richard Martin. Reproduction and quotes permitted with full and proper attribution.