Versatile Amphibian

In my last post , I summarised the findings of my analysis of the composition of executive leadership teams in the FTSE 100, having first set out some basic principles for the role of that team in the present environment. You can find that content here. Today I’m going to start to look at possible roles on an ideal future ExCo, leading onto future essays on orthodox and unorthodox compositions and finally on the resulting impact those compositions will have on decision-making flows. To look at roles, we first need to think about the demands that the present environment is placing on leaders. The world has always been a complex place to do business in. The difference today is that we are far more aware of that complexity than we have been in previous generations and our ability to generate and suffer from change is exponentially greater than it has been before. We are also nearing the end of the latest techno-economic revolution – in information technology – which began in 1971...

One of the central themes of the book (I am going to mention “the book” a lot in the coming weeks and months!) is the form of leadership required to win in the current environment and how those leaders should make decisions.  Given the constraints of a sensibly-long book, I was only able explore certain aspects of the topic. One piece I removed because it felt too much like conjecture relates to the form of corporate executive teams. My incoming thesis is that in general executive management teams have the wrong skills and perspectives to effectively guide their organisations in times of uncertainty. This is a function of a number of things: A lack of clarity about the actual purpose of the executive team The wrong composition of the leadership team, resulting in an inappropriate mix of skills and perspectives The wrong type of executives being selected to participate in executive leadership Each of these is covered to an extent in ‘Art and Science…’ but over...

A short post from me to share a simple framework I developed last week to explain the options an organisation has in implementing a digital team. It uses two axes: Degree of coupling to the traditional organisation, which refers to how well integrated the digital team is into the hierarchy; and Way of working, which defines the culture of the team, from traditional to digital native I found it quite useful to determine the leadership team's level of ambition. Hope it's useful!

I’ve been doing a really interesting case with a client recently, helping them to use digital to reduce their expenditure on third party recruiters and simultaneously increase the variety and quality of new recruits that they obtain. Here’s a few high level thoughts from the work… The first - and perhaps most obvious – principle is that it’s time to treat employees and potential recruits like customers. Understand their archetypes and needs and engage them on their terms. Using classifieds or Linkedin only gets you to about half of the direct recruiting community and if you’re after graduates or under–35’s, you will need to think about how you use Facebook, Instagram and Twitter in combination. If you want scarce talent, you’ll need to seek them out on their own terms and be proactive in targeting them.  Information in recruitment is now symmetrical and good people – hell, all people – are being constantly bombarded with interview offers thanks to a horde of recruitment co...

I was talking to a couple of colleagues about how to change the culture of businesses the other day (as you do). Someone commented that they didn’t know how to make the culture of a client ‘digital’. His implication was that there needed to be uniformity of culture in order to succeed at making a transformation to a more productive operating model, which struck me as odd. Why would cultural uniformity be a good idea? What business actually has that today? What’s a 'digital culture' at all? Is also a good question. I currently describe it as something that’s outcome centric, that has hierarchy that serves to resolve areas of debate rather than for command and control and devolves leadership to everyone in the organisation based on philosophical alignment about what needs to be done. My description changes quite a lot, it’d be fair to say, but this is the June 2014 version. What about cultural uniformity, then? Well, I started to think about this and to be honest I could...

With apologies for the shameless self-promotion, my latest paper has just been published ( link ). It reflects on what we've learnt about the best organisational structures for TMT organisations as they emerge from the downturn and look to grow in future. Any comments/ opinions/ experiences greatly appreciated!