Trusted Leader Blog

“It is more important to know who you are than where you are going, for where you are going will change as the world around you changes. Leaders die, products become...

A couple of months ago I went out for drinks with some of the graduates I studied with at the AICD company director’s course.  One of the members had recently arrived back in Australia following a two-month executive leadership course at Harvard that grooms potential company CEOs.  It was pretty intensive.  One hundred leaders from around the world studying and living together, while successful American CEOs addressed the class together with the world’s best business school teachers.

Despite the sluggish worldwide economy that we have experienced in 2016, economists still expect global growth forecasts to remain fairly static in 2017 with a potential increase later in the year.  But it’s insanely difficult to predict the future, particularly one that is VUCA: Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous.

As organisations get bigger through organic growth or acquisitions, consolidation becomes an important value creation strategy to provide economies of scale and reduce duplication of effort.  Operating in a borderless and integrated fashion across geographies and functions improves growth and adaptability.  Back in 1994, when Lou Gerstner took over IBM one of his major tasks to help the failing company was to reduce billions of dollars in expenses through consolidating global functions and to train staff to collaborate across borders and functions.  Achieving this goal helped turn IBM around in a spectacular fashion.

One of my darkest times as an entrepreneur was winning the contract to undertake all of the audiovisual requirements at Fashion Week.  It involved filming and editing 57 fashion shows in 4 days and creating a dedicated television network to play constantly updating fashion shows.  With 18 staff and 30 volunteers, we were massively under-resourced, working 15 hour days with barely a break.  We had naively (or stupidly) trusted our client that we didn’t need more resources to film and edit 15 fashion shows a day across Sydney (because they had no more budget).

For over a year, I’ve been running monthly executive roundtables with CEOs, entrepreneurs and executives.  On a couple of occasions I’ve had two senior leaders wax lyrical about their corporate culture.

The pace of change within most organisations is accelerating.  It’s now commonplace for companies to be restructuring, changing their business model, undertaking M&As, launching a new strategy or initiative, entering a new market or even relocating.

Around the world, there’s growing discontent about the ineffectiveness of employee engagement surveys.  Over the last fifteen years, employee engagement levels have remained static, despite companies being focused on it more than ever.  According to Gallup, only 24% of Australians are engaged in their jobs, while another study found that in Australia we recorded the third-worst global employee engagement figures in 2015.

Thousands of years ago, when humans roamed the African savannah, it was in our best interests to live in tribes.  Being part of a tribe allowed us to sleep soundly knowing that others were looking out for man-eating saber-toothed tigers.  If we became too sick to hunt, we knew our fellow tribe members would help us out.  We could trust that other people would look out for us and they could trust that we would look after them.  A solitary human would never have survived that hostile environment.

A few months back, I wrote an article called Are you Limiting your Company Vision?