The Long View

The all exciting Global Last Minute approach

Does it ever happen to you to leave things to the last minute? Regularly? What does this do for you?

This is not necessarily about procrastination. For some it's an adrenaline rush, others become more focused and effective in what they have to deliver.

The pressure of the deadline. The curious joy of being on the brink of collapse. The art of Just-in-Time.

I am coming to think that as humans, this is how we advance (and, on occasions, kill) our civilisations.

Forever on the verge of collapse. Empires rising and falling on the whim of a battle. Alesia (ask the French about that one). Trafalgar. Waterloo. (and yes, Agincourt, as well). The Cuban Missile Crisis. The Cold War...

In many cases decisive action (or, in some, inaction) came as last minute or ad hoc decision.

Recently, we have taken the art of the brink a step further, and started successfully applying it to aspects of human civilisation as a whole. We have become so much more sophisticated on the edge.

A few random examples:

• Acid Rain in the 80s: when we almost lost most of the pine trees in Central Europe.
• Deforestation: well that is a great one - how late can we leave this one?
• Animal protection: Once the numbers start hovering below the self-renewal stocks, they become protected and a huge and costly battle engages with poachers.
• Fish depletion: The Times of London announced in a Tube advertisement that we had 41 years of fish stock left.
• Oil: We know it's going to disappear. We will probably come up with viable alternatives (market forces or regulation will likely adjust price levels to appropriate levels) - just-in-time.

And of course, Global Warming. We have known about it for about a generation, and now the prospect of the December Copenhagen Conference is beginning to wake up nations. (Indonesia, for example, will announce a major Geothermal initiative.)

Of course, whatever the Copenhagen outcome, it will not be enough. There will be resolutions and powerful statements, large scale initiatives for sure - but binding agreements?

The prospect of new technologies and the pious wish that the next generation will be creative and innovative enough to come up with the right answers will do enough to allow everyone a sense of relief and reprieve.

In 2009, it is still not sufficiently last minute, and clearly, still not hot enough around the collar. On a global scale, we may or may not ……… (fill in the missing verb as you see fit from the following choices: wake up, invent, act, react, survive)

In short: the dreaded deadline is Monday, but let's enjoy the weekend barbecue first.

The motor industry gets a wake up call

Every once in a while a company comes along that utterly changes a market or invents a completely new one.

Edison and the light bulb.

Jobs and Apple is on track for being one such company. With the original Mac, it introduced the graphical user interface (GUY, with the iMac, it brought design and colour into the PC market; with the iPod, it reshaped the music industry, and with the iPhone its apps it is redefining the smartphone business.

Shai Agassi and Better Place have the potential to do for the car market and transport what Edison did for light in our lives and Apple did for computing.

Just on a massively grander scale.

Like Apple, Better Place put itself in the shoes of the customer. Agassi asked one simple question: What would it take for the electric car to be adopted by the public on a large scale?

Answer:

• Range
• Price
• Design
• Reliability
• Future proofness.

None of which the (pure) electric car can provide today. Battery technology is the biggest inhibitor for mass adoption of the electric car.

And so Shai Agassi, the founder of Better Place had what may well become the Newton apple moment of the 21st century:

What if we decoupled the battery from the car?

A new business model is born. Battery as a service; electricity by the mile. It goes somewhat like this:

• Separate the battery and the car. The pack becomes an easily replaceable element of the car, like in any mobile phone (except the iPhone… hmm).
• Sell the car, NOT the battery. Better Place holds on to the batteries. Now the car costs as much as a normal car. New technology batteries can easily be rolled out. Old batteries can be recycled.
• Remove range anxiety. Better Place, in partnership with hosting countries or cities, builds a network of charging points on parking lots and battery swapping stations. The driver choses to charge the battery or swap it. Swapping takes exactly 1 minute, less time than to pay for your petrol at the station.
• Design real cars. Cars that people want. Carlos Ghosn of Renault bought into the concept without hesitation and is building a fleet of 7 separate models to match market needs. Agassi is also talking to other manufacturers.
• Find a country, an island or a city. Oh look: Israel, Denmark, Australia, Hawaii, San Francisco, Tokyo are lining up.
• Build the infrastructure. 200,000 charging points and 100 swapping stations in Israel.
• Buy energy from renewable sources. Wind, sun, hydro ensure the remote pollution objection does not stick.

The “yes, but” crowd will no doubt have a field day and find all sorts of reasons why this cannot work in their country or anywhere else..

But this is happening right now.

Better Place goes live in Israel in 2011 (piloting starts in 2010). 20,000 cars had been pre-ordered by early 2009.

And, in ten or twenty years’ time, with the luxury of hindsight, it will just look so obvious. 

Like the light bulb. 

The eternal quest for motivation

When I work with my coachees, we often have long conversations around what motivates them at work. When I work with managers, we have the same conversations, in particular around how they can motivate their staff. 

My general view is that one cannot motivate people; you can only bring people to motivate themselves.

Motivation is a strong emotion inside that makes us do stuff because we want to do it: so the only effective way of motivation is self-motivation. Hence the limited effectiveness of rewards in the work environment: they will work well for some tasks and contexts (repetitive, left brain environments, but much less for others (right brain, creative contexts).

Sam Glucksberg did some extensive research around intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. The following video with Daniel Pink explains the differences beautifully, and, crucially, with a good sense of humour.

Survival dealbreakers for the 21st century

There are three huge challenges for humanity (among the numerous) that outrank all the others, if only because the way we will rise to meet them, will determine their fate… and ours.

Those three major headaches are education, energy and governance.

Education. 

This one has to be top of the pops. Education is fuel; it provides the brain power that drives creativity. Education drives prosperity like ignorance fuels despair. Educated people make for more peaceful living environments (generally…) extremists, of either the religious or the political variety, will garner more support among those susceptible to simple, or simplistic messages.

We need a deliberate collective approach to producing as much brainpower as we can. What our ever expanding server-and-hard-disk jungles does for the storage of ever more complex infinite sets of data, we should consider education, training and skills development as the main vectors for generating our future. Why we don’t, is beyond me, but it has to do a lot with our 20th century wasteful sense of consumption, and the selfish nation-based governance concepts that went with this me-first approach.

Energy.

Someone told me the other day that climate change is more important than energy. I beg to differ.

Climate change is one of the consequences of industrialised societies’ energy management (or lack thereof). The holy grail of satisfying our limitless greed for energy will ultimately not lie in energy conservation. There is just no doubt that we will need more of the stuff, not less.

As our societies delve further into the 21st century, our needs for additional kilojoules will expand, and so we will become more creative about how to get more without emptying the guts of the earth. (Hence the need for more brainpower, above and good governance, below).

The art will be to get our energy from non-depleting sources: the sun above all (since using the sun’s energy interferes least with our ecological systems), but also geothermal, wind and other renewable sources. This also includes the reform of agriculture, since agriculture is really nothing else than the provision of energy to our bodies… and brains. (Not to mention the fact that if one day we really need to escape from here and colonise Mars, that will require unimagined quantities of energy, so we better start thinking now…)

Governance. 

Rising to the global challenges will take global initiatives.
Slowly, and surely, we are moving into that direction. Society of Nations, UN,G3; G5; G7; G8… G20… These institutions can only be successful if there is a sense of shared responsibility for global governance, which today is not the case (with a hopeful “yet” at the end of the sentence). Just witness the recent debates around nations’ commitment (or not) to reducing greenhouse gases.

The (eventual) spread of education, successful energy management and global governance values work hand in hand to ensure that we will still be running about at the end of this century.
In the process we will need to address all the other challenges that living in a mix of industrial and post-industrial societies bring with them, including those that have a currently undetermined impact (synthetic biology, nanotechnology, genetics, genomics…) and, of course, those we don’t even know about yet. 

The 21st century is fast becoming the era of increasing abstraction where science becomes less and less tangible, where more and more people become more “abstract”, i.e. move up in the pyramid of the hierarchy of needs and where interrelatedness of concepts, nations and branches of knowledge create highly complex new entities that ignore traditional divisions and borders.

Governance, energy, education.

Today, our planet has shrunk. It is now too small for the me-firsattitude of nations to be viable. Today, the view has to be global, and while I am not advocating a global government, I firmly believe that we will need to really consider our planet as a global village. Just not quite in the sense that we came to give to that word at the end of the last century.

Harnessing technology and mustering political will for building the next society are the first steps. But long-term progress will ultimately come from actively grooming a next generation that will consider our endeavours as archaic and our debates as those of a previous and therefore ready for the bins of history.

Right now, our educational efforts don't get anywhere near achieving that. And so, we may just be creating the perfect conditions for jeopardising our chances of survival as a race.

And then, Peter Drucker said:

• Do first things first, and second things not at all.
• The average executive hires incorrectly 2/3 of the time.
• What you have to do and the way you have to do it is incredibly simple. Whether you are willing to do it , is another matter.
• Wherever you see a successful business, someone made a courageous decision.
• Every success creates new opportunities, and so does every failure.
• Communication is what the listener does.

They speak for themselves, really. 

A few Peter Drucker quotes

Here a few quotes that may seem familiar - all by Peter Drucker (and we might not know it):

About strategy:

• The only thing we know about the future is that it will be different..
• The best way to predict the future is to create it.
• The entrepreneur always searches for change,responds to it, and exploits it as an opportunity. 

• Unless commitment is made, there are only promises and hopes, but no plan. 
• Plans are only good intentions unless they degenerate into hard work.

About customers: 

• Quality in a service or product is not what you put into it. It is what the customer gets out of it.

• The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well that the product or service fits and sells itself.

About process:

• Efficiency is doing things right; effectiveness is doing the right thing.

About leadership:

• Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things.
• The successful person places more attention on doing the right thing rather than doing things right. 

• For it is character through which leadership is exercised; it is character that sets examples and is imitated.

• The most important thing in communication is to hear what is not being said.
• We know nothing about motivation. All we can do is write books about it.

The Socrates of modern management thinking

Peter F. Drucker spent his 70-odd year career teaching, consulting, writing and asking questions. Fundamental questions to guide managers in the awareness of their responsibilities and the execution of their tasks. Having had virtually no hands-on management experience himself, he prided himself that he was helping people to find out people what to do, yet not how to do it.

When Peter Drucker began his work in the thirties, management as a discipline was virtually unknown. 

Many of the business concepts we talk about today (and so often take for granted) can be traced back to Peter Drucker. Management was not a worthy subject of study in the first half of the century. At the start of his career, he found it extremely difficult to find books on management... so he wrote a few himself (about 40 of them).

Common modern business concepts and practices, like management by objectives, management by walking around, empowerment, people as an asset not a cost, doing the right things, leadership by example and countless others are all described, generally for the first time, in Drucker's writings.

In 1981, when Jack Welch (CEO and Chairman of GE, Forbes CEO of the Century) began his mission at the helm of GE, he went to see Peter Drucker for advice on running the conglomerate. He came away with only two questions. Yet those two questions were going to define everything he did in the following 20 years until his retirement in 2001:

1. If you were not already in the business you are in, would you enter it today?
2. What are you going to do about it? 

Whereupon Welch set off to sell hundreds of businesses of the GE Empire, restructuring, redefining and strengthening the organisation to 25 times its value.

And this is how Drucker described himself:

"My greatest strength as a consultant is to be ignorant and ask a few questions."

To me, that sounds eerily like what a certain Socrates said two and a half thousand years ago.

Fragmentation, convergence, contribution

The world is becoming more and more abstract. Certainties of the past are dwindling; we are moving in an ever escalating spiral of innovation, change and, more recently, turbulence.

There are essentially two ways to deal with this: cautious withdrawal and open embrace. 

Whichever you "chose" (and a lot could be said about that conscious or unconscious choice) will have an impact on our individual and collective outcomes and futures (yes, with a plural s). 

Yet there is more to it: the fragmentation of the traditional monoliths (state, company, society, family) is not just a breakup of cherished habits. It is also a powerful invitation to connect with people"other" side with the "other" context, with the people we do not usually do business (or buddiness) with. 

The opening of new intellectual and social portals produces and generates vast opportunities to talk to people of varying backgrounds, knowledge levels and semantic fields and linguistic jargons. Organisations, well established, like Ted, or more recent ones like Mindshare, highlight the growing desire to converge and exchange field notes with people from different scientific backgrounds.

In this interactive mash-up between social sciences, cognitive discoveries, business priorities and fractal movement, each of us can make a contribution. 

What we sometimes forget today, in the fearful chatter of recession an depression, is the basic fact that we still live in an economy of abundance, as measured in terms of available information, accelerated creativity and opportunities to shape and create the new paradigms for the century, while helping those around us that may be struggling today.

I am fundsmentally convinced that the sucess stories of the future will be written not by those who ask "What do I have to lose?" but by those who act on the question "How can I help you succeed?" 

A new beginning

The Obama  inauguration ceremony was a remarkable affair. 

Not because of the slightly muddled oath, not because of the powerful, if somewhat undefined speech, but much more because of the cathartic effect of the event - an event long announced, without any surprise in itself, and yet: the healing of old wounds, the cleansing of lingering resentment, the burst of new energy, the first day out in the sun after a long illness in bed.

Among the surrounding economic doom and gloom, and in spite of the uncertainty around his actual ability to carry out plans and honour promises, this has to be one of the prouder moments of our race. 

Now if the symbolic value and its federating power could be combined with momentous action, that would truly mark the beginning of a new era, not just defined as the replacement of Bush, but as the actual start of the 21st century, or the third millennium. 

On the larger scale of history, the Bush years could appear as the closing chapter of an old world order, before we became an all technological, networked, swarmlike society, focused, colourblind, and, strange as it may seem to some, more human. 

The How of the What, in the context of the Why

This week I had a lot of conversations around leadership. There is lots of great literature available on the subject, and I will create a list of the most important one of these days.

One comment I got this week was along the lines that "sometimes these books cloud the issue instead of clarifying it for me. The author's thinking process looks great on paper, makes lots of sense, but then when I have to apply it to real life situations, it turns into quite a different animal." 

Readers get lost in models, definitions, principles and graphics. Managers don't know if they should use a different theory at the beginning of the week and then end, in the morning and the evening.

What the entire leadership discussion might just come down to is three things: the What, the How and the Why.

The What: management roles - objectives, responsibilities, targets, directions, tasks,  deadlines, deliverables… This is what managers get hired for in the first place. It is their job.

The How: leadership roles (and styles) - personal credibility, accountability, inspiration, motivation, communication, handling of (own and others') emotions… This is how each person builds up the work culture in and around him, how she relates to her staff and what environment they chose to work in (Yes there is a choice element in that as well…).

The Why: What do we want to achieve in the end, why are we making all these efforts - vision, mission, values… The Why provides the context, background and the ultimate reason for our actions. Without it a vital piece is missing and this makes the manager's job virtually impossible.

The consistency and overall effectiveness of the manager (in managing others or/and themselves) lies in the careful reflexion on and mutual balancing of the What, the How and the Why.

And if you look closely, that works for pretty much everything in life.