David Kelley on Designing Curious Employees Design thinking is a process of empathizing with the end user. Its principal guru is David Kelley, founder of IDEO and the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford (otherwise known as the d.school), who takes a similar approach to managing people. He believes leadership is a matter of empathizing with employees. In this interview, he explains why leaders should seek understanding rather than blind obedience, why it's better to be a coach and a taskmaster and why you can't teach leadership with a PowerPoint presentation. Kermit Pattison: How has the design thinking model influenced your approach to leading people? David Kelley: The main tenet of design thinking is empathy for the people you're trying to design for. Empathy is not always talked about as a leadership quality. For me, it's all important. What happens when the leader has to crack the whip? A lot of this must depend on hiring the right people who have an internal desire to do well. What questions do you ask?
Manmohan Singh’s Second Wind by Shashi Tharoor Exit from comment view mode. Click to hide this space NEW DELHI – In September, India’s mild-mannered prime minister, Manmohan Singh, turned 80. He also turned a page: After months of being pilloried by every pundit with a soapbox for indecision and weakness, and for presiding over “policy paralysis” while corrupt colleagues allegedly made off with the country’s silver, Singh has boldly seized the initiative. A series of reform announcements, and some frank talk to the public, have underscored his new message: “I am in charge.” The initial steps that he has announced are impressive. Likewise, the government has reduced subsidies on diesel and cooking gas in the face of vociferous opposition, including a one-day strike that shut down the country. The rebirth of Singh the reformer came after a long wait. But Singh’s most recent chapters have been less positive. Within Singh’s Congress Party, the pressure will mount to match economic-reform initiatives with “pro-poor” programs.
Lead Like All Your Employees Are Volunteers The other day I read an article about a well-known company anticipating a big competitive problem: huge attrition when its first employees are vested for their stock options, four years after their hire date. The CEO expects to hemorrhage talent, many of which he expects to be snapped up by his competitors. His question, asked mostly of himself, is, “Why should we train our competition’s talent force?” Really? CEO, I’m writing to you. Here’s what I think. Most companies are not startups, and even among those that are, most will not have IPOs that make the founding talent rich. Guess what folks? Money will always be a factor for some people, and no matter what you try, some of your most talented performers will leave for a (financially) better offer. But for most of us, money only starts the conversation. But there are so many other, much more important reasons to want to work for a company, and even more to stay for one that we’ve grown to love! Image courtesy of SJ White Ted Coiné
The Best-Performing CEOs in the World It’s no accident that chief executives so often focus on short-term financial results at the expense of longer-term performance. They have every incentive to do so. If they don’t make their quarterly or annual numbers, their compensation drops and their jobs are in jeopardy. Stock analysts, shareholders, and often their own boards judge them harshly if they miss near-term goals. Five years ago we launched a global project to address that challenge. Three years ago, in the January–February 2010 issue of HBR, we introduced such a scorecard. Judging CEO Performance For the most part, we used the same methodology that we did three years ago. Assess the long-term performance of each CEO, from the first day on the job to the last. (Or for CEOs still in office, until August 31, 2012, our last day of data collection.) Reflect the global nature of business. In 2010 we drew candidates from the S&P Global 1200 and BRIC 40 lists; this year we worked with three other emerging-market indexes as well.
Creating Strategy Tools for the Next Generation Our solution: a series of visual strategy and innovation tools for the future. Through three years of action research and active experiments, we have developed and/or identified 32 powerful visual tools. Tools that help companies make strategic innovation happen. These are the tools we belief students and executives of all ages could benefit greatly from mastering. All our work builds on Creative Commons. For this Hack we highlight four of these tools: - Strategic Innovation Canvas - Innovation Thinking Modes - The Innovation Pyramid - The Action Roadmap Strategic Innovation Canvas Strategic Innovation Canvas is our default innovation tool. After having run the Strategic Innovation Canvas with management teams across private and public organizations, we can state; it simply works. The design principles and the visual thinking behind it helps management teams across all industries and all areas of expertise grasp strategic innovation in a record short amount of time. Innovation Thinking Modes 1.
Semiconductor Stock Outlook - Jan 2013 - Industry Outlook The Semiconductor Industry serves as a driver, enabler and indicator of technological progress. Developments in the industry determine the way we work, transport ourselves, communicate, entertain ourselves and respond to our environment. The PCs we work on, the cars we drive, the phones we communicate with, the electronic gadgets on which we watch movies, listen to music and play games on, and the planes and weapons used to transport or protect us use semiconductor devices. As environmental issues have become more of a concern today, semiconductor devices are being made to reduce power consumption, reduce heat dissipation, capture solar energy, create more efficient lighting solutions and so forth. The past decade has seen big changes in the industry, with most players streamlining operations and transferring more routine production to low-cost locations. End Market Drivers The computing and consumer end markets together consume around 60% of total semiconductors sold. Major Players
Igniting the Invisible Tribe – designing an organization that doesn’t suck Josh Allan Dkystra’s new book, Igniting the Invisible Tribe. It is about a new way of business and work for the 21st Century. It’s a fabulous, must read book on how the world of ‘work’ can, and should, evolve and what we can do, with practical real questions to answer, to make that happen. 4 things are particularly remarkable to me in the book: The book itself – the physical bookUnusual and powerful analogiesNew RulesTools The Book. Analogies: I love analogies so perhaps I’m a bit more critical of the usual mundane analogies that get used to portray the need for change in the 21st Century. Revolution as a complete cycle – e.g., a trip around the sun. Rules: Josh has 5 rules for the new world of business, Rule 1: Start with Why – rarely do we question why we do things (makes me think of us as sheep – just following the shepherd blindly). Tools: Josh concludes the book by providing 6 tools to help us create the new world of ‘work’. image credit: .asilverthread.com Wait!
The Industry Handbook: The Semiconductor Industry The semiconductor industry lives - and dies - by a simple creed: smaller, faster and cheaper. The benefit of being tiny is pretty simple: finer lines mean more transistors can be packed onto the same chip. The more transistors on a chip, the faster it can do its work. Thanks in large part to fierce competition and to new technologies that lower the cost of production per chip, within a matter of months, the price of a new chip can fall 50%. As a result, there is constant pressure on chip makers to come up with something better and even cheaper than what redefined state-of-the-art only a few months before. Chips makers must constantly go back to the drawing board to come up with superior goods. Traditionally, semiconductor companies controlled the entire production process, from design to manufacture. Broadly speaking, the semiconductor industry is made up of four main product categories: R&D/Sales: Research and Development Expenses Revenue What Can Go Wrong? Porter's 5 Forces Analysis
Strategy and the Uncertainty Excuse - Roger Martin by Roger Martin | 11:00 AM January 8, 2013 When I ask business executives about their company’s strategy — or about an apparent lack thereof — they often respond that they can’t or won’t do strategy because their operating environment is changing so much. There isn’t enough certainty, they argue, to be able to do strategy effectively. This is an argument I hear particularly often in high-technology sectors. It is almost a mantra there, a badge of pride and superiority: “We run at breakneck speed in the world of high-tech and there isn’t time to stop and do strategy. The implication is that only boring corporate bureaucrats in large corporations, where the future is (apparently) certain, engage in strategy. I find this to be pretty interesting logic. I really wonder what makes them think so. The danger, of course, is that while we are using uncertainty as an excuse to put off making strategic choices, the competition may be doing something else entirely.
Political donation with every spoon of sugar:Something Fresh:Nidhi Nath Srinivas Are you an Akhilesh Yadav supporter? Do you believe in Bhupinder Singh Hooda's politics? Are you willing to invest in the success of the BJP in Karnataka and the Badals in Punjab? No matter what your answer is, it is irrelevant. Every Indian is being used today to bolster the power of these regional satraps. Each time we buy a bag of sugar, we make a political donation. The game being played using us is so ludicrously simple that success is guaranteed. So Yadav encourages UP mills to clamour for trade barriers so that supply is curtailed, prices rise and consumers pay more. In neighbouring Haryana, Hooda realises that this is a great formula for political gain bankrolled by the aam aadmi. Like all good strategies, it travels well across crops and regions. How did he achieve this success? Luckily, this strategy can be easily foiled if the Centre plucks up courage. No one resents farmers earning better.
4 Reasons Employee Engagement Doesn’t Work William is passionate about employee engagement. So much so his company specializes in it. So it comes as no surprise that William has seen his fair share of misguided attempts to improve employee engagement. In this post, we get some insights into four areas where the attempts failed. There are a significant number of organizations around the globe where employee engagement simply doesn’t work. In one respect, this group is completely accurate. In my experience, the majority of the “failed” employee engagement efforts can be traced back to at least four major faux pas. Recruiting tool Employee engagement has become the rally cry for people trying to find work (especially the Millennials). The real problem is you don’t have good quality employee engagement for the right reasons. PR efforts Because of social media, there is an enormous amount of pressure for organizations to appear more human and a bit less like a money vacuum that is never satisfied. Distractionary methods Profit chasing
Structural problems can’t be fixed with cyclical tools Updated: Wed, Jan 30 2013. 12 49 PM IST The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) had little choice in reducing the repo rate by 25 basis points on Tuesday, if it didn’t want growth expectations to plummet, while the cut in the cash reserve ratio (CRR), the RBI governor has said, was to ensure that banks reduced their lending rates. But the problem is that inflation may have become structural, for the following reasons: 1) Food inflation remains high and the RBI has said on many occasions that it’s the result of increased purchasing power among the rural poor. 2) Wage inflation in rural areas remains high. 3) Administered prices have remained suppressed for so long that there is now no alternative but to raise them, for items such as coal, fertilizer, diesel and electricity. 4) Raising agricultural support prices is a political imperative. 5) The high current account deficit leads to downward pressure on the rupee, which, in turn, leads to higher import prices.