Saturday, 25 April 2015
Are 'political leaders' an oxymoron?!
Friday, 17 April 2015
Do customers matter, or is 'customer lip service' just fine?
I'm tired of dealing with companies who trumpet their so-called customer focus and do the opposite. Over the years I've had plenty of negative experiences.
Last October I wrote three blogs about Tesco - How to make your company more resilient, Stop your company's demons coming back to haunt you, and Was Tesco's Terry Leahy really such a great leader? You may recall that Tesco started to implode last September following the sacking of CEO Philip Clarke and the subsequent revelations that the global supermarket giant had been cooking its books, the subject of an on-going UK Serious Fraud Office (SFO) investigation.
Clarke's demise reminded me of that of David Moyes as Manager of Manchester United FC. Clarke and Moyes both made fatal errors during their relatively short tenures, but the true seeds of their downfall, and their organisations', were sown by their illustrious predecessors - Sir Terry Leahy and Sir Alex Ferguson respectively.
The fundamental problem at Tesco was the contradiction between Leahy's professed passion for putting the customer first (captured in Tesco's strapline 'Every little helps') and the company's traditional passion for profit, at the expense of its customers and suppliers. This thinly veiled, cynical hypocrisy made Tesco one of the most loathed retailers in Britain.
However, this blog isn't about Tesco. It's about EE, another household name corporate whose behaviour over the last few weeks is the amongst the very worst I have personally experienced from any company in my 52 years on the planet to date.
Funnily enough, the other most appalling customer treatment I can recall suffering is from BT. What is it about telecoms companies??!! Oh, and by the way, it's strongly rumoured that BT have been negotiating for months to buy EE - now that's a match conceived by Lucifer, if ever there was one!!
Anyway, it seems I'm not alone when it comes to EE. I recently Googled statistics from OFCOM, the UK Government watchdog that monitors the ICT industry, and found that EE had TWICE the rate of complaints of its next worst two rivals and THREE TIMES the rate of its other rivals.
Here's a selection of some of the damning evidence for the prosecution:
http://eecomplaints.co.uk/
https://www.facebook.com/EEComplaint
https://twitter.com/eecomplaints
http://bit.ly/1CijsfC,
There's plenty more, I can assure you!!
So what did EE do to upset this particular punter so much that he's decided he's quitting and not coming back, after 10 years with Orange, one of the brands that EE bought out?
10 months ago we moved my 18 year old son's mobile phone account over to EE from a competing provider and put it onto my contract, to get a better deal. 8 weeks ago, bless him, my son decided he wanted a better mobile phone. So unbeknowns to me he went into our local EE shop in Skipton, North Yorkshire.
Now you'd think, wouldn't you, that if a customer walks in to a mobile phone shop and says they want to upgrade their mobile phone then the shop would assume they had an existing contract. That would be logical, wouldn't it? You'd also think that they'd assume the contract must be with them? I mean why would someone walk into a different mobile phone shop than the one through which they had their existing contract, for crying out loud??!!
Now bear with me on this - I know it's difficult. A customer comes into your mobile phone shop. Wait for it, they have a mobile phone, of all things. Now there's a surprise. They want to upgrade it. First of all you would ask them for their phone number, right? You wouldn't ask them for their contract details - most of us don't carry those round in our heads. You would key in their mobile phone number to EE's computer system to see what sort of contract they were on. And you would probably tell them that it would cost them to upgrade the phone, since it almost certainly would. Of course as soon as you keyed in this particular customer's mobile phone number you would see that the contract was not in his name, so you would ask him who Mr Mark Ashton was, and he would tell you it was his father.
Are you still with me? Yes? Good. Except that's not what happened.
All we know is that the EE shop proceeded to sell my son not only a new mobile phone, but a new two year contract to go with it, in his own name. He did not need a new contract - he already had one in my name, which still had 16 months to run. But somewhat naively, yet quite understandbly, particularly for a youngster, he was preoccupied with getting this sexy new mobile phone and perhaps assumed that EE would automatically cancel the existing contract?
I wonder if the more streetwise can work out where this is heading?!
I was aware that my son had been given a new mobile phone number - he gave it to me - but I did not realise he had taken out a new contract. This did not become apparent until I got my next bill from EE a few weeks later and noticed that I was still paying for his now redundant, previous mobile phone number.
I called EE. Guess what? "We're sorry, Mr Ashton, there's nothing we can do. You took out a 2 year, legally binding contract last June and we cannot cancel it. You can pay an early termination fee - it's £250. Your son was legally old enough to take out a contract in his own name. HE SHOULD HAVE TOLD US (my emphasis) that he had an existing contract with EE and that it was in your name. Without that information we could not find his mobile phone number on our system."
I went into the EE shop, I rang EE to complain and in each case I got exactly the same response. It was as if this sort of thing happens regularly and they are all programmed to deal with it. Every person I've spoken to from EE has pointed out to me that I have a legal contract with them for two years, my son now has a different legal contract with them for two years, and THERE'S NOTHING THEY CAN DO ABOUT IT.
I have a phrase for it, an ironic paradox - I call it 'legalised theft'.
My son was sold something he didn't need - a new mobile phone contract, which will cost him approximately £650 over the two years. The only sensible option now in fact is to pay £250 to terminate early the unwanted contract in my name. The helpful customer complaints guy from EE did point out to me that there was another solution - guess what folks, I could FIND ANOTHER USE FOR THE SPARE MOBILE PHONE NUMBER! Wow! Let me see now - what could I use a mobile phone number for when I have no need for it? Tough question! No, but wait, he did point out another option. Wait for it - I could find someone else who needed it! Wow again! So having created a problem for me that was none of my own making, EE now suggest I should figure out a way to solve that problem myself. Great, spectacular in fact! What genius! Where DO they find these people?!
That's why I'm leaving EE after spending 10 years with Orange, and will never return. They will lose my business mobile contract next week (as luck has it, that's when it expires), and once the contracts have expired they will lose my son's contract, my wife's contract, and my mobile WiFi dongle contract. Oh, and as I pointed out to them, I might mention it to a few people, including at least several hundred who typically read my blog each week!
EE's behaviour is a classic example of corporate taking - see Adam Grant's 'Give and Take' (2013). Takers ultimately lose out because people abandon them so they constantly have to replace churned relationships that have gone toxic on them. Then there is the bad press - people spread the word about their negative experiences with takers, like I'm doing now. But most people do it privately, so takers are never aware that their dire reputation is spreading.
By contrast it's well known and well researched that companies who genuinely put customers and customer relationships first, and who handle complaints sensitively and intelligently, are rewarded with far greater, enduring loyalty and a much better reputation.
The choice is yours!
__________________________________________________________________
I’m grateful you’ve taken the time to read this article. If you find it helpful please click on 'Like' and also share it using the Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn or Google+ button. And make a difference - be a smart giver and do something positive for others this week. Pay it forward.
Recent blogs you may find helpful include:
If this blog is particularly relevant to you, your organisation, or to someone else you know, I may be able to help or advise. I strive to be a smart giver – Adam Grant’s excellent book “Give and Take” (2013) explains why smart givers are the highest 25% of achievers in all walks of life. They go out of their way to help others, intelligently, without allowing themselves to be widely exploited. In this way they inspire higher performance and create sustained new value through collaborative exchange.
The business I lead, Resolve Gets Results (RGR), provides hands-on leadership, management, problem solving, customer/market development, sales and fundraising capabilities to companies with long-term growth potential. I'm also actively involved in Linked2Success (L2S), a business which helps clients to use social media intelligently to build professional relationships and grow. RGR and L2S work together as a single team to leverage the benefits of our respective skill sets, giving tremendous business value to far-sighted clients..
I work with a superb small team of Board-level professionals, each a leader in their field with over 30 years’ business experience. We are based in the UK but have international business backgrounds, in my case including 5 years in the United States, where I ran a high growth machinery sales and service business.
You can find my contact details under the ‘Contact info’ tab near the top of my LinkedIn profile.
Mark Ashton
Sunday, 29 March 2015
Welcome to Planet of the Apes!
I've often regarded the long-running film and TV franchise 'Planet of the Apes' as the metaphor it was intended to be for the perils of atrophying human intelligence and wisdom.
It's based on the 1963 satirical novel 'La Planete des Singes' by French author Pierre Boulle, which highlighted the failings of human nature and mankind's over-reliance on technology. It depicted a faraway world in which animal like, speechless humans had, through complacency, allowed themselves to become subjugated, hunted and enslaved by intelligent apes. Amongst other things one can see in it an obvious metaphor for Edmund Burke's famous saying which I've quoted in previous blogs: "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing".
There are many topical examples in the news, and I've experienced some in my business and personal life recently. Complacency is indeed a huge peril, perhaps the greatest one of all to long-term human survival and happiness.
- A 28-year old (scarily young) deluded narcissist with a known, troublesome medical history which prevented him from achieving his heart's desire to captain long-haul flights apparently decides to fly a commercial airliner into a mountain at 500 km/h, taking 149 poor souls with him, stunning the world, and permanently destroying hundreds of lives, including his own family's. Yes, realistically it could not have been foreseen, but there were ample reasons why he should not have been flying an airliner nonetheless. No doubt we'll hear in due course that as well as seeking everlasting global notoriety (already widely reported) he also intended to punish his employers, and/or his former girlfriend, and/or his parents for dealing him such a rotten hand of life cards, i.e.being born into one of the safest, richest, most civilised countries in the world, without obvious disability or suffering, and with a strong intellect and superb life chances.
- A talented, intelligent, maverick but arrogant and utterly selfish, anti-social journalist (I've heard 2nd hand stories from people who've dealt with him personally) who deliberately courts fame and controversy by being a boorish, obnoxious, insulting thug in front of a global TV audience, thus making the BBC £100s of millions annually, finally oversteps a 'line' after years of incidents by assaulting one of his colleagues and subjecting him to unwarranted, prolonged, extreme abuse in a hotel they were filming at 20 miles up the road from where I live because the chef had gone home and there was no hot food at 10pm in the evening. He is suspended from work pending the outcome of an investigation by his employer. His friend the UK Prime Minister inadvisedly professes support for him, and the Prime Minister's 10 year old daughter reputedly (and one hopes jokingly) supports a petition of 1 million to have him reinstated by saying she'll "go on hunger strike" (a severe case of anorexia clarksona?) The BBC's internal investigation proves assault (the police are now examining the case) and the Director General, who confesses he is a fan of the journalist himself, is apparently subjected to a death threat when he makes the only decision available, to fire him - see http://bbc.in/1xK7iw8. Puerile BBC interviewers leave their brains (what brains?) at the door and suggest that he and the BBC are over-reacting and have lost the plot.
- A police investigation gathers pace into increasing reports of child abuse and subsequent cover-up by politicians, celebrities, senior police officers and clergymen in Central London in the 1970s and 1980s. Already several celebrities are behind bars and others, now dead, are disgraced as a result of the unfolding UK child abuse scandal. Informed sources tell the media we are looking at a Pandora's Box of depraved behaviour by people who considered themselves above the law and thus covered up for each other. I cannot conceive of anything more insidiously, cynically evil than this - it makes my blood boil.
- The police officer in charge of the stadium at the appalling 1989 Hillsborough disaster in Sheffield in which 96 Liverpool FC fans were crushed to death finally admits to the latest official inquiry 26 years later that he panicked, lost his head, did not consider the impact of his decisions, that they caused the loss of 96 lives, and that subsequently he and his superiors in South Yorkshire Police systematically covered up their mistakes by submitting false statements, requiring fellow officers who witnessed the terrible events to do the same, and leaking to the media a false story that drunken Liverpool fans had caused the tragedy. He apologises publicly to the families of the dead, many of whom are in tears in court listening to his unexpected confession. His life since 1989 appears to have been decimated by the trauma of what he is responsible for - he was retired early from the police on grounds of ill-health and has suffered regular, serious bouts of depression.
- I visited a close friend this week in another part of the country. She and her husband, whom I introduced to each other over 20 years ago, set up a vibrant new community church last year in a school in their local town after a small coterie of nominal Christians used a procedural ruse to expel them from the mainstream church her husband led, which had been growing successfully with young families under his (and her) dynamic, inspired (though by no means perfect) leadership for 10 years. The national leadership of the denomination in question were unhappy about it but were apparently powerless to intervene because the organisation's rules embed authority at local level. The main reason the established church is on its knees in the UK is not because the country has become substantially more atheist. It is because it is largely discredited due to the out-of-touch, complacent (that word again), self-serving people who control it locally and in blissful stupidity think it is there to serve them and their cliques, not to make a positive difference by giving practical aid to anyone in the community who needs it, regardless of their faith or lack of it, and without proselytising them. These people have truly lost the plot, and whether or not it exists there is no place for them in Heaven!
In two blogs last November - How the brain works and why you should know and Why selflessness is good business - I described the 4 level hierarchical structure of the human brain captured in the Neurosequential Model of Therapeutics (NMT) and derived from studying how the human brain has evolved over millions of years since we were.....guess what.....apes!! The juxtaposition and inextricable interconnectivity of our primitive brains (brain stems, at the rear top of our necks) and neocortexes (upper brains) led me to use the analogy of a 6 year old child who has found the keys to Dad's Ferrari and is intent on taking it for a spin, with inevitable, catastrophic consequences. The challenges we face, individually and collectively, are beautifully captured in Dr Steve Peters' 'The Chimp Paradox'. Dr Peters has become well-known in the UK in recent years for his work as a sports psychologist with the likes of the world-beating British Cycling Team, snooker world champion Ronnie O'Sullivan and more recently Liverpool FC and now the England soccer team. He describes the battle we each have to fight with our 'inner chimp', aka the irrational, oft-threatened primitive brain, and he trains people to deal with it successfully. The likes of Andreas Lubitz and Jeremy Clarkson could have done with his input.
Irrespective of your personal beliefs, and to be blunt no-one can prove the existence of a higher intelligence (God, Allah, Yahweh, whatever) or its benevolence (which seems to me on the basis of available evidence to be seriously delusional, wishful thinking), many of the biggest problems humanity is currently facing arise because we complacently believe we don't need to follow what I might characterise as 'the maker's instructions', in other words the essential, pretty much universally shared principles of goodness and self-sacrificial love. THEY WORK, and they tend to keep us out of trouble. As it stands though, watch out - the intelligent apes are coming, in the guise of narcissistic humans!
My business life is now informed by a detailed understanding of how the Top 1%, most enduringly successful businesses all swim against the tide by following humanity's 'maker's instructions'. And do you know what, it's the best fun I've ever had - I heartily commend it!!
__________________________________________________________________
I’m grateful you’ve taken the time to read this article. If you find it helpful please click on 'Like' and also share it using the Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn or Google+ button. And make a difference - be a smart giver and do something positive for others this week. Pay it forward.
Recent blogs you may find helpful include:
If this blog is particularly relevant to you, your organisation, or to someone else you know, I may be able to help or advise. I strive to be a smart giver – Adam Grant’s excellent book “Give and Take” (2013) explains why smart givers are the highest 25% of achievers in all walks of life. They go out of their way to help others, intelligently, without allowing themselves to be widely exploited. In this way they inspire higher performance and create sustained new value through collaborative exchange.
My business Resolve Gets Results provides commercial expertise, leadership capabilities and in some cases financing to different sized businesses with long-term growth potential. I work with a superb small team of Board-level professionals, each a leader in their field with over 30 years’ business experience. We are based in the UK but have international business backgrounds, in my case including 5 years in the United States, where I ran a high growth machinery sales and service business.
You can find my contact details under the ‘Contact info’ tab near the top of my LinkedIn profile.
Mark Ashton
Sunday, 1 March 2015
How to get people to do what you want
"Leadership is a potent combination of strategy and character. But if you must be without one, be without the strategy." General Norman Schwarzkopf
Good leadership, like good parenting, requires self-sacrifice, love, wisdom, patience, resolve, humility, and the ability to learn from frequent errors. It is a lifelong quest, not a destination, and it is the most basic role of any human being. As I blogged last September great leadership is fine art, not painting by numbers.
Poor leadership, like poor parenting, is characterised by selfishness, neglect, bullying, intimidation, manipulation, sniping criticism, the portrayal of self (inadvertently perhaps) as controlling and all-knowing, an inability to learn from mistakes leading to their constant, needless repetition, and often a compulsive need to belittle others to puff up one's own fragile self-esteem. Poor leaders are often unhappy people - fearful and insecure, though they may conceal it well.
As I used to say years ago of an admittedly talented narcissist, one of several I had the misfortune to work for!: "He's like a tennis coach. The first thing he does is take your game apart................er, that's it!!"
Great leaders are, at least when it matters, at ease in their own skin. Above all they are self-aware. That breeds humility, but they also have keen insight into their ability to make a positive difference and they aren't afraid to do so.
Like great parents, great leaders are inspirational and utterly transform other people's lives for the better. They are die-in-a-ditch, princpled people who infuse others with confidence. They can be in sharp conflict with one another - witness Churchill and Ghandi, Montgomery and Rommel, or Lincoln and Robert E Lee for example. There are many examples in sport of competing coaches, or competing captains, who are both great leaders.
Sadly in 'real life' great leaders often suffer, and sometimes pay the ultimate price - Friday night's brutal execution of Boris Nemtsov within spitting distance of the Kremlin in Moscow is a painful reminder of that horrible truth.
However, like great parents the majority work anonymously in the background and don't seek the limelight or take the credit. They are more than content to enjoy the unfolding results of their long-term labours, in the form of the happiness, performance and fulfilment of their charges. Or put another way:
In stark contrast are the managers.
For over 20 years the BBC has produced the peak time TV show Room 101 in which celebrities talk about their pet hates and send them to outer darkness - Room 101 - a prison cell for which they throw away the key. I'd love to consign the words management and manager to Room 101.
In the spirit of the 'Stop Doing Lists' of the Top 1% companies in Jim Collins' Good to Great, and with tongue only partially in cheek, this would be a major contribution to organisational excellence! And in the spirit of Jardin's Principle (see Focus - it's easy, right?!) it would simplify organisations wonderfully, focus minds, and prevent humungous time-, energy- and life-wasting for millions. After all, as Peter Drucker put it:
I would therefore replace the word management with the word bureaucracy, and manager with bureaucrat. My wife says this sounds perjorative (contemptuous/disapproving) - I say "Exactly - it's meant to!" So instead of Sales Manager, Operations Manager and Technical Manager I would have Sales Bureaucrat, Operations Bureaucrat and Technical Bureaucrat, etc. Finance Manager would of course be Finance Bureaucrat, and Accountant would be Accounting Bureaucrat! Only teasing guys, and I'm privileged to have associated over the years with a good selection who defy this particular stereotype!
I'm not alone. There are many great books and research programmes that support the basic premise behind this unashamedly irreverant take on the world of management. See 'How Google Works' (Eric Schmidt, Jonathan Rosenberg - 2014) for example - if this sort of thinking is good enough for Google to create over $50 billion in revenues in 15 years from a standing start it's good enough for me.
"So what?", I hear you say. Where is this going?
In last week's blog Don't get ill in the UK!!! I described the Dickensian standard of medical care my father-in-law has experienced in recent weeks as he waits for a hip replacement. It has long been de rigeur in the UK to decry the at times breathtaking dysfunctionality and self-defeating stupidity of the National Health Service (NHS). Yet there's an almost hysterical resistance to creative, common sense thinking about changes to the NHS that would benefit everyone, most of all patients, for goodness sake! Oh yes, sorry, did anyone tell you they're real human beings, not inanimate widgets to be processed through the system??
My father-in-law and I talked today about a perfect example of NHS idiocy. As a diabetic he has suffered two hypoglycemic episodes (abnormally low blood sugar) in the last 2 days, whilst in hospital. He told me the food is very poor, unappetising, often not properly cooked, and made from poor quality ingredients because of course the over-riding focus is cost. Choosing external contractors on cost is somehow not deemed as "creeping privatisation", whereas more effective solutions are. The hyporcrisy and closed-mindedness is infuriating.
My father-in-law knows his own body and manages his diabetes very successfully when he's at home. In hospital he is finding it difficult to do this since the diet isn't geared to his diabetes. Sorry.....did I hear that correctly? He's in.......hospital, did you say.......and the diet is not geared to his diabetes?!
He and I swapped ideas for improving hospital food. He suggested providers of airline food could do a better job. Ever the entrepreneur I suggested patients could pay for their own food. I can hear the sharp intakes of breath from NHS true believers - what a sacrilegeous suggestion! Surely I must be some rabid, facist, free marketeer?!
OK, now you've vented, think about it logically (and no, I'm not, by the way). Patients would be paying for their own food if they were at home, within their own budget, so why should it be free in hospital and thus inevitably farmed out to the lowest cost bidder?? Why not offer a range of foods that could be brought in from outside, ranging from budget to gourmet level, and give patients the choice? Indeed why not offer a whole raft of other services to patients that help them to feel they are still in control of their lives, not some helpless piece of meat left in the lap of the gods, at the mercy of an incompetent system?!
This brings me to the crux of the argument. In study after study after study you find that the highest performing organisations in all walks of life do exactly the same 5 things:
Should this all seem rather theoretical I conclude by offering a compelling personal case study that it really does work, which you'll find in full on my LinkedIn profile.
In late-1999 I was asked on behalf of the Chief Financial Officer of £4 billion turnover British Nuclear Fuels Ltd (BNFL), to undertake a rather unusual and challenging assignment at their infamous Sellafield site on the North West coast of England. BNFL bore many of the hallmarks of the NHS - a large, complex, essentially public sector organisation run by bureaucrats and unchallengeable black art technocrats, in this case nuclear engineers rather than consultant doctors. Like the NHS the costs to the UK taxpayer of the nuclear industry were slowly, inexorably spiralling out of control.
My 'Mission Impossible' was to come up with a way of quantifying the financial value of decommissioning and waste management at Sellafield. It is the largest industrial site in the UK, and one of the largest in Europe. It contains dozens of streams of nuclear waste, some coming from the decommissioning of 1950s, 1960s and 1970s nuclear weapons programmes and spin-off civilian nuclear power programmes, and some from plants which reprocess fuel for British nuclear power stations and for overseas customers, principally the Japanese.
Reprocessimg was viewed as highly profitable by BNFL managers (bureaucrats and technocrats), whereas decommissioning and waste processing were deemed necessary evils, to some extent distractons, paid for by the UK taxpayer, who would of course go on picking up the tab ad infinitum.
By applying the five principles above I created a financial performance measurement system that met the brief extraordinarily well. far better than any of us could have imagined. The CFO, a very experienced senior accountant who had worked in a tightly financially controlled large corporate (plc) environment previously, described it as the best measurement system of its type he'd ever seen. By making the true financial picture starkly visible in a way that non-finance people could immediately understand it completely transformed both the operational and the strategic realities. It broke down barriers along the value chain, leading to far greater effectiveness and efficicency, and it contributed to a complete restructuring of the nuclear industry. The UK Government broke up BNFL and formed a new public body - the Nuclear Decommissioning Agency - to oversee a strategic shift away from reprocessing to decommissioning.
A similar earth-shaking change is needed in the NHS. It starts with the correct application of the 5 principles. It's essentially the same change that CEO Dave Lewis is applying to turn around Tesco's fortunes (see How to make your company more resilient, Stop your company's demons coming back to haunt you and Was Tesco's Terry Leahy really such a great leader?).
So how do you get people to do what you want?
As a student of leadership whose passion for it has intensified over many years I'm increasingly struck by its parallels with parenting. And as father ('Pop') for over 14 years to an adopted son who turned 19 this week I find them even more striking.
Good leadership, like good parenting, requires self-sacrifice, love, wisdom, patience, resolve, humility, and the ability to learn from frequent errors. It is a lifelong quest, not a destination, and it is the most basic role of any human being. As I blogged last September great leadership is fine art, not painting by numbers.
Poor leadership, like poor parenting, is characterised by selfishness, neglect, bullying, intimidation, manipulation, sniping criticism, the portrayal of self (inadvertently perhaps) as controlling and all-knowing, an inability to learn from mistakes leading to their constant, needless repetition, and often a compulsive need to belittle others to puff up one's own fragile self-esteem. Poor leaders are often unhappy people - fearful and insecure, though they may conceal it well.
As I used to say years ago of an admittedly talented narcissist, one of several I had the misfortune to work for!: "He's like a tennis coach. The first thing he does is take your game apart................er, that's it!!"
Great leaders are, at least when it matters, at ease in their own skin. Above all they are self-aware. That breeds humility, but they also have keen insight into their ability to make a positive difference and they aren't afraid to do so.
Like great parents, great leaders are inspirational and utterly transform other people's lives for the better. They are die-in-a-ditch, princpled people who infuse others with confidence. They can be in sharp conflict with one another - witness Churchill and Ghandi, Montgomery and Rommel, or Lincoln and Robert E Lee for example. There are many examples in sport of competing coaches, or competing captains, who are both great leaders.
Sadly in 'real life' great leaders often suffer, and sometimes pay the ultimate price - Friday night's brutal execution of Boris Nemtsov within spitting distance of the Kremlin in Moscow is a painful reminder of that horrible truth.
However, like great parents the majority work anonymously in the background and don't seek the limelight or take the credit. They are more than content to enjoy the unfolding results of their long-term labours, in the form of the happiness, performance and fulfilment of their charges. Or put another way:
"By their fruits ye shall know them".
For over 20 years the BBC has produced the peak time TV show Room 101 in which celebrities talk about their pet hates and send them to outer darkness - Room 101 - a prison cell for which they throw away the key. I'd love to consign the words management and manager to Room 101.
In the spirit of the 'Stop Doing Lists' of the Top 1% companies in Jim Collins' Good to Great, and with tongue only partially in cheek, this would be a major contribution to organisational excellence! And in the spirit of Jardin's Principle (see Focus - it's easy, right?!) it would simplify organisations wonderfully, focus minds, and prevent humungous time-, energy- and life-wasting for millions. After all, as Peter Drucker put it:
"There's nothing quite as soul-destroying as doing with great efficiency that which one should not be doing in the first place!"
I'm not alone. There are many great books and research programmes that support the basic premise behind this unashamedly irreverant take on the world of management. See 'How Google Works' (Eric Schmidt, Jonathan Rosenberg - 2014) for example - if this sort of thinking is good enough for Google to create over $50 billion in revenues in 15 years from a standing start it's good enough for me.
"So what?", I hear you say. Where is this going?
In last week's blog Don't get ill in the UK!!! I described the Dickensian standard of medical care my father-in-law has experienced in recent weeks as he waits for a hip replacement. It has long been de rigeur in the UK to decry the at times breathtaking dysfunctionality and self-defeating stupidity of the National Health Service (NHS). Yet there's an almost hysterical resistance to creative, common sense thinking about changes to the NHS that would benefit everyone, most of all patients, for goodness sake! Oh yes, sorry, did anyone tell you they're real human beings, not inanimate widgets to be processed through the system??
My father-in-law and I talked today about a perfect example of NHS idiocy. As a diabetic he has suffered two hypoglycemic episodes (abnormally low blood sugar) in the last 2 days, whilst in hospital. He told me the food is very poor, unappetising, often not properly cooked, and made from poor quality ingredients because of course the over-riding focus is cost. Choosing external contractors on cost is somehow not deemed as "creeping privatisation", whereas more effective solutions are. The hyporcrisy and closed-mindedness is infuriating.
My father-in-law knows his own body and manages his diabetes very successfully when he's at home. In hospital he is finding it difficult to do this since the diet isn't geared to his diabetes. Sorry.....did I hear that correctly? He's in.......hospital, did you say.......and the diet is not geared to his diabetes?!
He and I swapped ideas for improving hospital food. He suggested providers of airline food could do a better job. Ever the entrepreneur I suggested patients could pay for their own food. I can hear the sharp intakes of breath from NHS true believers - what a sacrilegeous suggestion! Surely I must be some rabid, facist, free marketeer?!
OK, now you've vented, think about it logically (and no, I'm not, by the way). Patients would be paying for their own food if they were at home, within their own budget, so why should it be free in hospital and thus inevitably farmed out to the lowest cost bidder?? Why not offer a range of foods that could be brought in from outside, ranging from budget to gourmet level, and give patients the choice? Indeed why not offer a whole raft of other services to patients that help them to feel they are still in control of their lives, not some helpless piece of meat left in the lap of the gods, at the mercy of an incompetent system?!
This brings me to the crux of the argument. In study after study after study you find that the highest performing organisations in all walks of life do exactly the same 5 things:
- They devote themselves to the end-user of their products or services, in this case the patient. Google's astonishing success is built on this principle - read 'How Google works'.
- They pursue an inspiring non-financial purpose and they do not compromise on it in order to achieve financial targets, whether on sales, profits or costs.
- They focus on effectiveness in striving for the non-financial core purpose and meeting the needs of the end-users, not on efficiency. (They learn from Peter Drucker's maxim quoted earlier.)
- They measure the performance of the whole system in delivering value to the end-user, in this case again the patient. By focusing performance measurement on the end-user they highlight all of the really big inefficiencies, which occur at the boundaries between different parts of the organisation along the so-called value chain, or value stream. And so they dramatically outperform the pedants who steadfastly refuse to see this logic, and who tend to be.......bureaucrats rather than leaders.
- They engineer the entire organisational model to gradually deliver more and more value for end-users and to systematically eliminate waste, classified as anything not adding value for end-users. This strategy was originally called the Toyota Production System and it turned Toyota into the No 1 car company in the world. It is now called Lean Thinking, but is commonly totally misunderstood and incompetently applied, including by the NHS, to improve efficiency for 'internal' stakeholders rather than effectiveness for end-users.
Should this all seem rather theoretical I conclude by offering a compelling personal case study that it really does work, which you'll find in full on my LinkedIn profile.
In late-1999 I was asked on behalf of the Chief Financial Officer of £4 billion turnover British Nuclear Fuels Ltd (BNFL), to undertake a rather unusual and challenging assignment at their infamous Sellafield site on the North West coast of England. BNFL bore many of the hallmarks of the NHS - a large, complex, essentially public sector organisation run by bureaucrats and unchallengeable black art technocrats, in this case nuclear engineers rather than consultant doctors. Like the NHS the costs to the UK taxpayer of the nuclear industry were slowly, inexorably spiralling out of control.
Sellafield
My 'Mission Impossible' was to come up with a way of quantifying the financial value of decommissioning and waste management at Sellafield. It is the largest industrial site in the UK, and one of the largest in Europe. It contains dozens of streams of nuclear waste, some coming from the decommissioning of 1950s, 1960s and 1970s nuclear weapons programmes and spin-off civilian nuclear power programmes, and some from plants which reprocess fuel for British nuclear power stations and for overseas customers, principally the Japanese.
Reprocessimg was viewed as highly profitable by BNFL managers (bureaucrats and technocrats), whereas decommissioning and waste processing were deemed necessary evils, to some extent distractons, paid for by the UK taxpayer, who would of course go on picking up the tab ad infinitum.
By applying the five principles above I created a financial performance measurement system that met the brief extraordinarily well. far better than any of us could have imagined. The CFO, a very experienced senior accountant who had worked in a tightly financially controlled large corporate (plc) environment previously, described it as the best measurement system of its type he'd ever seen. By making the true financial picture starkly visible in a way that non-finance people could immediately understand it completely transformed both the operational and the strategic realities. It broke down barriers along the value chain, leading to far greater effectiveness and efficicency, and it contributed to a complete restructuring of the nuclear industry. The UK Government broke up BNFL and formed a new public body - the Nuclear Decommissioning Agency - to oversee a strategic shift away from reprocessing to decommissioning.
A similar earth-shaking change is needed in the NHS. It starts with the correct application of the 5 principles. It's essentially the same change that CEO Dave Lewis is applying to turn around Tesco's fortunes (see How to make your company more resilient, Stop your company's demons coming back to haunt you and Was Tesco's Terry Leahy really such a great leader?).
So how do you get people to do what you want?
- By acting like a selfless, nurturing parent, not a selfish, petty bureaucrat
- By focusing unequivocally not on internal targets, especially financial ones, but on the needs of others, first and foremost the end-users of your products or services.
As Norman Schwarzkopf so memorably put it, at the end of the day it's about CHARACTER, stupid, and it ALWAYS will be, whether individually or collectively, and on whatever scale you care to name.
The evidence is out there in spades if you're willing to listen and learn. Go for it!
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I’m grateful you’ve taken the time to read this post. If you find it helpful please share it. And make a difference - be a smart giver and do something positive for others this week. Pay it forward.
Mark Ashton
I’m grateful you’ve taken the time to read this post. If you find it helpful please share it. And make a difference - be a smart giver and do something positive for others this week. Pay it forward.
Recent blogs you may find helpful include:
If this blog is particularly relevant to you, your organisation, or to someone else you know, I may be able to help or advise. I strive to be a smart giver – Adam Grant’s excellent book “Give and Take” (2013) explains why smart givers are the highest 25% of achievers in all walks of life. They go out of their way to help others, intelligently, without allowing themselves to be widely exploited. In this way they inspire higher performance and create sustained new value through collaborative exchange.
My business Resolve Gets Results provides commercial expertise, leadership capabilities and in some cases financing to different sized businesses with long-term growth potential. I work with a superb small team of Board-level professionals, each a leader in their field with over 30 years’ business experience. We are based in the UK but have international business backgrounds, in my case including 5 years in the United States, where I ran a high growth machinery sales and service business.
You can find my contact details under the ‘Contact info’ tab near the top of my LinkedIn profile.
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