Drive

Employees First, Customers Second: Turning Conventional Management Upside Down

The Mind Map About Mind Mapping

"There is one quality which one must possess to win, and that is definiteness of purpose, the knowledge of what one wants, and a burning desire to possess it." Napoleon Hill

"Confusion of goals and perfection of means seems, in my opinion, to characterize our age." Albert Einstein

Linchpin

                                                                


                                                                    

Career development is one of the most important topics in life. Ironically, most universities do not have a subject on developing a successful and exciting career. I am not talking about training courses for interviews and resume writing. I am talking about building a bright career future. Graduates often need to make hard decisions in deciding which companies they should work for, which positions they should apply for, which additional courses they should study, how long they should stay with the companies etc.

"Don't spend time beating on a wall, hoping to transform it into a door." Coco Chanel

"A pure hand needs no glove to cover it." Nathaniel Hawthorne

"You don't get paid for the hour. You get paid for the value you bring to the hour." Jim Rohn

List of the sixteen mistakes entrepreneurs do not have to make from John Osher

John Osher is a very successful entrepreneur in America. He found numbers of new ventures in different industries: earrings, antique fashion, energy conservation products, baby products, toys and toothbrushes. Millions of dollar is earned from these companies. He shares a list of 16 mistakes which entrepreneurs should not make from his experience in a Harvard Business School case study.  

Core Values and Organizational Change (Theory and Practice)

                                                                         


Adapting market environment is becoming more and more important for business survival in this turbulent climate.  Unfortunately, organizations very often face a lot of challenges when adjustingtheir operations in order to cope with the competitive environment.  Most of these challenges are emotional, rather than technical issues.  In reality, new strategic or operation plans can be very logical and business sound on paper, human factors can still tear these plans apart. Therefore, change processes are very complex and dynamic activities with unpredictable outcomes.

A book titled Core Values and Organizational Change Theory and Practice provides very compelling arguments and systemic methods to tackle the human issues during change processes. The book starts from highly academic arguments about the philosophies of business management: modernism, status quo thinking and postmodernism.  These three philosophies have a fundamental impact on how a management may approach the change processes as shown below:

What every body is saying

                                                                           

Interpersonal communication is one of the most important aspects in human resource (HR) study for a very obvious reason, because HR practitioners need to communicate with vast amounts of people from different backgrounds, interests andambitions. Thus, possessing a set of effective interpersonal communication skills is an invaluable asset to any HR practitioners.    

As most people know, interpersonal communication consists of verbal and nonverbal components. Verbal communication basically means talking in words. On the other hand, nonverbal communication involves  facial expressions, gestures, touching, physical movement, posture, body adornment and even the tone, timbre, and volume of an individual’s voice.  Nonverbal communication comprises of approximately 60- 65% percent of all interpersonal communication.  Sadly, not even one subject in my 5 years of study in HR management teaches nonverbal communication. All the subjects are focused on written and verbal communication training. Therefore, I am often fascinated by TV shows about body languages like “The Mentalist” and “Lie To Me”. I always wonder how true these shows really are. Can a person read everything about other people’s thought barely based on body language? Can they really detect liars based on this science?

Blue Ocean Strategy

                                                                         

Companies have long engaged in head-to-head competition in search of sustainable, profitable growth. They have long fought for competitive advantage, battled over market share, and struggled for differentiation. These often lead to intense price wars, slow growth and low profitability.

So, can we break this rather pessimistic ending? In the academic world, the answer is yes.  Many business theorists offer mental frameworks to reinvent businesses. However, most of them are still at an experimental stage and they offer very little practical use.

Fortunately, a book titled “Blue Ocean Strategy” provides practical tools and methods for business practitioners to reinvent their businesses. These tools and methods are based on more than 15 years of research on more than 20 companies across different industries in Europe, Asia and America. The focus of these tools and methods are:  searching, formulating, evaluating and executing blue ocean strategies. Details are given in a mind map at the end of this post.

Buy*In

                                                                       

Have you ever had an experience such as this? You believe in a good idea. You know it could make a crucial difference for you, your organization, and your community. You present it and hoping to garner some enthusiastic support. Instead, you get confounding questions, inane comments, and verbal bullets. Before you know what’s hitting you, you idea is dead and shot down. Personally, I have lots of such experiences, from presenting a business pitch in a room full of venture capitalists to guessing to add a new position for a department. People can always come up with questions which I can neverprepare myself for. This would put me in a vulnerable position, because I cannot provide perfect answers for those unexpected questions.  Before I know it, more and more people start to jump in and question the idea. At the end, my idea is dead.

In a book titled “Buy*In” offers a systematic method to handle these tough questions when you presents your new ideas or proposals. This book is written by John P. Kotter (a professor inleadership and change management at Harvard Business School) and Lorne A. Whitehead (a leader of education innovation at the University of British Columbia). They put years of real life experiences  in corporations and combine  complicated theories to create the method. Don’t worry though. The goal of this book is to provide practical tools for business practitioners, and not to pose an academic argument. Therefore, this book is written in very plain and simple English. They also use a lot of storytelling methods to demonstrate how their method works in real life settings. 

The Hobbit and Team Dynamic

                                                                       

Many entrepreneurs constantly face human resource (HR) problems. One predominant HR issue for start-up companies is having to manage their founding teams effectively. Start-up companies are inhered with 3 major difficulties in dealing with team issues:

1.       Under-Resourced. Most start-up companies lack finances to compensate member’s effort and their opportunity cost.

2.        High Level of Uncertainty. Start-up companies generally ignore detailed business planning processes. Most founders have rough business ideas, and just work with them. Therefore, start-up companies often change their demand on skill sets and capabilities rapidly to cope with unseen situations.     

3.       Loose Organizational Culture and Values. Founders often ignore the need strengthen their organizational culture and values, because they are too tied down by the day to day workload. 

Creative Destruction

The first Standard and Poor’s (S&P) index was created in 1920 in USA. 90 major companies were on the original list for a span of 65 years. In 1998, the S&P list was expanded to 500 companies and their average life spans were around 10 years. In 2000s, some studies suggested that the average life span of top companieswould be shortened to 5 years. This shocking trend is mostly caused by the effect of intensified creative destruction.

In a journal article titled Creative Destruction, it  describes interactions between companies and markets in the creative destruction process and implications for management to take advantage of the process. This summary is shown in a mind map at the end of this post.  

Creative destruction theory  explains how the economy evolves in a capitalist environment. This particular theory focuses on innovation aspects of economic development. The key concept of creative destruction is that innovative breakthrough can only be achieved by destroying some of the current economic system and status quo. This simply means that innovation can only created by changing the rules of game. As this happens in a rapid pace in the past 20 years, many companies which cannot catch up and adopt with the new rules, they have to leave the game.  Nowadays, if companies do not have the  ability to embrace creative destruction in their strategies and operations, they will  not survive very long in the game.