David Kelley on Designing Curious Employees Design thinking is a process of empathizing with the end user. Its principal guru is David Kelley, founder of IDEO and the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford (otherwise known as the d.school), who takes a similar approach to managing people. He believes leadership is a matter of empathizing with employees. In this interview, he explains why leaders should seek understanding rather than blind obedience, why it's better to be a coach and a taskmaster and why you can't teach leadership with a PowerPoint presentation. Kermit Pattison: How has the design thinking model influenced your approach to leading people? David Kelley: The main tenet of design thinking is empathy for the people you're trying to design for. Empathy is not always talked about as a leadership quality. For me, it's all important. What happens when the leader has to crack the whip? A lot of this must depend on hiring the right people who have an internal desire to do well. What questions do you ask?
Manmohan Singh’s Second Wind by Shashi Tharoor Exit from comment view mode. Click to hide this space NEW DELHI – In September, India’s mild-mannered prime minister, Manmohan Singh, turned 80. He also turned a page: After months of being pilloried by every pundit with a soapbox for indecision and weakness, and for presiding over “policy paralysis” while corrupt colleagues allegedly made off with the country’s silver, Singh has boldly seized the initiative. A series of reform announcements, and some frank talk to the public, have underscored his new message: “I am in charge.” The initial steps that he has announced are impressive. Likewise, the government has reduced subsidies on diesel and cooking gas in the face of vociferous opposition, including a one-day strike that shut down the country. The rebirth of Singh the reformer came after a long wait. But Singh’s most recent chapters have been less positive. Within Singh’s Congress Party, the pressure will mount to match economic-reform initiatives with “pro-poor” programs.
Netflix - culture Lead Like All Your Employees Are Volunteers The other day I read an article about a well-known company anticipating a big competitive problem: huge attrition when its first employees are vested for their stock options, four years after their hire date. The CEO expects to hemorrhage talent, many of which he expects to be snapped up by his competitors. His question, asked mostly of himself, is, “Why should we train our competition’s talent force?” Really? CEO, I’m writing to you. Here’s what I think. Most companies are not startups, and even among those that are, most will not have IPOs that make the founding talent rich. Guess what folks? Money will always be a factor for some people, and no matter what you try, some of your most talented performers will leave for a (financially) better offer. But for most of us, money only starts the conversation. But there are so many other, much more important reasons to want to work for a company, and even more to stay for one that we’ve grown to love! Image courtesy of SJ White Ted Coiné
The Best-Performing CEOs in the World It’s no accident that chief executives so often focus on short-term financial results at the expense of longer-term performance. They have every incentive to do so. If they don’t make their quarterly or annual numbers, their compensation drops and their jobs are in jeopardy. Stock analysts, shareholders, and often their own boards judge them harshly if they miss near-term goals. Five years ago we launched a global project to address that challenge. Three years ago, in the January–February 2010 issue of HBR, we introduced such a scorecard. Judging CEO Performance For the most part, we used the same methodology that we did three years ago. Assess the long-term performance of each CEO, from the first day on the job to the last. (Or for CEOs still in office, until August 31, 2012, our last day of data collection.) Reflect the global nature of business. In 2010 we drew candidates from the S&P Global 1200 and BRIC 40 lists; this year we worked with three other emerging-market indexes as well.
Millennials on the Job: All They Really Want Is a Little Appreciation Do Millennials care about “length of service” recognition? I can hear you saying no. But you’re wrong. A study conducted by the Center for Creative Leadership in San Diego found Millennial employees have about the same level of organizational commitment as other generations. And there’s even better news from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. A recent study found employees are staying longer with their current employer than they have in nearly 15 years. Millennials want engaging, meaningful work Add an effective career achievement program, where employees are rewarded for their years of service, and that number jumps to 6.7 years. But being pegged as a job-hopping generation isn’t the only myth surrounding Millennials. But what they really want is engaging, meaningful work that doesn’t take over their lives. Sure Millennials expect to be listened to when they have an idea even if they are the youngest person in the room, but why shouldn’t they be? “They want to know their work matters”
Creating Strategy Tools for the Next Generation Our solution: a series of visual strategy and innovation tools for the future. Through three years of action research and active experiments, we have developed and/or identified 32 powerful visual tools. Tools that help companies make strategic innovation happen. These are the tools we belief students and executives of all ages could benefit greatly from mastering. All our work builds on Creative Commons. For this Hack we highlight four of these tools: - Strategic Innovation Canvas - Innovation Thinking Modes - The Innovation Pyramid - The Action Roadmap Strategic Innovation Canvas Strategic Innovation Canvas is our default innovation tool. After having run the Strategic Innovation Canvas with management teams across private and public organizations, we can state; it simply works. The design principles and the visual thinking behind it helps management teams across all industries and all areas of expertise grasp strategic innovation in a record short amount of time. Innovation Thinking Modes 1.
Semiconductor Stock Outlook - Jan 2013 - Industry Outlook The Semiconductor Industry serves as a driver, enabler and indicator of technological progress. Developments in the industry determine the way we work, transport ourselves, communicate, entertain ourselves and respond to our environment. The PCs we work on, the cars we drive, the phones we communicate with, the electronic gadgets on which we watch movies, listen to music and play games on, and the planes and weapons used to transport or protect us use semiconductor devices. As environmental issues have become more of a concern today, semiconductor devices are being made to reduce power consumption, reduce heat dissipation, capture solar energy, create more efficient lighting solutions and so forth. The past decade has seen big changes in the industry, with most players streamlining operations and transferring more routine production to low-cost locations. End Market Drivers The computing and consumer end markets together consume around 60% of total semiconductors sold. Major Players
Goodies and Gimmicks Won’t Get You a High-Performing Workforce A while back, I was doing a public program on how to keep employee morale high and shared my “Forget the Goodies, Gimmicks, and Gala Events Approach to Building Employee Morale” maxim. I’ll talk a little about that here, but if you want to read a more in-depth riff (rant?) on it, go to Are You REALLY Serious About Improving Morale? After I shared my thoughts about the all-too-common Goodies, Gimmicks, and Gala Events approach to morale and engagement and why it’s such a huge mistake, an HR manager raised her hand and shared her experience with this approach. Each year, her employer spends about $20 per employee on a Christmas gift (this was before the PC Police starting trying to make people pariahs for using the world Christmas). An all-too-familiar story She said how one year the gift was a plush beach towel and the previous year’s gift was a really nice picnic basket. Does some variation of that story sound familiar? After she shared her story, I found myself thinking: 3 things you can do
Igniting the Invisible Tribe – designing an organization that doesn’t suck Josh Allan Dkystra’s new book, Igniting the Invisible Tribe. It is about a new way of business and work for the 21st Century. It’s a fabulous, must read book on how the world of ‘work’ can, and should, evolve and what we can do, with practical real questions to answer, to make that happen. 4 things are particularly remarkable to me in the book: The book itself – the physical bookUnusual and powerful analogiesNew RulesTools The Book. Analogies: I love analogies so perhaps I’m a bit more critical of the usual mundane analogies that get used to portray the need for change in the 21st Century. Revolution as a complete cycle – e.g., a trip around the sun. Rules: Josh has 5 rules for the new world of business, Rule 1: Start with Why – rarely do we question why we do things (makes me think of us as sheep – just following the shepherd blindly). Tools: Josh concludes the book by providing 6 tools to help us create the new world of ‘work’. image credit: .asilverthread.com Wait!
The Industry Handbook: The Semiconductor Industry The semiconductor industry lives - and dies - by a simple creed: smaller, faster and cheaper. The benefit of being tiny is pretty simple: finer lines mean more transistors can be packed onto the same chip. The more transistors on a chip, the faster it can do its work. Thanks in large part to fierce competition and to new technologies that lower the cost of production per chip, within a matter of months, the price of a new chip can fall 50%. As a result, there is constant pressure on chip makers to come up with something better and even cheaper than what redefined state-of-the-art only a few months before. Chips makers must constantly go back to the drawing board to come up with superior goods. Traditionally, semiconductor companies controlled the entire production process, from design to manufacture. Broadly speaking, the semiconductor industry is made up of four main product categories: R&D/Sales: Research and Development Expenses Revenue What Can Go Wrong? Porter's 5 Forces Analysis
Are You Really Serious About Improving Employee Morale? One of the questions I’m most frequently asked is “How can we improve morale?” because morale affects every aspect of a company’s competitive advantage, it is a critical question to ask. Business objectives that relate to your company’s success, such as increasing quality, productivity, and customer loyalty, while reducing turnover, absenteeism, and safety related costs, are all influenced by employee morale. In difficult times like the ones we are facing, when many employees are anxious and overwhelmed, it is more important than ever to know how to keep employee morale high and employees engaged — despite what’s going on in the world. Knowing this will help you combat the negativity that can drag down a workforce and make it less productive, less capable of providing great customer service, and less adaptable to change. Therefore, keeping employee morale high should be on every manager’s radar screen, and knowing how to do so a central part of their skill set. It won’t. What does?