Managing Leadership^®

Pressure to figure out how to get businesses under control is coming from all sides: from legislators, state and private litigators, shareholders and interested parties (this expression, in place of the awful term: stakeholders), not to mention from within: from managers and employees. How do we understand it, and how do we do it?

• Art imitates life. To begin with, see this piece from Business Week about how academics are using the virtual reality site, Second Life, to create laboratories for understanding business and economic behavior. They can develop experiments with many more subjects, and much more finely controlled and manipulable variables. This is actually becoming old hat: many businesses already use this vehicle for testing new management models and marketing initiatives. If you haven’t yet become acquainted with this sort of Web 2.0 activity, and how it can benefit your business and management work, read the article, this and that post on these pages, and visit Second Life’s site.
• Democracy’s laboratory. Or, you can just blunder along, and let state and national legislatures adjust your variables for you. How about that? Actually, it may not be as bad as it’s made out to be. Visit this leader from The Economist for a brief discussion of how all the corporate cries of “wolf” about the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, five years after it became law, may actually be doing more or less what it intended. It’s just too bad we had to have it imposed on us, rather than getting our heads out of . . . our dream worlds, and being more realistic about our individual capabilities and corporate governance responsibilities. The leader is paired with a full-length article which, I believe, does not require a subscription to view. But, you all have subscribed to this essential business and managerial resource, right?
• Let’s be honest. A major consultancy is advising top management, when doing strategic planning, to get their noses out of the data, skip the usual number crunching drills, and look down the road a bit to identify strategically important issues the company is likely to deal with. Another technique this highly renowned firm thinks might be helpful is for decision makers to be required to speak candidly with each other. Here’s another one for you: design methods to measure the progress and results of your strategic plan. Honestly, now – do you really need high-priced consultants to tell you basic stuff like this? If you do, you don’t deserve to be in a position to hire them.
• Tongue in cheek? Actually, it seems that many executives agree that it is difficult to get good advice. There are so many self-interested angles and pressures that potentially taint the suggestions of everyone from consultants to your own staff, that many top managers are dispensing with them all for their more serious issues. According to this item from the WSJ (another periodical you should subscribe to), CEOs are beginning to develop their own informal talk shops where they can dissect each other’s issues and provide straight ideas. It’s sort of like a psychological consultation, where therapists in turn present their difficult cases, and the other professionals at the table apply their experience and training to the problem and the treatment of it so far, and offer recommendations regarding avenues of analysis and action for the future. Not bad, but for CEOs, there’s still the potential for conflict of interest.
• Small is better. In my experience, the large consultancies are useful for two things: 1) research, and 2) providing managerial manpower for peak demand periods or for implementation of new programs. For actual advice, particularly on how to conceptualize and address the issues you face, visit the premier business blog authors, such as Steve Roesler at All Things Workplace. Yesterday alone he posted two items – one about building talent and the other on the source of the managerial climate – that more than validate Peter Townsend‘s recommendation about where to look for consulting advice.

Running and regulating our businesses (and other organizations) is not something we can subject to magical formulas, and generally something we should protect from legislative solutions. We need to start with our goals and our abilities, and find ways to leverage those. We need, that is, to be more serious about actually being managers.

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