“In the future, the real core competence of companies will be the ability to continuously and creatively destroy and remake themselves to meet customer demands.”

-Noel Tichy, Author of The Leadership Engine

The concept of re-inventing ourselves is not new. There are countless examples of this mantra in history (think about the U.S.S.R, Germany, or China) and our contemporary culture (think of the TV show The Biggest Loser or the movie The Pursuit of Happyness). The concept rarely lacks lustre. The real challenge surrounds your willingness and ability to reinvent  yourself. How do you reinvent yourself? Your team? Your company? Your community?

From a transformation perspective, the challenge is to create an engine that will drive your change agenda to produce your desired results. To make this happen, a couple of key questions should to be answered to set you off in the right direction, including but not limited to:

• Do you know where you are going? What are your desired financial results? What are your desired non-financial results? How do these two sets of results relate to each other?
• How will you drive the transformation? Who serves as the gas pedal? Who serves as the brakes? How do you minimize stepping on the gas and the brake simultaneously?
• Who are the brains of your transformation? Do you have enough? Do you have the right ones? Are they performing to your needs?
• Where is the heart of your change agenda? Is your team engaged? Have you won the hearts and minds of the team?
• Would you describe your transformation engine as “command, control, & authority”, “collaborative innovation”, or “priority driven teamwork”?
• Are you unleashing the professional, personal, and emotional capacity of the team to maximize your opportunity for success? If not, why not? What can you do differently to make this happen?
• As with any engine, what is  your fuel? Are you maintaining your engine? Is it working in concert with the other moving parts or are they out of sync components?

Behind every result, good or bad, there are a series of events. And behind those events are people making decisions, or not, that impact the future. If you know your desired results, you are one step ahead of most. With the benefit of understanding the desired results, your challenge is to identify the transformation engine and associated capabilities that will propel you to deliver your desired financial and non-financial results.

Related articles

• The Pursuit of Happyness (crossfitovercome.com)
• Organizational Capability for Transformation (businesstransformation.wordpress.com)

In the United States, the NFL season is upon us, or not. I hope the owners and players come to a settlement, but that is not what I want to share today.

In preparation for the upcoming NFL season, the league held its rookie seminar to welcome the newest players into the league, a fantastic ritual to incorporate into any organization. At this year’s session (and apparently others), ex-NFL player and coach,, Herm Edwards addressed the players. The video is linked above. Herm Edwards happened to play for my hometown team, the Philadelphia Eagles. While I recognize, I might be biased in my appreciation for him, he hits the nail on the head with this excerpted speech above. I hope the NFL / ESPN posts more of this comments.

Paraphrasing…”You were born with talent. You didn’t learn it. You didn’t go to the store to get it. It was given to you.” Very true words, in my humble opinion. While I am big believer in effort, and hard work, talent is hard to overcome, particularly at the NFL level of sports. Don’t misunderstand me, effort can make up for some lack of talent. I personally believe the harder you work, the luckier you get. However, this is not the point of this discussion.

Herm hits the nail on the head by differentiating talent from production. In the NFL, this is very apparent. There are many players who were drafted in the first round including even Heisman trophy winners who never lived up to their talent. They failed to produce. In the business world, you might say “they didn’t deliver” or “they failed to execute.”

Inspired by Herm’s comments towards the end of this video, don’t let your talent under-perform. If you consider yourself talented, make sure that you are delivering results. No one ever wants these things to happen, and as leaders it your challenge to make sure this doesn’t happen. At the same time, on the flip side, don’t let talent replace performance. Talent is important. We all want to surround ourselves with talented people, but managing a highly talented team, leading them to victory takes a different leadership style than managing a team with minimal talent.

Finally, as an individual, if you find yourself “basking in the glow” of your talent, but cannot explain your results, check yourself. As a leader of teams, hire for talent and pay for results. And remember, “you play to win the game”.

How many times have you worked in a team where, there was one or two outstanding performers who always had the answer and were the “go to” people in the team? What 5 adjectives would you use to describe the culture / character of that team?

Heroes are everywhere. The are most noticeable in professional sports. The article linked above refers to some recent examples, most notably, LeBron James of the Miami Heat. We need heroes, the kind of people who step up in crucibles of crisis to make the great play, close the difficult deal, turn around the troubled project, or deliver on the unreachable milestone.  They are very much a part of our society, and they bring limitations as well as benefits.

Are  you staffing your team with heroes? Are you picking up the highest paid free agents in an effort to boost your team? Are you building an all-star roster, or are you amassing a multi-faceted team capable of taking on just about any challenge thrown their way? The key is assembling the right balance within your team to give people a chance to be a hero, even an unsung hero. Every hero is made. This is validated by the fact that they are presented with an opportunity to shine, and they step up to make it happen. Having heroes on your team is important, but an over-reliance on them is risk. Heroes without a supporting cast, can lead to under-achievement.

Taking a lesson from the article attached, I would agree that great people, heroes, are overrated, much like betting $1M at the roulette table is overrated. For every millionaire who has won big at gambling there are hundreds of thousands who have lost. For every Mark Zuckerberg, there are millions of technical entrepreneurs who never made it. In business and in life, an over-emphasis on heroes or heroic behavior can create issues like bad team dynamics, increased costs, and an unsustainable model for success. So, how do you create a balanced team in the work place?

The triple constraint of repeatable success in the work environment is:

1. The right balance of structure (e.g. processes and standards that enable not inhibit),
2. The right individual people who can be, but don’t need to be a hero (e.g. individual skills and self-confidence), and
3. The right team dynamic (e.g. a mixture of complimentary skills with individual self-awareness)

No matter what line of business you work in, your will be a better leader by establishing an environment that periodically gives people opportunities to be heroes while creating a management system that reduces the dependency on “betting it all on the roulette table.”

How do you align the business with IT? How do you confront the reality of a business strategy when it represents a threat to the status quo? How do you align that direction with a portfolio of projects that incrementally deliver on the desired change? In order to transformation a business, company, division, or team, you need to assemble many disciplines and techniques including but not limited to: business strategy, enterprise architecture, project management, personal development, communication, and training.

There are many books, white papers, and commentary on business strategy, project management, change management, IT governance, and organizational design. However, I rarely see any transformational thought leadership that describes these concepts as organizational capabilities, or services that work together in unison. When teams have raised their capability to deliver multiple skills like this, they position themselves better for success.

In order to transform an organization, the organization needs to position itself for success by building the capability to change, or transform. Too frequently, leaders assemble only one or maybe two of the disciplines listed above to deliver significant change. Calling on Admiral Stockdale’s profound leadership, transformational leaders should have confidence in the 1 or 2 skills they have brought together to drive change, but they should also confront the reality that most transformations fail. Have you assembled all the skills and capabilities you need to be successful with your change? What additional capabilities does your team need to better position you for success? Confront your reality and adjust  your team to bring more transformational capabilities to the table.

Want to learn more? Contact us regarding our Transformation Capability Assessment. Learn how prepared you, your team, and your company are to take on the challenges presented by your board or ownership.

In a recent exchange with colleagues, we discussed this phenomenon. Enterprise transformations have pros and cons and tendency to cause white knuckles more often than not. One of the pros is the once in a lifetime journey that these endeavors provide, and one of the cons is the once in a lifetime journey that these endeavors provide!

Enterprise transformations are launched with the goal of rebuilding companies through significant change. You might think having the right goals, organizational structure, products, feasibility to meet financial commitments, partners, go to market strategy, etc. are the key to your transformation. While all these are vitally important to the end result of the transformation, I would suggest that to truly thrive in these environments, you look inside yourself and embrace your own personal change on the following 4 levels:

1. Intellectual – What is your capacity to deal with complexity, unexpected challenges, first of a kind problems, thinking on your feet, etc.?
2. Physical – Quite simply, how healthy are you?
3. Emotional – How do you deal with adversity, ambiguity, self-confidence, self-doubt, self-awareness, conflict?
4. Spiritual – What do you believe? Who do you believe in? What are your life philosophies? From where do you draw energy?

Do you know if you are holding on too tight? How? Do you know when you are squeezing the life out of your project, program, teammates, friends, family? Enterprise transformations will undoubtedly challenge your capacity across these 4 personal levels. What investments will you make to change your intellectual, physical, emotional, and spiritual capacity?

If this resonates with you, you may want to check out Noel Tichy‘s famous book “The Leadership Engine”. In this book he describes that each of us lead based on three concepts: Ideas, Values, and E3 (emotional energy, & edge). Noel’s model is very useful, and put into practice can help you understand your personal leadership model, which in turn will help you navigate the intellectual, physical, emotional, and spiritual growth offered via enterprise transformations.

No matter what leadership model, or personalization you inject into your enterprise transformation, recall that it is unacceptable for any one person in a transformation to acknowledge that the enterprise is undergoing drastic change, but not them personally.