Business Minds; the criticality of relevant, optimistic and intelligent thinking

Business Minds; that’s the label of one of the most instigating books I’ve read about conducting business in the 21st century. This unique material is a profound compilation of thoughts and view-points of renowned entrepreneurs, professors and leading consultants globally. (I strongly recommend you get this text)
I extracted a few landmark pronouncements by some of these thought leaders and put them here (though some are paraphrased)

• Warren Bennis: intellectual capital (know-how, skills and innovation) has supplanted capital (traditional resource-based assets) as the critical success factor….
• Peter Cohan: the few firms that persist and ultimately achieve integrated transactions (ERP/ERM and enterprise-wide intelligence) are likely to enjoy a sustainable advantage over those that give up.
• Arie de Gaus: long lived organizations were sensitive to their environment, cohesive with a strong sense of identity, tolerant and financially conservative. What you find out today is that the wisdom of the past has largely been reengineered away rather than appreciated and intelligently referenced.
• Peter Drucker: today, you have to be a partner, not a boss! It’s a democratic relationship.
• Daniel Goleman (The EQ Master): all effective leaders learn to manage their emotions, especially anger, anxiety and sadness. Pontificating and hypothesis, rather than hard data have been the currency of many leadership theorists.

Referencing data from The Hay Group on over 300 executives showed 6 separate leadership styles in use by business executives. They are:

• Coercive: usually demand immediate compliance with procedures
• Authoritative: mobilise people towards a compelling vision
• Affiliating: create emotional bonds in the workplace
• Democratic: aim to build consensus
• Pacesetting: expect excellence all the way
• Coaching: develop people for the future


Leaders who have mastered 4 or more of these styles especially the authoritative, democratic, affiliating and coaching strategies have been shown to have the best climate and business performance. (Seems like a bit of everything is important for success)
Leadership however certainly requires a balanced mix of pragmatism and mental agility.

Another sharp business mind, Dr. Oren Harari in the field of strategy quite accurately remarked that a truly competitive business strategy is:

Coherent: i.e. clear and makes sense to all parties
Deliverable: i.e. execution. It’s practical and can be carried out
Ever evolving: i.e. not rigid. It’s flexible and responds appropriately to internal and external changes in its business eco-system.

After studying the field of competition for a long time, he discovered that:

• Winners do strategy on the run. (i.e. adaptability, responsiveness and flexibility)
• Intangibles are more important than tangibles (brains are more than bricks)
• It’s got to be fun. Strategy should involve informality, humour, celebration and shenanigans at work. After all, we’re humans.

These next two statements I have kept at heart, as they have proven invaluable in every type of business I’ve engaged in.

Companies that catapult over conventional wisdom in order to carve out new value propositions or create new markets are the ones that create sustained competitive advantage.

In business, don’t try to make people share your values, find those who already do!

The following have been identified as major pitfalls to growth in businesses, particularly for the big and global ones. The companies in braces have been negatively impacted at one time or the other by these identified pitfalls:

Lack of a clear mission (ITT)
Underestimating your core business (Medtronic)
Depending on a single product line (Cisco)
Failure to recognise technology and market changes (Compaq)
Changing strategy without changing culture (GM)
Going outside your core-competence (Xerox and IBM)
Counting on acquisitions for growth (WorldCom and Sprint $160b merger)


Our very own business mind, Fela Durotoye (CEO, VIP Consulting) addressed some fundamental business and related issues at a meeting we had in his house.
In Fela’s words:
Your talent and the business of your talent are different things.
You need to get into the business of meeting needs, not pushing products on people.
Consulting (selling information, expertise and know-how) has proven to be the easiest way to start a business in an industry where you could eventually end up becoming a major player.

A great way to connect to people and potential clients and customers is to say and do things that make them appreciate you, and in essence say ‘thank you’.
Learn to do things to perfection, blast your tasks to pieces!
He had this to say about weaknesses. Well, we all have them, or don’t you?

Your weaknesses will not limit you until you refuse to acknowledge, respect, restrict and submit them into the hands of someone who can manage them for you.

Finally, he had these to say about attaining leadership:

• Right Intention: constitutes the justification and bias for undertaking any tasks.
• Excellence: You ought to build the reputation of being the best at something (especially in a highly specialised area i.e. finding a niche). Many times, it’s easier to make impact as a small growing company. Though you may not boast of size, you could certainly emphasize growth rates.
• Celebrate Milestones: Your little achievements count and you should learn to tell success stories regularly to your staff and team members.
• Expertise: Realise that passion is not a substitute for knowledge, wisdom (strategy), understanding (underlying principles), expertise, genius and skill

Remember that you are the custodian of your own future. Birthing and actualising a desired future requires breaking free of controlling forces, and believe me, these forces are every where, even in the most subtle and unexpected of forms and places. This concept of controlling forces constitutes a subject on its own. Robert Liardon wrote a whole book on this. He was very candid, performed some root-cause diagnostic and approached it from a more fundamental (and Spiritual) perspective.

Many highly talented folks have been held back from venturing into the wild and attaining their full potential largely because of the demands (i.e. shackles and restraints) placed on them by loved ones to live up to certain expectations. It requires appreciable strength, determination, awareness of the bigger picture, and many times divine enablement to break free from the myriad of psychological, physiological, cultural, emotional and sometimes unexplainable impediments that attempt to inhibit the process of harnessing our potential and maximising everyday opportunities.

Nevertheless, we have a choice to escape from gravity and ascend into an unthreaded stratosphere of possibilities.

Have a good week folks!

Pitfalls and Threats to Business Leadership

In 2000, Fortune Magazine did a survey of American CEOs and business leaders who were forced out. Top reasons were:

• Bad earnings (Poor return on investments, faulty investment decisions)
• People problems (failure to get on with owners and other executives)
• Lifer syndrome (creativity drought resulting from being too long on the job)
• Decision gridlock (lacking influence and political clout to implement ideas)

The critical challenges facing business leaders today are:

1. Globalization (Balancing Pankaj Ghemawat’s 3As i.e.)

• Arbitrage: has to do with exploiting the variations in the availability and cost of accessing critical resources. For instance, situating your production facility in China may provide you with opportunities for significant cost-reduction with respect to labour as against erecting your facility in Western Europe or the United States. (you can ask BMW why they decided to move some of their operations overseas!)
  
• Adaptation: entails tailoring your products to suite target markets. HSBC’s slogan, ‘the world’s local bank” is a pointer to the fact that they package their products to suite their target markets. Standardization may not always prove effective depending on the nature of products and services being offered.
  
• Aggregation: aims at strategically centralising some aspects of your operations or implementing some form of shared services. The leverage point here is scale. With careful case analysis, multinationals can aggregate aspects of their operations for better coordination, increased throughput and overall effectiveness.

2.Technological change

Any business that isn’t internet enabled would simply be unqualified to be called a business in the nano-second world of today. Deployment of business automation systems and e-solutions including business to business and customer to business applications are basic pre-requisites for conducting any sort of business today. Service providers, finance and consulting firms and companies where knowledge and information management constitute core aspects of their business have significantly higher technological investment obligations including Document Management Systems, Information Security and Availability, Business Continuity Planning and host of others.

In our fast changing world, successful companies (by implication companies with sound leadership and management) focus on a few simple rules:

• How to rules -- There are standard methodologies and approach to problem solving.
• Boundary rules -- A niche has been carved out. This forces you to focus on your target market and ignore almost everything else outside your strategic framework.
• Priority rules -- First things first. Resources ought to be allocated on the basis of the projected estimated value derivable from such resource commitment.
• Timing rules -- There’s a time and season for everything. If you would agree with me, we are past the period of mega-bucks profits from computer hardware sales. It’s critical to discern the right moment for a product offering, but this does not in any way negate the fact that a company must be able to pro-actively articulate the needs of consumers and hit them with a solution they never knew they needed!
• Exit rules – There’s a time to be born and a time to die. One of the most critical issues investors face today is pin-pointing to divest, exit or liquidate an investment. A twenty-hour delay in liquidating an investment could have implications in the realm of billions of dollars in losses for global corporations.

Warren Bennis remarked that the new leader is one who commits people to action, converts followers into leaders, and converts leaders into change agents.
Today’s leaders ought to think globally and act globally (not just locally)!