EVOLUTION OF BPR

Thoughts on Presidential politics and change leadership

Posted on the October 8th, 2008 under Change Management by Gregory Yankelovich

It is very disturbing to watch what we do to our democracy as we pitch away our tolerance and respect for each other’s values, and dive into a type of brawl I used to observe in the years of my youth at the hockey rinks. The polarization of public opinions is becoming reminiscent of the era of religious wars. As the power and omnipresence of communication channels and “contributors” grow along with transparency of candidates voting records, both candidates look more and more unqualified to produce meaningful change as they seem to converge on less and lessof a distinguishable platform in the attempt to please everybody.

What do we really want from our next leader? We seem to give even less thought to our expectations of the next President, than we do for job requirements when we hire a new employee for a management position.

I am often puzzled by the very poor quality of job requirements found in wanted advertising of the on-line job boards. Many HR professionals often complain about this as well. It is very easy when you are looking for a developer to take part in a project with specified technology skills. However it gets increasingly difficult if the technology and the scope of the project is not yet defined.  The challenge grows exponentially as you move up the organizational hierarchy with ambiguity and uncertainties escalating, but yet hiring managers are still focusing on less critical, but easier to list specific technical skills while totally ignoring more critical assets like ability to lead, ability to challenge creativity of your team, integrity of character, integrity of the thought process, etc.

It is mind boggling that we criticize political leaders for changing their minds on certain issues, which amounts to prohibition to learn and to be pragmatic. Steadfastness is not the same as intellectual inflexibility and denial of reality. If that is what we want from the next President how come the current one is so unpopular - he delivered most of things he promised. Too bad we didn’t want them anymore.

“…in looking for people to hire, you look for three qualities:

integrity, intelligence and energy.

And if they don’t have the first, the other two will kill you.”

Warren Buffett

People capable to lead with integrity do not need to be experts in National Security or data base design. Look for the one who has verifiable experience of building talented teams and leading them to create constructive change. If change is what you really want. And that disqualifies both candidates, so let’s embrace for at least one more term of the sameness, regardless who wins.

Burn after reading

Posted on the October 1st, 2008 under Change Management, Organizational Transformation by Gregory Yankelovich

I am a big fan of the Coen brothers comedy films and I’ve seen their latest installment of the genre, the name I borrowed for this post. Since I know even less about the business of cinematography than about the business of politics, I figure that I am uniquely qualified to draw some obvious parallels between the storyline of this movie and our current, politically induced, economic crisis. Essentially it is a story of a woman who has a burning desire for cosmetic surgery that she does not particularly need and definitely cannot afford. However through the carelessness of a caretaker (the law secretary who loses the info in the gym), unyielding power of entitlement and total disregard of personal responsibility as a citizen or a human being, she gets her surgery. Are you following me so far? The CIA gets involved, people get killed, good times! But at the end the the CIA chief, after authorizing the expense for the plastic surgery, asks a pivotal question - “So, what have we learned?” The answer is “Nothing. We didn’t know what it was all about in the first place”.

That brings me to our current economic situation - since nobody accepted responsibility for any single policy or action, which led to this crisis, I have to conclude that we have learned nothing except more distrust in people who try to scare us to do “something”.

You may ask why did I completely abandon the topic of this blog, which was focused (I hope) on economics and management of IT as a leverage for organizational transformation initiatives. Let me assure you that I have not done such a thing, I just decided to examine the current political situation in order to learn and understand better the challenges of transformation management.

Let’s define for the purpose of this discussion, that the role of management is to optimize available resources to achieve a specific goal. The specific goal could be an expansion of the organization, or survival of the organization during contraction cycles.  Either one could trigger an organizational transformation initiative and its success would depend on the execution of IT and the adoption of change of people in the organization. It is very common to separate responsibility for these two parts or even totally disregard the latter part and that’s what causes most breakdowns in attempts to change the way organizations function. However it is also very common to blame technology and IT for the outcome. Therefore when the inevitable question “So, what have we learned?” is posed, the answer is not very conducive to future success.

We have to accept responsibility for our mistakes in order to learn from them.

Human aspect of change

Posted on the September 20th, 2008 under Business Risk, Change Management, Organizational Transformation by Gregory Yankelovich

I was wondering about how long we will vote for people who think that we are morons? The tone of every campaign in the last twenty or so years, was and is incredibly condescending. Apparently a very large percentage of electorate thinks that voting for someone they don’t trust and respect, is a better alternative than voting for someone they trust and respect even less. How about voting for, and not against, specific issues? Not party lines, but conscience? Third party - Green or Libertarian? I think that even voting for “Non of the above” is better that what we keep doing, however the “wisdom” of “devil you know is better.” is the one which provides obstacles to any meaningful change in a way we participate in politics of government, organizations and family.