Our CEO has co-authored her second book, Here be Dragons: navigating an uncertain world.  It is a book of two parts: the first part, The Columbus Project, tells the story of a fictional manufacturing company’s (FutureParts) change journey as it re-invents itself.  The second part, The Pilot’s Guide, is about five of the tools used by FuturesParts and how you can use them in your own organisation.

On April 23rd at 16:00 (UK time), we will be running a free, 60 minute webinar to introduce people to the tools covered in The Pilot’s Guide.  It is a way to give you a taster so that you can decide if this book is for you, as well as giving you the chance to ask questions of the authors.

This webinar provides a rare chance to hear and talk with five experts on what organisations need to do in order to thrive in today’s uncertain global environment. The title of the book which the webinar is launching, Here be Dragons, comes from the map on our cover: once there was the known world and beyond that was the unknown world – where mysterious and strange creatures such as dragons dwelt, ready to pounce upon unwary travellers. The experts – Gill Ringland, Patricia Lustig, Rob Phaal, Martin Duckworth and Chris Yapp – have come together to bring the Cycle of Renewal to life.

To register, please follow the link below.  A recording will be made, so contact us if you have missed the session but are nonetheless interested to follow it.

https://sami.webex.com/ec0605ld/eventcenter/enroll/register.do?formId=0&formType=0&loadFlag=1&siteurl=sami&confId=660296802

News

Last month we ran a seminar, Managing Risk and Planning for Long-Term Success, with the Institute of Directors.  In May our CEO has been asked to participate in the Gloucestershire Plunge! event as one of the local experts (a “Dragon” – quite fitting with her new book).  See below for details.

Plunge with Gloucester College

May 18, 2012 at 8:30 AM – 4:30 PM

Not so long ago, businesses had (more) time for looking at things and thinking things through.  In the 90′s, Motorola made some initial mis-steps, but it had the time to correct them and come up with the Razr handset and re-capture some of the market it had lost… for a time. It did not have a second chance and has since been sold to Google.

Fry’s blog discusses the past four and a half years (that is how quickly companies can rise and fall these days) in the mobile phone/smartphone market.  It is quite amazing how quickly we forget things like Palm’s offerings – they went under in 2009, when they were sold to HP.

The latest to miss the re-invention-boat is RIM and BlackBerry – their share price has dived and they may soon join the club of the has-beens.

In each case, the has-beens didn’t practice the Quality of Insight*, keeping their eyes open to what was going on around them, not just to competitor intelligence but also to what their customers wanted and how these desires might be met.

So what does this mean for you, you ask?  Perhaps it is worth taking some time out to think about your business, your market, your resources, your supply chain, your partners, your staff…. and what you need to do if you wish to still be fit for purpose in 12 months’ time.  Because the lesson I take out of the recent history of smartphones is that businesses need to be increasingly nimble and agile, and need to respond immediately to signals from their market in order to survive.

*See January 2012′s blog or our latest book Here be Dragons: navigating an uncertain world  for more on the five Qualities of the cycle of Renewal.

Much research has been carried out on how senior executives spend their time – for instance, the recent McKinsey Global Survey: How effectively executives spend their time[1].

When writing our first book I encountered a statistic about CXOs spending far too little time thinking about long term strategy even though they knew they should be spending more.  This recent McKinsey survey finds that they spend about 15% of their time on ‘Setting organisation’s direction and strategy’ when they want to spend 22% or more.

What is getting in the way? The answer: CXOs spend too much time fire-fighting.  They know they should be spending more time on strategy and organisational direction, but somehow it just doesn’t happen.  And these are the CXO’s of successful companies!

We find that if you don’t spend time thinking strategically – that is, gaining insight into what is happening in your business and in the world around you, thinking about how it might play out and how you will handle it when it does – it will bite you in the bum.

There is plenty going on ‘out there’ that we know, but choose not to think about.  Take a simple example; think about water as a resource.  How does it affect your business?  How do you use it? How would a reduction in its availability affect you?

You may be in a service industry and think it wouldn’t affect you at all, apart from a short-term inconvenience to your personnel.  But think about your supply chain and think about your clients.  Who might be affected in that group? And how would that affect you?

I was speaking to a business colleague about what this might mean for him.  He runs a restaurant in Cheltenham, UK.  He hadn’t given a thought to the importance of his water supply until 2007 when there was serious flooding across the area.

Thousands of homes and businesses were affected, including the restaurant. Agricultural land was inundated; roads & railways were cut off; public transport was affected. In addition, the local water supply was cut off.

Along with thousands of others, the restaurant was surrounded by water (as it continued to rain) but they had no water they could use.  This wasn’t just drinking water; they also needed ‘grey’ water for hygiene: washing, cleaning, and even for the lavatories.  Therefore, they ended up being forced to close for 8 days.

He realised that he was losing a great deal of grey water by not capturing what came off his roofs; enough that he might have been able to stay open longer.

When the floods had gone down and normal service was resumed, my colleague took stock – literally and metaphorically.

He looked at how the restaurant used water, how much, when, where and why.

He set up a grey water system to capture the rain water from their extensive roofs. It is used for washing up and for the toilets.  On the water front, so to speak, his business is more efficient and effective. It is also far more robust, should the water supply fail again.  And it saves money.

Take another simple example: electricity supply.

Today, there is enough to go around.  But with the global growth in demand, it is doubtful that there is enough supply for even five years’ time.  How is that going to affect you and your business?

I’ve lived in Asia where we have what is euphemistically called ‘loadshedding’.  This means that there are a few hours during office time and a few in the middle of the night when you do have electricity.  Last year, it got down to four hours in a 24 hour period.  Today there is 68 hours per week of electricity; around nine-and-a-half hours a day.

Apart from the irritation and inconvenience of having to adapt everyday life (schooling, transport, hospital appointments, personal hygiene, cooking – when your refrigerator is off for most of the day, cleaning, child-rearing, socialising, internet usage, reading, homework …) to a restricted supply, running a business or any organisation under these conditions became a battle.  Candlelight doesn’t work for everything!

What would something like this mean for your business?  How do you do business in the 21^st century in an uncertain environment like this?  It is highly likely that in this country there will not be enough supply within a few years to sustain projected demand.

So, what are you planning to do to protect your business?  When?

If this has whetted your appetite to know more, get in touch with us directly.

Or you might like to join us for a short Masterclass to explore ideas like this on 22^nd March 2012 in Gloucester, UK. Sponsored by LASA and the IOD, the session entitled Managing Risk and Planning for Long-term Success will bring together colleagues from a wide variety of different businesses. You can sign up on the IOD’s website[2] – and get your own strategic ball rolling.

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Advance notice: …our new book, Here be Dragons: navigating in an uncertain world will be published in the next few days; it will be available from Amazon from the 15^th of March.  You can get it at Amazon[3].

I find myself surprised and gratified (thank you Ms. Moss Kanter!). She reckons there are six facets of what she calls ‘institutional logic’ (as opposed to financial logic) which serve to alter leadership and corporate behaviour. They are:

• Common purpose and values
• Long term view
• Emotional Engagement
• Community Building
• Innovation
• Self-Organisation

These can easily be translated into the Five Qualities we identified that organisations need for renewal (Values, Insight, Options, Narrative and Machinery). In the end, it doesn’t really matter which model you use; what matters is that businesses understand the need for renewal and have some clear ideas on how to make it work for them.

To be fair, the rules we currently have, ought to work if companies were properly responsible and thought about the good of all, but in our current reality they do not.  This is largely due to the fact that companies believe that their primary responsibility is to their shareholders and only after that (and in some cases, long after that), to anyone else. This is because today the majority of us – as individuals and in organisations – focus on the short term and instant gratification to the detriment of the longer term and the good of the greater ‘we’.

…to read more, please see Newsletter 21 in the archive.

And for fun, have a look at a clip which may explain some of the issues we are facing here in Europe…EU