Organic Management and Leadership culture

Managers are like oceans...
To measure their deeds is to measure the power of oceans by its foam...
To judge their failures is to blame the seasons for its inconsistency...
You are like an ocean...
You are like the seasons also...
You deny in the winter...and you smile in the spring...
In the fall you see only the good in us...and you praise us...
Your thoughts are waves that keep records in our memory...
I am a small ship on your tides...
I come to take of your wisdom...
I see mountains on islands...i struggle...i can't see the horizon...
You say, these mountains are, but stepping-stones...
Now i stop, and ask him from my heart...
How do we distinguish the relationship between you and i?...manager and me...
and he says, seal to one of the shores..go to the fields...
and you will learn...You will learn that...
For the bee a flower is a fountain of life...
and for the flower a bee is a messenger of love...
and to both, giving and receiving is a need and an accomplishment

Beginner's Luck and Blogging...

Communication is very important and this blog has been a very effective tool in accomplishing the goals set by professor Kurpis. In my point of view, communicating via blog accomplished, besides the goals intended, a different set of goals:
1- Interest and enthusiasm.
2- Deadlines and time constraint.
3- Establishing a blog persona, writing style and voice.
4- Blog audience members and feelings of belonging.
5- Clear blog purpose and focus.
So, for all the reasons above and more, i would say that communicating via blog is a very effective way to bring people together, share ideas and most importantly creating a blogging community that has the same purpose but different personalities. Indeed, this was my first blogging experience and definitely would not be my last...

Management: The burger way...

Before I start my experience with the extra credit assignment, I just would like to briefly talk about a similar experience I had working as a restaurant manager in the Upper East Side, Manhattan. Now this area is 1) highly competitive due to the existence of so many restaurants, serving different cuisines and been there for decades 2) has a special clientele, the salaries of people living in this area represent the highest income in America per district and the most contributors to the political campaigns 3) high level of attendance, a good portion of our clientele visit us once a day every day, sometimes twice a day, since we were open for lunch, dinner and brunch.

Anyway, because of all the reasons above and more, we were very flexible in term of customer service satisfaction especially by allowing customers to change and modify certain ingredients and sauces, which some other restaurant businesses don’t allow: you get what is on the menu “No substitutions”. Let me give you one simple example: you may see something like this on our menu “Chicken cutlet with proscuitto, roasted red peppers artichoke hearts, lemon white wine, served with capellini and mixed vegetables (carrots, broccoli and string beans)”. Now , someone may change this entrée to something like this, for different reasons, “no artichoke hearts, no butter, no white wine, with olive oil, no capellini, angel hair instead and no carrots.
This substitution strategy besides customer satisfaction and profit maximization has some disadvantages such as an increase risk of making mistakes by not getting an order right, due to so many detailed substitutions especially on a busy night as well as creating bottlenecks at the kitchen because changing the components of a meal is time consuming.

Now, let’s go to Astoria, Queens where I got my burger and fries. It was a Sunday afternoon and a very warm day. As I walked in, the line was very long. I waited for almost 20 minutes before my turn to order. While waiting, I can see the frustration of the staff working at the registers; nobody is smiling and keeping the conversations to a minimum. On my right, there was an old Hispanic lady (homeless), sitting with no food on the table but a bottle of water and dirty brown bags scattered around her.
OK, my turn now to order. I approached the lady, greet her and as the assignment states, I ordered as follow: 1 small hamburger with exactly 4 pickles on it and 1 small order of well done French fries with no salt, both orders from the Dollar menu. I had to repeat myself 3 times beside the fact that she looked at me like I have two heads or some type of mental challenge. As I watched her processing my order, she had to tell the cook my order instead of relying on the computer system, and because she was in charge of the French fries station, she walked fro it to the register back and forth at least 3 times and every time she asks me if I wanted salt on my fries and if I wanted them well done. The whole process from ordering to handing me my order took about 4 minutes, since she had to throw in the fryer another bag of frozen potato and wait for it.

I don’t like McDonald’s food so, after I checked it to make sure it is correct, I decided to offer it to the homeless lady I mentioned before, went to her table and asked gently: “would like some food?” Then she started screaming at me, opened the bottle of water that was on the table and threw it on me. I got all soaked in water, stepped away and placed the food in the garbage can.
Today’s fast food market is highly competitive and there is a constant pressure on the market to move to a healthy one in terms of calories, oil and certain ingredients. Businesses and in this case McDonald’s, have to improve their customer service and because of the nature of the business that requires a very interaction between the staff and customers and since the corporation, through its commercials, is advocating for love and happiness( “ I am lovin it” and the smiling face on the logo ) they have to infuse some friendliness, warmth and openness to consumer’s needs as well as to come up with some strategies to smooth the flow of special orders operation. A good portion of the time that took to complete my order was spent on making a new French fries, the one that was already there was salty, so I recommend a basic strategy, adding salt to individual orders rather than the whole pile of fries.

DISC: Dimensions of behavior

DISC reflects the leadership/management diagnostic of tendencies, needs, influence and action plan.
Dominance: Emphasis is on shaping the environment by overcoming opposition to accomplish results.
Influence: emphasis is on shaping the environment by influencing or persuading others.
Conscientiousness: emphasis is on working conscientiously within existing circumstances to ensure quality and accuracy.
Steadiness: emphasis is on cooperating with others to carry out to task.
After getting the results of the behavioral analysis, i was truly amazed to find out that i fall in the D(dominance) category which identifies me as follow:
1- My tendencies include: getting immediate results, accepting challenges, making quick decisions and taking authority.
2- I need others who: weigh pros and cons, calculate risk, structure a more predictable environment, research facts.
3- I desire an environment which includes: power and authority, direct answers, prestige and challenge, opportunity for individual accomplishments.
4- To be more effective i need: identification with a group, difficult assignments, an occasional shock, techniques based on practical experience.
The analysis got it right and all the characteristics above represent, to a great extent, my actual tendencies and i don't think i would like to be in another category because i don't feel i belong to any category but D.

It is very helpful, to my understanding, to determine people’s management “type” to better understand where they are coming from. Some jobs require a specific behaviors and tendencies such as quick problem solving capabilities, intuitions and risk taking, others value performance consistency and predictability, being a good listener, and generating enthusiasm. Indeed, it is important for both organizations and people to know and understand what the job requires and who is the right person for it. The same goes for the personal interactions, it is important to identify where you stand in terms of your interpersonal behaviors so you can make the right decisions and connect with your entourage.

Now, lets apply the DISC analysis in a winter survival scenario (“Stranded!”). In a situation like that i believe that it is valuable to have a mix of people’s management “type” because you need someone to cause action and make quick decisions, other to motivate and generate enthusiasm, another to weigh pros and cons and someone who is a good listener and desires to help others. in conclusion, having the same “type” in a survival scenario is like having a ship with soo many captains or an army of soldiers but no comander .

VISION: INSIGHTS AND NEW HORIZONS

"Vision without action is a daydream.
Action without vision is a nightmare."
Vision is a sense of direction, discovery and tomorrow's opportunity.
To achieve great things, you need ambitious visions. And it does not matter that vision cannot be laid out in details. It is the direction that counts.

Vision...My vision right now, i believe visions do change, is to follow the steps of Dr. Muhammad Yunus and Grameen Bank, awarded the Nobel peace prize for 2006 for their efforts to create economic and social development from below. Lasting peace can not be achieved unless large population groups find ways in which to break out of poverty. Micro-credit is one such means. Development from below also serves to advance democracy and human rights. Muhammad Yunus has shown himself to be a leader who has managed to translate visions into practical action for the benefit of millions of people, not only in Bangladesh, but also in many other countries. Loans to poor people without any financial security had appeared to be an impossible idea. From modest beginnings three decades ago, Yunus has, first and foremost through Grameen Bank, developed micro-credit into an ever more important instrument in the struggle against poverty. Grameen Bank has been a source of ideas and models for the many institutions in the field of micro-credit that have sprung up around the world.

I have read Dr. yunus' publications: Creating a world without poverty, Banker to the poor, The poor always pay back. i also had the pleasure to meet him last year, he was very humble person. Indeed, i believe in his vision and direction and what i intend to do in the future is to promote micro-credit in poor areas in Northen Africa. Northen Africa is a rich region in history, culture and arts, people there are very talented and master so many crafting jobs such as antique furniture, tribal rugs, pottery and more.

Every single individual on earth has both the potential and the right to live a decent life. Across cultures and civilizations, Yunus and Grameen Bank have shown that even the poorest of the poor can work to bring about their own development.

Micro-credit has proved to be an important liberating force in societies where women in particular have to struggle against repressive social and economic conditions. Economic growth and political democracy can not achieve their full potential unless the female half of humanity participates on an equal footing with the male.

Yunus's long-term vision is to eliminate poverty in the world. That vision can not be realised by means of micro-credit alone. But Muhammad Yunus and Grameen Bank have shown that, in the continuing efforts to achieve it, micro-credit must play a major part and us now with the future generation we can continue the vision and eliminate poverty in the world.

Decision Making and Conflict

Before tackling the class activity on decision making that we completed (on Monday 3/9/09. Let's breifly explain the most important aspects of decision making and conflict.

Decision making:
1- Is frustrating
2- Leads people to withdraw or disengage
3- Is prone to self-serving behavior
4- Is challenging under time constraints and uncertainty
5- Requires people to think more deeply about problems than going to a superficial understanding or firt response
6- Requires an interpaly between leader and group

Team Conflict - Causes:
1- Scarce resources
2- Who's in charge?
3- Poor communications: Misperceptions, misunderstandings
4- Personality clashes: differences in values, personality, attitudes
5- Power and status differences
6- Goal differences

How people handle conflict:
1- Compete to win: Assertiveness to get one's own idea
2- Avoidance: Withdrawal, used when there's " no chance " of winning
3- Compromise: used with decision making under pressure, all members are equal
4- Accommodation: seeing issue as more important to others than self
5- Collaboration: Bargaining and negotiation among group

With the concepts above, now we can try to analyze how the class decision making went. First, we have to agree that we all wanted the same goal( getting great grades) but different process to reach that goal( yes/no essay, yes/no short answers, yes/no multiple-multiple questions)so, people were trying to advocate for their areas( in the exam) of strength and other trying to get ride of areas of weaknesses which are legitimate approaches. Indeed, everybody is competing to win.
Given the size of the class( i can imagine Congress) and the time frame to reach the conclusion, it's understandable that withdrawal may occur, a matter of fact, it did happened.
I personally adapted the collaboration aspect of the decision making process that supports bargaining and negotiation among the group. By participating, other ideas are born and other solutions are added to the pile of the already existing solutions. In short, participating and collaboration create diversity in ideas and explore all the possible outcomes.
In the way the class activity was set up, done and given the class size in addition to time constraint, there's no other way, in my point of view, to do this better.

Corporate planning

Managing in the fog
Feb 26th 2009 | San Francisco
From The Economist print edition


The struggle to make meaningful forecasts in a downturn

“NOT to beat around the bush, but the budgeting process at most companies has to be the most ineffective practice in management.” Thus Jack Welch, the former boss of GE, in his book “Winning”, which was published several years ago. Many firms that put their 2009 budgets together at the end of last year will no doubt agree with him. Most of them will have already been consigned to the shredder, as the economic crisis has blown away the assumptions on which they were based.

Faced with exceptionally volatile business conditions, senior executives are finding it harder than ever to gauge how their companies are likely to fare in the months ahead. According to a recent global survey of 1,300 chief financial officers (CFOs) by Tilburg University in the Netherlands, America’s Duke University and CFO Europe magazine, a sister title of The Economist, finance chiefs say that the struggle to produce accurate forecasts now tops the list of things that keep them awake at night.

With even short-term horizons as obscure as the San Francisco skyline during a summer fog, companies are finding their standard budgeting and forecasting of little use. The usual trick of plugging figures from operating units into spreadsheets appeals to number-crunchers, but can often generate misleading targets, especially when conditions change fast. “The annual budget is even less of a meaningful document this year than usual,” argues Cynthia Jamison of Tatum, a consulting firm that also provides clients with interim CFOs.

What can companies do? A few forward-thinking firms can provide inspiration. Hugh Courtney, a professor at the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business, thinks more companies should be using “scenario planning” alongside their financial models, which do not produce a large enough spread of possible outcomes to capture the flavour of today’s uncertainties. Sten Daugaard, the finance chief of Lego, a Danish toymaker, says his firm generated a number of different scenarios as part of its 2009 budget, the first time it had used such an approach. It has developed contingency plans for each scenario so that it can react swiftly whatever the coming months throw at it.

Lego has also been using a monthly meeting of senior managers, known as the operations board, to pool knowledge of what is happening in its various markets. At each get-together, the firm’s executives not only discuss what has been going on that month, but also make their best guess about what is likely to happen in the 12 months to come.

Some companies have formalised this kind of approach by creating “rolling forecasts”. At the end of, say, the first quarter of a financial year, managers forecast the remaining three quarters again and then add an extra quarter’s projections, worrying about only the most important financial variables. Many companies in Europe already use such systems, says Emery Sinclair of Revelwood, an American software-services provider, and firms in America are suddenly taking a lot more interest in them. One benefit of rolling forecasts is that they discourage executives from becoming too fixated on the present at the expense of the future.

In praise of short-termism
Yet with economies in free fall, managers also need up-to-date information about what is happening to their businesses, so that they can change course rapidly if necessary. Cisco, an American network-equipment giant, has invested over many years in the technology needed to generate such data. Frank Calderoni, the firm’s CFO, says that every day its senior executives can track exactly what orders are coming in from sales teams around the world, and identify emerging trends in each region and market segment. And at the end of each month, the firm can get reliable financial results within four hours of closing its books. Most firms have to wait days or even weeks for such certainty.

Admittedly, Cisco’s financial results have not made happy reading recently because, in common with many other large technology companies, it has seen demand for its products falter in the downturn. In early February it announced that its fiscal second-quarter revenues of $9.1 billion were 7.5% lower than the same period in 2008 and that its profit had fallen by 27%, to $1.5 billion.

In response to hard times, Cisco plans to cut $1 billion of costs this year by, among other things, harnessing its own video-conferencing and other communications technologies to reduce the amount its executives travel. It is also using these facilities to relay information from employees on the ground to its senior managers, and to get instructions from Cisco’s leaders back out to its 67,000 staff. A rapid exchange of information and instructions is especially valuable if the company wants to alter course in stormy times.

If everybody in a company can rapidly grasp what they have to do and how it is changing, they are more likely to get the job done. But some firms are reluctant to share their goals with the wider world. Unilever, a big Anglo-Dutch consumer-goods group, has decided against issuing a 2009 financial forecast to investors, arguing that it is difficult to predict what is going to happen, given the parlous state of the world economy. “We’re not just going to provide numbers for the sake of it,” explains James Allison, the company’s head of investor relations. Other companies that have decided not to provide annual earnings estimates for 2009 include Costco, a big American retailer, and Union Pacific, an American railway company.

Some firms, such as Intel, seem to have chosen to take things quarter by quarter. The giant chipmaker said in January that it would not issue an official forecast for the first quarter of 2009 after its fourth-quarter 2008 profit plunged by 90%. Several retail chains have also stopped providing monthly sales estimates because they cannot see what the future holds. Retailers, chipmakers and firms in many other industries may have a long wait before the economic fog finally lifts.

Don't break the egg, plan wisely...!!!

The egg drop activity was definitely a lot of fun after a busy long day...To drop an egg from a certain height without causing any damage to it, was a challenging objective. My team and i, in trying to reach that goal, we put a four steps plan.
1- We defined the ultimate objective, what we want to reach and what is the time frame to do so.
2- We identified the permitted resources and discussed all the possible scenarios that satisfy our objective.
3- We selected two action alternatives that fit our resources and time constraint.
4- From those two alternatives in step3, we chose the best one and laid out the whole action plan.
5- We implemented the plan, made corrections along the way and considering the time frame.
Even though, we followed all the steps in the planning process and we were five managers, we didn't reach the objective. you know, they say all the time, luck helps the prepared but this time luck just wasn't there.

To Sasha " Managers'r'Me " : La Parisienne.

Change is a tricky business...It's hard to move from a city like New York City to any other city on earth without experiencing major changes and different standards in living, socializing or school system. I had a similar experience, i was born in Morocco, went to school in France for a year. now the French and Moroccan education systems are very similar, the professors are very strick, don't smile and they think they are gods.The way people socialize is the same too, i mean the gathering of friends every day around the same time after work for coffee or cappuccino, watching soccer games...
The big change for me was when i came to New York City. now let's start with education system, in the begginning i thought it was a joke, you get to decide certain classes you like, when you like, day or night, professors actually smile...great i love it.
Anyway, i do agree with you. Change to me is something that makes it hard to go back to the starting point and you just can't be independent of it, so you learn from it and Keep on going.
" Le temps souriant sur l'homme mais les pyramids souriant sur le temps"

Management and uncertainty

One of the major problems that we face as people, corporations or even as nations is uncertainty. it could be in day to day business activities, long-term palnning and sometimes instinct decisions.
i always think about certainty and uncertainty...how certain am i in getting an A in Management class? let me share this recent experience. Few days ago, i moved to a new apartment, for some reasons the moving process had to be done in 2 days. Now, i have a lot of friends, close friends, so i chose 4 of my friends to help me move plus myself. I only needed 2 of them but i said to myself just in case something happened to one of them or two. At this point, everything is well-planned, the guys are coming tomorrow, maybe we grab couple drinks after...
Next day only one of them showed up and my phone was ringing all day, lot of apologies, some with good excuses...i don't blame them it was such a short notice, last minutes type of move.
anyway, my point here is that and beside this story, i run a lot in to the uncertainty effect and how it could be in some situations dramatic or maybe lucky in others.

Interesting article about Leadership from TheEconomist.com Feb 2nd 2009

Leadership
Feb 2nd 2009 From Economist.com
Leadership is “one of the most observed and least understood phenomena on earth”, wrote one man in a position to know. In business, interest has focused on three aspects of the phenomenon:

• the nature and behaviour of leaders;
• the nature and behaviour of those who are led;
• the structure of the organisation in which the leading takes place.

Most is written about the first of these. There is a visceral fascination with leaders and their character, and with the great issue that surrounds them: can they be made or are they only ever born?

There is no general agreement about the qualities of a leader. Field Marshal Montgomery thought that a leader “must have infectious optimism, and the determination to persevere in the face of difficulties. He must also radiate confidence, even when he himself is not too certain of the outcome”. Henri Fayol, an early French writer on management, said that the leader’s task is “thinking out a plan and ensuring its success”. It is, he added, “one of the keenest satisfactions for an intelligent man to experience”.

David Ogilvy, founder of an advertising agency, Ogilvy & Mather, and himself a leader of some quality, said:

Great leaders almost always exude self-confidence. They are never petty. They are never buck-passers. They pick themselves up after defeat … They do not suffer from the crippling need to be universally loved … The great leaders I have known have been curiously complicated men.

This view of the leader as complicated is supported by the personality of some undeniably great leaders, such as Napoleon and Winston Churchill. It may also lie behind the fact that up to 60% of past presidents of the United States and prime ministers of Britain had lost their fathers before they were 14.

The leadership of people like Alfred P. Sloan (see article), the legendary boss of General Motors, however, owed more to the structure and systems that they put in place in their organisations than it did on the individual’s personality. Henry Ford II’s success in revitalising his family’s firm after the second world war depended largely on his reorganisation of the company. The man himself was a jet-setting playboy who rarely met the David Ogilvy standards of a great leader.

The leading management thinker on leadership in recent years has been Warren Bennis (see article), a professor at the University of Southern California. He has said that successful leaders follow an almost universal principle of management “as true for orchestra conductors, army generals, football coaches, and school superintendents as for corporate executives”. When they came to head an organisation, successful leaders “paid attention to what was going on, determined what part of the events at hand would be important for the future of the organisation, set a new direction, and concentrated the attention of everyone in the organisation on it”. He also found that the vast majority of successful leaders were white males who remained married to the same person all their lives.

Abraham Zaleznik, in an influential article in Harvard Business Review, argued that “because leaders and managers are basically different, the conditions favourable to one may be inimical to the growth of the other”. In other words, a long career as a manager may not be the best training for a leader. Yet this is the training that most business leaders get.

The nature of leadership has been discussed since time immemorial. In perhaps the most famous book on the subject, “The Prince”, written in Florence in the 1520s, Niccolò Machiavelli set out his ideas about what a prince must do to survive and prosper, surrounded as he inevitably will be by general human malevolence. Dedicated to Lorenzo de Medici, the book draws on examples from history, of Alexander the Great and of the German city states, to teach its readers some eternal lessons. Many a corporate chief has a copy near his bedside.