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When the high-fives are over, it’s important to interrogate the reasons behind your wins.

 

We are rapidly approaching the three-year anniversary of the start of the pandemic. Anybody running a business during this period has experienced the stomach-churning ride of this roller-coaster economy—the freefall at the outset, followed by surging demand, and now, with the war in Ukraine, the likelihood of a global slowdown. The leaders who have managed through these turbulent times have learned a lot about how to navigate crises. But strengthening muscles for dealing with uncertainty can mean less time for another crucial leadership discipline: interrogating the how and why behind a success.

 

What did you do to pull it off? Can it be replicated? What did you learn?

It’s an exercise that many leaders I’ve interviewed talked up even before the pandemic. “I’ve learned to question success a lot more than failure,” said Kat Cole, who is the president and chief operating officer of Athletic Greens, a nutrition company. As she told me in an interview years ago, “I’ll ask more questions when sales are up than I do when they’re down. I ask more questions when things seem to be moving smoothly, because I’m thinking: ‘There’s got to be something I don’t know. There’s always something.’ This approach means that people don’t feel beat up for failing, but they should feel very concerned if they don’t understand why they’re successful.”

Successes can feel like moments for celebration, rather than furrowed-brow scrutiny. But it is precisely those moments of interrogation that can lead to insights and longer-term competitive advantages. Today’s shorter economic cycles create more momentum, both good and bad, and you want to be riding a wave rather than trying to paddle against it.

For example, in this environment, longer-term strategies—which were a reasonable proposition in the comparatively stable pre-pandemic world—have, out of necessity, increasingly been replaced with shorter-term bets. Understanding why some succeed can help companies figure out strategies to address pressing challenges like finding the right return-to-office policy or developing new products and services to help accelerate a digital transformation.

A company’s leadership may be so pleased to share good news that they lack the emotional distance to ask the probing questions about their successes, or about whether, for example, market insights about the popularity of a new product require shifts in the way capital is being allocated.

Boards of directors are well-positioned to provide much-needed scrutiny. As George Barrett, who led Cardinal Health for nearly a decade and now serves as a director at companies such as Target, told me, leadership teams and boards are quick to engage in tough conversations about performance when there are challenges. But the bigger challenge can come when things are going well. “The really important questions are often not asked at the right moments,” he said. “Asking probing questions when things are going well can illuminate important insights. For example, this might allow you to understand that our actual numbers look good, but there’s a tailwind that is masking a problem. Or now this solid performance tells us we’re onto something really important, and if we don’t leverage this, our competitors are going to be right there with us in two months, so how do we accelerate this or scale this differently? It’s that burning question of ‘why?’ It’s important to celebrate successes, but it is important to ask tough questions.”

Leaders shouldn’t have to wait for their board meetings to start this type of interrogation. Even with an ever-lengthening list of urgent challenges to address, leaders should place the word “why?” at the top of it, as a reminder to get to the bottom of unexpected triumphs. Questioning successes as much as failures is timeless leadership advice that feels particularly timely now.

by Adam Bryant

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Teamwork is trending—and probably always will be. But managing teams isn’t getting any easier.

 

Business leaders are still coping with the unprecedented dispersal of staff prompted by covid and enabled by technologies such as Zoom. Although some people are back in the office, many prefer to work remotely, at least part of the time. It appears that the traditional, office-based 9-to-5 is probably a thing of the past.

Even before covid, though, teams were increasingly made up of ever more diverse staff members in ever more far-flung locales. Managing and coordinating across time zones and cultures can be a challenge, and that’s before we consider how to motivate team members and build them into a cohesive unit when they spend little time working in physical proximity.

Those challenges are important for several reasons, not least because in business, as in life, things go wrong. In Unbreakable: Building and Leading Resilient Teams, Bradley Kirkman and Adam Stoverink, business professors at North Carolina State and the University of Arkansas, respectively, tackle the problem of how to gird your team against the setbacks that disrupt operations—or worse.

Teams have great potential advantages in the face of setbacks. The talent, energy, and resources of a group will always exceed those of an individual, and group members can support one another in a crisis. But the point of a team is to accomplish ends sufficiently challenging and complex that a whole bunch of people must work together. That means coordination, communication, and, potentially, friction. Teams also need some things that tend to be in tension with one another. They need leadership, for example, yet they need personal initiative to make decisions close to the action. Teams also need to strike just the right balance between planning and improvisation.

Doing all this is infinitely harder when things go bad. The authors open their book with a bang by focusing on the tragic case of the 1949 Mann Gulch Fire in Montana’s Helena National Forest, which claimed the lives of 13 wildland firefighters and was the subject of Norman Maclean’s famous book, Young Men and Fire. Fighting fires is teamwork, but when the fire turned viciously against the team sent to corral it, inadequacies in planning compounded by breakdowns in communications, confidence, and other essential factors led to disaster.

Business, thankfully, isn’t usually quite that risky. But there are steps managers can take to increase team resilience. “Over the past two decades of working with thousands of teams from hundreds of companies,” the authors write, “we’ve found that when adversity strikes, resilient teams do three specific things exceptionally well. They are skilled at making sense of situations, they coalesce, and they persist.”

Much of the book is spent on the four qualities the authors believe teams must cultivate to achieve resilience.

The first quality is team confidence, or the belief that the team can handle just about anything that comes its way. Team confidence, the authors note, isn’t really the sum of a lot of individual confidence, for swollen egos don’t benefit the team. The goal is collective and mutual confidence. And not too much, because overconfidence undermines success. “Moderately high confidence offers a healthy balance of confidence and caution,” the authors write.

To build team confidence, managers are urged to make goals and processes clear, empower the team by encouraging members to participate in decision-making, cheer successes, and provide useful feedback during struggles.

The second quality is having the foresight to create a teamwork road map, or a plan that “reflects the extent to which all team members know what their own roles and responsibilities are, and the extent to which they agree on what all other team members’ roles and responsibilities are. Team members may even know how to perform one another’s roles so that at any point, one person can step in for another.”

Throughout the book, in fact, the authors stress the importance of preparation in building resilience. For example, teams should run through brief practices to determine how they will cope with the absence of each member to accomplish their goals. Who will step up? What knowledge will they need to do so? Backups should be designated in advance so that they can step in as needed.

The third quality is the capacity to improvise. Recommendations here include making sure members understand who knows what so they can call on colleagues with the right knowledge; assembling teams “with a high level of thought diversity;” and making sure team members are comfortable sharing.

The fourth quality is valuing the team’s psychological safety. The authors want team members to speak up with suggestions, observations, and objections without feeling shy or intimidated. At times, their concerns in this arena border on obsession. The words safe and safety appears in the book 247 times, by my count, as if readers might be engaged in professional activities as dangerous as firefighting rather than merely rejiggering spreadsheets and sitting through video calls.

That said, the authors are at least well attuned to the importance of psychology in team success. They emphasize the importance of morale, of making sure the team knows the impact it is having, and of praising worthy efforts. Team members can even visit other teams and customers via video call to explain the importance of their work. Managers are urged to ask team members how they are doing and hold one-on-one check-ins. One of their best suggestions is to have a daily 15-minute huddle, which must seem like bliss compared to the endless meetings that have come to afflict the modern workplace.

A resilient team will overcome difficulties to get the job done, and when it succeeds in the face of adversity, it can draw on this experience to perform even more successfully in future. To help this process along, the authors urge teams to follow up projects with debriefing sessions during which all parties meet to list “roses” and “thorns” on a whiteboard. The thorns come first because the roses, after all, are easy. And everyone looks forward to reveling in their fragrance.

Author profile: Daniel Akst is a business writer, author, and novelist based in New York’s Hudson Valley. 

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When is the right to reinvent your business?

A set of indicators could provide advance notice of impending periods of business model change in sectors and industries.  

It’s a perennial strategic dilemma: when is the right time to reinvent your business? Move too soon (or too late) and you’ll likely destroy value. Maybe a lot of value.

Blockbuster. Kmart. BlackBerry. These are just a few of the corporate titans that were slow to rethink their business models and were overtaken by nimbler competitors. Less well-known are the firms that reinvented their business models too soon.

One such company was Iridium, which boldly recast itself as a voice and data communications company in the late 1990s, investing US$5 billion in the launch of more than 60 satellites and a range of handsets. But it was at least a decade too soon: outside scientific and military circles, there were few takers for Iridium’s bulky, pricey technology. Burdened with significant debt and operational challenges, the company filed for bankruptcy in 1999. The consumer satellite business model has since been proven profitable.

Getting wrong-footed is hardly the exception. In recent PwC research, only 58% of companies said they modified their business model at the right time; the others said they moved either too early or too late. 

The good news is that mistiming your business model reinvention (BMR) once doesn’t foreclose the opportunity to get the timing right the next time around. Sectors never stand still—and companies that miss out or jump too soon in one era (even if they destroy billions of dollars of value or leave it on the table) can find themselves back in the game during the next. Iridium, for example, survived its initial misstep, successfully restructured, and has reemerged as an innovative player. Walmart, which we discuss below, was slow on the draw during the Dot-com Era but later came around to making strongly innovative moves. The obvious conclusion is that strategic agility remains critical at any stage of sector or company evolution.

That said, every company will surely want to address the timing risk inherent in BMR. To help with that challenge, we have conceptualized six sector-level measures, including industry performance, regulation, and innovation, that could together act as bellwethers of impending business model reinvention. We tested these against 30 years of business model change in the United States, the UK, and Germany (among other selected countries) for the telecommunications, insurance, utilities, technology, aerospace and defense, and construction and engineering sectors, as well as others, and found a close correlation: when the indicators rose, an era of BMR soon followed.

When companies are wrestling with timing risk in a fast-moving world, these indicators might help them choose the right moment to begin reinventing their business. To simplify the discussion, we describe them below as they played out in the US retail and insurance sectors.

 

Introducing the BMR Pressure Index

Our index, which can be applied to any sector, brings together six leading indicators of BMR that we list here along with a rationale for how they might increase pressure for the reinvention of businesses. 

Performance: Faced with declining industry returns, companies feel pressure to find new ways to ensure their survival. For this indicator, we calculated the market share–weighted sum of the return on capitalExcept for financial services, where we used return on equity. for the companies in that sector

Attractiveness: Increasing industry attractiveness drives new entrants and incumbents to seek emerging value. Here, we simply counted the change in the number of firms active in any given sector.

Innovation: Emerging innovations and new technologies enable companies to capture new sources of value. The proxy for this metric is the growth-adjusted share of sectoral venture capital (VC) investments, as VC firms typically seek to be ahead of the curve on business reinvention. Note that we looked at these investments at the industry level, not the sector level, to capture the cross-pollination of innovation between sectors within the same industry.

 Shocks: Global shocks rapidly put pressure on companies to adapt to new conditions. Our proxy for this indicator was sectoral recessions—any period in which the total real revenue growth (inflation adjusted) of the sector is negative.

 Regulation: Changes in regulation prompt companies to adapt to shifting sources of value in their sector. Here, we constructed a qualitative measure of regulatory intensity by incorporating major regulatory and policy introductions taking place each year, Because regulatory changes are often planned and discussed years before implementation, we’ve factored in a build up and cool-down of each regulation before and after its implementation date. scoring their intensity according to their impact on the economy and customer segments, as well as on companies’ geographic activity and product mix.

BMR intensity: The expanding adoption of new business models within an industry puts pressure on others in that industry to follow suit. The redistribution of market share between companies is an indication that BMR is occurring within a sector. Those with more successful business models win market share, while obsolescing business models lead to erosion of market share. We measured this movement of market share between companies within a sector using a three-year rolling average, recognizing that the effects of BMR intensity persist as pressure into future years. We acknowledge that this measure may over-or underestimate the effect of BMR intensity in some situations. For example, it may overestimate it when there are changes to market share for reasons other than BMR such as with acquisitions. Or it may underestimate the effect for example, if a company were to change its business model in order to remain competitive and not improve its market share as a result, but nonetheless avoid a loss in market share it would have otherwise suffered had it not made the change

     

As a test case, we applied the BMR Pressure Index to all public companies in five US sectors: retail, insurance, banking, telecommunications, and technology. To do so, we looked back over the past 30 years at the combination of market share changes (as described by the BMR intensity factor above) to identify roughly when business model reinvention had occurred. We found that our pressure index, composed of the six leading indicators above, correlated well with the periods just before such reinvention occurred in each sector.

 

 https://www.pwc.com/gx/en/issues/business-model-reinvention/business-model-reinvention-pressure-index.html?utm_campaign=sbpwc&utm_medium=site&utm_source=hpedit

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Hi,

 

 

Lets go straight to Tip number 1: Give Attention to Details

 

 

 

Details are critical for the following points

 

 

 

It is important not just to have a vision but also to know what are the scope and all exclusions of the vision.

 

Don’t just understand the project’s objectives but have a detailed direction on how to achieve those objectives

 

Project plan. A well defined and clearly communicated project plan taking into consideration all known factors like time, cost, risks etc

 

In our very lives today details are not common place. An average Nigerian working professional does not run a budget, neither does he have a retirement plan. He just wakes up everyday and goes to work without a clear cut mission of how long he intend to stay on the job and step-by-step plan to get him out when the time comes. The same attitude is carried on to our projects. Projects are different from processes. We must have very detailed parameters governing not just our projects but also our lives.

 

 

 

I have discovered people will naturally yield and give more to a vision than a need. The vision therefore must be very clear and unambiguously defined. What is the use of a vision that stakeholders cannot relate to because it is not well explained. As a manager with project team to guide and provide leadership to, you must adapt the vision to each person and their role. This is necessary for simplicity sake. Though details must be achieved on all that has to do with the project at hand, simplicity should not be compromised.

 

 

 

 

 

Next week we will explore tip number two: Communicate to Be Understood. Please join us.

 

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Guidelines for Effective & Efficient Meetings

 

 
One of the essential ingredient for team building, making group decisions, solving group problems and achieving

a group consensus is a meeting.

The project manager should abide by the following guidelines for ensuring efficient and effective meetings that hold the attention and interest of all team members:

 

 

 

1. establish a meeting policy

 

2. Only call a meeting when there is a real need

 

3. Make the purpose of the meeting very clear

 

4. prepare an agenda

 

5. Follow the agenda

 

6. Encourage participation

 

7. Include a team-building element

 

8. Issue mistakes.

 

9. Follow up on all task assignments and action items

  poor meetings are usually a result of poor preparation and inept or incompetent chairperson.

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