Is “The Right Thing To Do?” the right thing to do?

Posted on December 12, 2012 by David Tebbutt

Last December we embarked on this blog with little idea where the journey would take us. We just felt that a lot of people of good will were out there with good ideas about how to make our world better. All we had to do was find them. Or, better yet, for them to find us.

And, through a mix of word of mouth and downright cajoling, they delivered their thoughts, based on their life experiences, for us to share with a wider audience. And, for that, we are truly grateful to every one of them. Here they are:

As you probably know, this site is non-commercial. Everything is voluntary and the most anyone gets is the opportunity to see their words published and to give themselves a slight exposure to a wider audience. Some benefit from this more than others. No names, no pack drill.

I’d just like to say “Thank you” to every contributor and reader and wish you all seasonal greetings and a happy new year. We’re going to take a bit of a break now. I’ll leave you with a list of the contributions and perhaps you’ll enjoy reading some of those you missed.

Why things will get better - from a Matt Ridley TED talk
Entrepreneur Extraordinaire, Felix Dennis, on Good Fortune
Never mind GDP, what about Gross National Happiness? - from a Chip Conley TED talk
Reconnecting kids with the school curriculum - Ray Maguire
Has the Khan Academy found the right way to educate? - from a Salman Khan TED talk
Why green makes business sense - Ben Goldsmith
Is sustainable growth a myth? - Clive Longbottom
Rag and bone men of the information world - Euan Semple
The power of community Mark Chillingworth
Where’s the ‘social’ in ‘accountancy’? - Martin Banks
Mind the gap - Hussein Dickie
Inhumane HR behaviour - Tracey Poulton
Listen! (To the right people) - David Tebbutt on Cognitive Edge work
Get on the trust trajectory - Rob Wirszycz
Baby, bathwater, beware … - Anne Marie McEwan
Is green the new gold? - Tarquin Henderson
Hunters got us into this mess – will farmers get us out? - Dr. Bill Nichols
Fairtrade, Organic or Me-Me? - Andy Redfern
How sticky are your labels? - David Tebbutt
Reputation is deeds, not words - Tari Lang
Passion + talent = magic - From Sir Ken Robinson’s work
Authenticity vs perception - Dr. Bill Nichols
Could the fly save humanity? - Jason J. Drew
Ignorance and prejudice - Ibukun Adebayo
Superstorm Sandy: what would you have done? - David Tebbutt
Doing the right thing – even when no one is watching - Neil Crofts
Stubbornness – The Nailhouse Principle - Drew Buddie

So, what do you reckon? Is “The Right Thing To Do?” the right thing to do? Do you know anyone who would like to share their learnings from real life for the greater good?

Please point them at me trttd@tebbo.com. Thank you. (PS It could be you too!)

Ignorance and prejudice

Posted on October 18, 2012 by Ibukun Adebayo

I’ve never been one to cry foul when someone calls me a “‘black’ whatever”; I’m usually more concerned about the ‘whatever’ bit than the fact they’ve confirmed what I’ve known since birth, i.e. that I’m ‘black’.

I once started a job in IT whereby I met with so much resistance in my early days there that I felt like taking up kick-boxing to relieve the stress. I was turned down for kick-boxing lessons because, apparently, my massive feet could have knocked an opponent into a coma.

Eventually, the manager who had led the unwelcoming pack told me one day, “You know you’re the best leader I’ve ever worked with and the only problem I had with you at the beginning is you’re black and you’re a woman, and I’ve never worked for either before”.

Okay, so how did this two-pronged ‘revelation’ affect me, and did it influence my views on the IT industry? It didn’t really. Many people have prejudices and biases, yet very few are as honest as this manager was with his straightforward admission that he was prejudiced against women in IT and that his ignorance about reporting to a black woman was affecting his professional relationship with me.

Things got better after this; and after he’d realised my massive ideas matched my foot size (ten, if you’re interested). While on the subject of my feet, I also take strides of purpose while carrying my team members along with me. Moving to the other end of my body, my unusually large nose means I sniff about and probe and ask my managers the right questions, expecting them to provide answers as I steer my department towards our agreed vision.

In the CIO (Chief Information Officer) community, things do need to be spiced up a bit. Attending CIO conferences (we met at one – ed.) is still a pretty testing experience for me as, despite being born in Balham, I’ve always enjoyed rice – preferably extra-large plates with curry, beef and goat meat – with some nice chilli hot pepper, whereas conference delegates tend to be presented with bland tasting rice, sometimes err… dripping with water, and a few tiny bits of lamb, while, of course the ‘polite’ thing to do is to take about two tablespoons of rice and move on to an equally bland tasting sauce. But, more importantly, you don’t see many female CIOs at these events because there are so few women in ‘C’ positions in IT in the UK. And you see even fewer women there from ethnic minorities.

I don’t believe in quotas, rather in appointing the right person to each role whatever their colour, gender or religious orientation. Sexual orientation shouldn’t even come into the recruitment equation, after-all nobody should care who you get into bed with, as long as you’re personally not being asked to get into bed with anyone other than the love of your personal life.

Managerial life really isn’t that stressful and, because of my baptism of fire into a role where I received affirmation of my race and gender plus of my credentials as a good leader, I’ve learned that leadership means being able to differentiate between prejudice and ignorance. It means being able to deal with any conflict that arises from prejudicial behaviour, and being able to identify development needs where ignorance is the issue. It means ensuring that the ignorant are developed until their ignorance turns into awareness, and always remembering that not all ignorant people are prejudiced, yet all prejudiced people are ignorant.

Baby, bathwater, beware …

Posted on June 13, 2012 by Anne Marie McEwan

William Hague said recently, “There’s only one growth strategy: work hard.” Without daring to go near the politics of that statement, I have to say that it would have made more sense to say “work smart.” You can flog your guts out working hard the same old way but if you don’t take into account the changing world and intelligently figure out how to work with it, then you’re likely to exhaust yourself and fail into the bargain. Sorry William.

At the moment, you hear a lot of buzz around ‘social business’ or, before that, ‘Business 2.0′ and similar sounding slogans. The trouble with such ‘paradigm shifts’ is that they all imply a jettisoning of past experience. How stupid is that? And, no, I’m not taking a pop at anyone or any organisation in particular, just making the point that ‘new’ is often complementary to some of the ‘old’.

Some of the ‘old’ is with us, rallying under a new banner. “Organisations are networks of formal and informal relationships.” Geddaway. Of course they are; they always have been. The difference now is that we have software and communication tools to massively improve their effectiveness.

We have the legacy of the first wave of smart working, in particular, “the need to make innovation everyone’s business and to empower workforces to ‘take action that will benefit the customer without layers of bureaucratic approval’.” Lessons learned from the successful pioneers of these working methods are invaluable input to what’s needed now, in this even more uncertain and chaotic world.

We need to build flexible systems with adaptability, integration, disciplined collaboration, innovation and knowledge sharing in mind. This isn’t a lazy set of buzzwords, each is a vital consideration as we invent our way to a better future. I could have added more – discovery, sharing and co-creation, for example. The point is that the networked world really is a network of brains, knowledge and information sources all orchestrated for the collective good. ‘Collective’ in this case has to include customers which, by extension, means suppliers. Otherwise you won’t have any customers when the current turmoil ends.

Turmoil? No, I’ve not made a big deal of the ways in which the world is changing and the challenges we face because I assume you know. But, just in case, try these for size: ageing populations; shifts in global economic power and declining industries. The latter being replaced by new high-value industries such as: bio-tech; electronic gaming; renewable energies; and so on. Adapting to change is not easy but the status quo is no longer a place of refuge.

The future of work is visible. Most of the ingredients exist, even though we’re bound to see more come along. It doesn’t matter; we have enough to act. We can blend the old with the new and connect up to internal and external knowledge flows.

Here’s an example taken from a presentation by Alistair Moffat: NSN, a 60,000 person organisation formed from parts of Nokia Networks and Siemens Communications, faced the challenge of accelerating the emergence of a common culture. It chose to use discussion forums to create The Culture Square, a forum where company‐wide conversations could take place.

People were encouraged to talk freely and anonymously without risking dismissal for saying what they believed.The values and attitudes of the Chief Executive and his desire to nurture an organisational culture consistent with adult-to-adult relationships, where people could disagree without being disagreeable, were core to how the conversations unfolded and, indeed, succeeded. The Culture Square came to represent trust and inclusion., revealing the important issues that people were most concerned about.

Each person involved in innovation and problem-solving can be augmented by the knowledge and capabilities in their network. This is massive. And it’s at our fingertips. Yet what are many businesses doing with social technologies, the potential turbochargers of change? Imposing a blanket ban.

How blinkered is that?

Anne Marie wants you to know that she was aided and abetted by David Tebbutt in the creation of this post.

The power of community

Posted on March 21, 2012 by Mark Chillingworth

In these difficult economic and environmentally challenged times soft issues like community don’t immediately sound fitting. The truth is very different.

Working together as a community, or building a community around shared ideals is exactly the way to tackle these challenges. Businesses built on community are thriving despite the challenged economy. Organisations that create an internal community that involves the workforce too are not only trading strongly, but are also assured enough to do the right thing and make environmental issues a pillar of their strategy.

Community projects are tackling housing issues. The media industry is not at death’s door if it knows and understands the community it is part of. And this is the heart of my argument. Taking a focussed approach, knowing the community you exist within, cutting out the periphery players and constantly listening to your community delivers results and therefore allows positive change.

It has never been easier for organisations to find and connect with those with shared ideals. Social media platforms like LinkedIn and Twitter connect communities together and create sub-communities. Their most powerful proposition is the direct one-to-one contact within a community that fosters debate.

Not every organisation can create a community platform and then exploit it as Facebook has, but the social media phenomenon that includes Twitter demonstrates the human desire to come together and collaborate on a topic, no matter how elevated or inane.

Individuals become a mass using social networks and together they can influence an organisation that can then influence policy. Take the Cities Fit for Cycling campaign by The Times newspaper. Twitter gave cycling commuters a platform to discuss and share ideas about improving road safety. Cycling is a very individualist activity, but with Twitter cyclists became a community, then when staff at The Times had a very personal experience of cycling dangers, they discovered the size of the community and launched their campaign which influenced the Prime Minister and Parliament to debate the issue.

The Cooperative Group and fellow retailer John Lewis operate models where customers and workers respectively become part owners in the organisations. This community model of shared responsibility has helped both to flourish and make ethical and environmental business decisions.

Planning decisions in many communities more reflect the needs of developers and shareholders than the communities that then have to live with the supermarket or infrastructure foisted upon them. But by acting as a community the development pressures on authorities and regions can be alleviated. Community Land Trusts in Georgia, Vermont, USA and London have redeveloped regions and delivered affordable and profit-making housing, thus relieving two pain points for local authorities.

The last 30 years has been an era of broad brush approaches by businesses and organisations. In the highly networked, economic and environmentally challenged 2012 the broad brush is the wrong tool for the job. Big no longer works; wide ranging products lack focus and customers and users cannot identify with them. Although there is a lot to be said for the serendipity of discovery when presented with a wide range of choices, communities require focused and specialist information and will naturally coalesce around it. Contrary to perception, targeted media products, even in printed format, are still in good health.

To engender a community, business has to accept the need for face-to-face contact. As a result the recent tendency to rely on consultants, PR or marketing agencies needs to be drastically cut or even eradicated. These organisations are sales driven, often represent a single aspect of a community and have short term targets. A community is a long term project and members increasingly find each other directly through social networking.

Direct relationships, fostered through communities, cut costs, embrace innovation and meet, in partnership, the challenges that our streets, towns, schools, organisations, countries and planet face.

Rag and bone men of the information world

Posted on March 7, 2012 by Euan Semple

We are all aware these days of the need to make better use of our available resources, whether this is recycling our domestic waste or minimising our use of energy guzzling technologies. We apply these green principles to our physical environments – why shouldn’t we apply them to our intellectual environments as well?

In the world of business we waste an awful lot of our existing and available knowledge. We reinvent the wheel on a regular basis when we have perfectly good, well documented wheels available to us. We don’t tap into the accumulated experience of our staff. We store vast amounts of information at considerable expense, often making it hard to find in the process, and then feel overloaded with the trivial bits of information that seem to get in our way on a day to day basis.

The main tools currently for business communication are the email and the Word document. Email is commonly cited as one of the main sources of stress and frustration in organisational life. This is largely because it gives priority to the sender of information. The amount of information coming into our inbox is not in our control and we still feel an obligation to respond to things that have been sent to us. Mostly what we are sent are Word documents which have become very formulaic with multi-page reports the norm simply because they are written to a formula and a template.

We could do so much better by than this by using social tools which can add immense value both in the reduction of daily noise and in a greater ability to reuse our existing knowledge. Blogging and Twitter are teaching us collectively how to point and as more of us do this we develop networked sense-making which enhances our ability to learn and improve. We build networks of people to follow who are good at finding, and sharing, the good stuff. Our networks filter the web for us on a daily basis and they dig into our old information to retrieve the gold dust.

These tools are also teaching a more concise form of writing, potentially a whole new form of business literacy. They require us to give context to information and to add value. Unlike email, this time the control is with the receiver of information and they know it. If you don’t make a difference for someone else with your use of social tools no one will subscribe to you – they will tune you out.

Bloggers are the rag and bone men of the information world. They root around in the rubbish tips of information, picking over the bones and finding the good bits. They combine discarded writing in new, innovative and productive ways. They re-discover long forgotten information and breathe life into it by giving it context and meaning. When they combine in networks they offer the possibility of increasing the usefulness and longevity of your information as never before.

Why things will get better

Posted on December 22, 2011 by David Tebbutt

We’ve never had it so good. And it will get better, thanks to technology.

This is according to author Matt Ridley speaking at the TED conference in Oxford in July 2010. He called his presentation, “When Ideas Have Sex.” (Hat tip, by the way, to Dave Cook for recommending this video.)

His fundamental thesis is that humans learned long ago that, by exchanging ideas and goods, they could combine them in new ways thus increasing their wealth and well-being. (My synopsis, not his.)

With the advent of cloud computing and instant communication and collaboration almost anywhere (translation is available at the drop of a hat), he fully expects new developments and their associated rewards to accelerate.

See what you think (the embedded video needs Flash. The TED link is below.):

http://www.ted.com/talks/matt_ridley_when_ideas_have_sex.html

Our plan

Posted on December 21, 2011 by admin

Ideally, we would like to fill this blog with self-penned insights from successful people and to facilitate a lively debate through the comments.

In the early days, the majority of posts are likely to be carefully-selected republications.

All opinions belong to the speaker or writer and their points of view will be supported by success in their chosen field of endeavour.

Recommendations would be very welcome. Please send us a note with your chosen contributor, the reason you think they’d be a good fit and contact details (if you have them). Thank you.

The Right Thing To Do

Business leaders and thinkers share their knowledge

Category Archives: Collaboration