Friday, October 17, 2008

what can we learn from his gold-medal-winning team? (tom peters)

To start the debate off, I can point to what I see as three important factors: awareness of current performance levels compared to the competition, collective desire to achieve a shared ambition or goal, and ability to learn. Let me expand on these:

1. Awareness ...
As a young Army Officer, I was once tasked with planning an attack on an enemy position. For hours I pored over maps, studying known friendly and enemy dispositions, weather, tide, intelligence reports, and so on. I got completely bogged down in my thinking. I had lost clarity. My Commanding Officer offered me a twenty-minute flight in a helicopter to sight the ground over which we were to advance. Twenty-one minutes later I had a crystal clear plan in my head and knew exactly what we had to do. I had quite literally gained altitude over my problem. Heightened my awareness.

I think the business world is evolving faster than management is adapting. We are, as a cadre of managers, poorly prepared to deal with the rate of change we now face. Some of us are in denial about this, some are simply confused by it, and some have willingly embraced the renewal imperative.

Do you have "altitude" over your organisation, or are you bogged down in the detail? Do you have a brutally clear view of your current performance? Can you define the competitive challenges and disruptive forces at work on you? Does everybody in your organisation know, understand, and care about the adaptive strategy as much as you do? Honest answers to questions like these can differentiate the next generation of winners from the future also-rans.

2. Collective desire ...
Many contemporary managers are from a generation that has not experienced the hardships of economic depression or wide-scale warfare. Full employment, violence-free lives, and comfortable retirements are seen as reasonable expectations. Many of us who have done well in the developed world have simply become too comfortable and too complacent. I see many well-established businesses that, as part of an increasingly individualistic society, have become temples of high individual aspiration but low collective or corporate ambition. Take the present credit crunch as an example. To what extent have we all been denying or ignoring the onset of the now inevitable crisis? Will this denial prove to be a contributory factor to the scale of the eventual havoc it causes us all? Even now, people still seem to believe they can escape unscathed!

If leadership is "the art of getting others to want to struggle for shared aspirations" (from leadership researchers Jim Kouzes & Barry Posner), I see too many businesses that are suffering from being over managed and under led. I often ask clients "Isn't our performance struggling from a lack of people who are struggling?" Gold medals certainly don't come without a struggle!

I regularly present the above leadership definition to management audiences. Almost invariably, managers in the West tell me that they have a problem with the word "struggle." I can assure you that in Bucharest, Talin, Moscow, Mumbai, Casablanca, and Chishinau, managers never question the word "struggle." Why is that?

Are you as hungry for your organisation's success as the average Latvian, Indian, Russian, Estonian, Romanian, or Moldovan is for theirs? Do you really love what you do at work, or are you really funding a lifestyle that you love?

3. Learn ...
I want to discuss two factors in this context, failure and speed. Failure is a taboo subject in many management teams to the point where it is, paradoxically, inhibiting their performance. In a fear-charged, non-collaborative, and non-purposeful context, the key post-failure survival competence is blame avoidance, not learning. This kills the natural propensity of an organism to learn from experience and adapt itself for the future. It also seems to me that the larger the organisation, the more hiding failures is likely to be a key management skill, and the more opportunities to do so exist!

Now speed, or rather the lack of it! In the military environment, where speed of reaction often determines survival, soldiers at all levels are taught "naturalistic" decision-making, that is (1) Rapidly identify three options open to you, (2) On gut feel, go with one of the three options, BUT assume that whichever one you choose will ... (3) Need substantial revision once you are underway. This degree of decisiveness engenders life-saving reaction speeds.

How many management teams would deploy decision-making strategies of this type across their businesses? Even in those that have, step (3) above, the preparedness to revise a chosen course of action, or lack thereof, is the biggest source of eventual performance failure.

It used to be conventional wisdom that the big organisation would eventually triumph over the small. High rates of disruption, challenge and change mean that it is now the fast that will usually succeed over the slow. Which are you? What happens in your organisation when things go wrong? Does the performance of your business benefit from failure? Does your organisation make decisions in a naturalistic way? What speed penalty do you pay for your need for security? Do you get the balance right?

My conclusion from all this ...
I think Dave Brailsford was pointing us at the human art of performance: respectively, human awareness, human desire, and human ability to learn. The tragedy for many organisations is that they have become too scientific. They are places where managers apply pressure to performance levers rather than lead people to perform.