We have moved to a new WordPress powered website. Now the View From Zero Degrees is fully integrated into our company website: http://www.meridianprime.co.uk Shift has happened and we are up and running with a whole new look and exciting new events planned.
Please stop by and visit. Regular blogging will resume shortly.
I have found a wonderful new way to tell my story about making shift happen in my work and in my business. Using a great app called Haiku Deck and my iPad, I have created this slideshow. I hope you enjoy it….
http://www.haikudeck.com/p/Ubn63UMPtt/leap-a-professional-development-journey
For International Women’s Day 2013, I made this collage to share with my sisters, mothers of my heart, grannies, aunties, cousins and assorted other family members and dear, dear friends. You are unique, precious and gorgeous, one and all!
My recent musings and reflections have led to a change in branding and look for my company Meridian Prime. I have followed through with my promise to revisit my visual and virtual presence.
Inspired by my desire to banish the beige and to be more bold in the world, as well as my commitment to live by the principles and values around embracing change that I often encourage my clients to explore, I present my new logo and strap line.
The red stands in for the red shoes of a couple of posts ago. The spiral represents growth and change – the proverbial shift. There is also a nod to the previous symbol I used to represent my company – a breaking wave, symbolising movement and change, as well as my commitment to sustainable seas (my former career, in which I still play a part).
Feedback, comments, thoughts all welcome.
What do monkeys and the Australian Olympic swimming team have in common?
Sounds like the beginning of a joke, doesn’t it? Sadly, it isn’t a joke. Rather a damning indictment of leadership and culture gone toxic.
There’s a perfect analogy in the organisational development literature that describes how destructive cultures form:
Begin with five monkeys in a cage. Hang a banana from a string and put a ladder or stairs beneath it. When the first monkey puts a foot on the first step, spray the other monkeys with cold water. Repeat as the same or another monkey goes for the stairs. Repeat. Soon whenever a monkey goes for the stairs, the other monkeys react to prevent it, with violent retribution. Put the hose away and take out one monkey, replacing it with a new monkey. Naturally the new one wants the banana, but when it goes for the stairs the others attack it. Repeated attempts result in further attacks. Remove another monkey, replace with another new monkey. The process repeats itself. Soon none of the original monkeys remain, and none of the new monkeys have been subjected to the cold water treatment. They just know that you don’t go on the stairs and you enthusiastically punish anyone who tries. Why? Because that’s ‘how we do things round here’. And that’s how organisational culture comes about
The publication of a review by Bluestone Edge into the leadership and culture of the peak Australian Olympic swimming body sheds damning light on how toxic a culture can become when focus is put on functional or task-based leadership and attention on individual ‘star performers’ at the cost of a more human, team-oriented and relational approach. The failure at the 2012 Olympics in London by a once triumphant, world-beating swimming programme has been laid at the feet of a complex collision of leadership focussing on the wrong things, a failure to transform groups of, and individual, athletes into a team, and inconsistent approaches to bad behaviour, bullying, hazing and other transgressions.
The review is a short but excellent dissection of how things can go terribly wrong when group dynamics are ignored. The authors offer up several recommendations to the leaders of Swimming Australia that are more widely applicable as lessons for leaders in organisations:
1. Pay attention to ethical standards of behaviour and accountabilities.
2. Design processes to deal with things openly and inclusively when performance starts to go wrong.
3. Design and implement innovative, realistic and relevant team-building strategies to deal with fragmentation.
4. Get clear about consequences.
5. Create feedback loops that involve all stakeholders from the leadership to the ‘coalface’.
6. Dire need to reorient, develop and enable leadership to the personal rather than solely functional.
7. Invest in professional leadership development, coach-the-coach and ethical decision-making processes for leaders in the organisation.
Any of us who work in organisations and with teams could learn some vital lessons from those outlined in the review by examining our assumptions, biases and the undiscussed way ‘we do things round here’.
Let’s not be monkeys!
It’s been a reflective start to 2013.
For some months I’ve been playing around with ideas to rebrand and relaunch my work and my company. By the end of the year I had come up with a strap line that I thought would send the right messages to sensible, middle-of-the-road potential clients. I hired a graphic designer and got new business cards printed. The more I looked at it, frankly, the more uninspired and bored I became. I put myself in potential clients’ shoes and imagined how they might feel. Oh dear.
I went on retreat to deepest Oxfordshire. I spent time with Myles Downey (http://www.enabling-genius.com/enabling-genius/) and other extraordinary coaches. Something remarkable happened. Ideas that have been bubbling and percolating since I finished my Masters degree in 2011 come into clear focus. Shift happened.
Quite simply – I realised it is time to banish the beige.
Billy Connolly has for years talked about not wanting to be beige – the colour of mediocrity, of the masses, of the ordinary. You see it in his comedy, in his clothes, in how he negotiates his world. I love it. Always have. I used to embrace that part of myself. But then I became lost to that part of me. In my striving to be seen as credible and acceptable I became more and more beige.
Well no more!
My great insight for the beginning of 2013 is that it is time for me to reclaim that part of me that I allowed to lie dormant for a long, long time. In finding out what is at my core, I discover it is a passion for helping people make shift happen. It is owning the fact that I am a shift stirrer! My best expression of myself is when I banish the beige and own the renegade within. I am a rebel with a cause (thank you, Richard: http://21stcenturyprosperity.org/2013/01/12/wanted-rebels-with-a-cause/). I am the woman who bought the red velvet shoes in the picture (and had to learn how to walk in them!). I am the woman who is totally committed to helping people and organisations find where their potential lies, and to stirring things up so they can unleash that potential for dramatic results in the world.
These last three-four years I have been helped along the way by some very talented people. But to give myself credit, I was willing to go inside, ask and answer questions like:
“What is at my core?”
“What really matters?”
“What do I want?”
“What am I willing to do?”
“What will I do?”
So it is back to the drawing board with the strap lines and branding materials. I want to capture the essence of my core – it is where thought leadership will come from, it is where my very best work emerges from because there I am engaged, committed, passionate and congruent with an image of myself when I feel at my best. A new website will be in the offing, as will a different presence in cyberspace and my networks, along with new ideas for how I can help people make dramatic breakthroughs and make their own SHIFT HAPPEN!
I might even design a bumper sticker, in purple or maybe in red (the colour of luscious ripe tomatoes, and the shoes of course).
What might you need to do to make your own shift happen?
Photo credit: Chris Grieve. All Rights Reserved.
All Rights Reserved. Chris Grieve.
It’s been an extraordinary summer for Great British sport (if not the weather). During the latter half of July I was glued to Bradley Wiggins’ performance in the Tour de France. And then, just across the river from the home of ‘zero degrees’, the Olympics. Wow.
London 2012 is gearing up again today for more feats of athletic prowess from another group of extraordinary athletes. The Paralympics’ opening ceremony is on tonight and another fortnight of exceptional performances will have me riveted again.
I’ve been reflecting in the last two weeks since the last lot went home, about Dave Brailsford the manager of Team GB’s phenomenal cycling team (7 gold from 10 events) and the Sky team that brought Bradley Wiggins GB’s first ever Tour de France win. When asked about the extraordinary performance of the Olympic team, on BBC breakfast TV he explained his philosophy of marginal gains:
“The whole principle came from the idea that if you broke down everything you could think of that goes into riding a bike, and then improved it by 1%, you will get a significant increase when you put them all together. There’s fitness and conditioning, of course, but there are other things that might seem on the periphery, like sleeping in the right position, having the same pillow when you are away and training in different places. Do you really know how to clean your hands? Without leaving the bits between your fingers? If you do things like that properly, you will get ill a little bit less. They’re tiny things but if you clump them together it makes a big difference.”
Its not a new concept, improving things by 1%, but what struck me was the tangential things, the peripheral things that accumulate and help transform the potential of marginal gains into the most extraordinary performance. These lessons can cross disciplines – we don’t have to be elite sports-people to apply such learning in our everyday lives, especially our work.
So rather than only focussing on improving the direct and obvious, like tweaking the stuff we do everyday at work, ask yourself this: what are the tangential and peripheral marginal gains that could help me transform my performance? What little things might I be able to do that will help me improve by 1%?
Think about all the little things that go into your work, including the stuff that goes on outside of your work – like sleep, like exercise, like having creative outlets, like having healthy relationships, like food. What can you tweak, just a little, that will make you just a tiny bit better. It’s not just your personal performance to which you can apply this philosophy either: what tiny tweaks can you make to your organisation or business? Are there peripheral things, as well as direct things, that will enhance your organisation’s performance?
Now imagine the cumulative change in a month, or six months!
Photo credit: Chris Grieve.
All Rights Reserved.
At the end of 2011, MBS executive recruitment consultants reviewed the reasons for the departure of high profile leaders from large, public corporations such as Lloyds TSB, Adidas and Pfizer. Exhaustion and personal reasons were cited by highly talented individuals as influencing their choice to leave. Once upon a time personal reasons and exhaustion might have been read as code for getting the boot, but as the authors acknowledge, now these are genuine reasons for high-flying leaders to turn down or get out of the top job in large public companies.
Rejecting the time wasted in endless meetings, the remoteness of the executive suite from so-called real work, the illusions of status and the pressures of being under public scrutiny 24/7 or having to constantly deliver short-term, quarterly financial growth, many are turning to smaller, privately held companies where longer-term strategies are valued, along with creativity, autonomy and a sense of freedom.
MBS also reported the challenges they faced recruiting CEOs for companies listed in the FTSE100. Head-hunted, high profile candidates turned down top jobs because they knew the high cost of such roles on their lives – by being at the beck and call of boards all day, everyday; working all hours; travelling and being away from family; quarterly performance assessments based upon returns to shareholders, rather than delighting customers and meeting their needs. And. And. And.
In a survey of some 40 executives who had chosen to lead smaller companies, the main reasons for seeking out these places to work were the relative freedom and autonomy that comes with a private enterprise. While there may be fewer resources, still a need to travel and work really hard, the rewards came from doing a job that engaged their passions, or where they could see how they made a difference, or realised the satisfaction of growing a business. Such rewards came on both personal and professional levels.
Turning down the top job in a FTSE100 company doesn’t seem so daft. If one is committed to pursuing a sense of purpose and meaning in one’s work, then being a slave to shareholders and the board for the sake of a few share points each quarter won’t stack up. Creating and delivering something of real value to people and society, that’s something to want to get up for in the morning. And being able to do it while also valuing and making time for your loved ones, as well as engaging in the pursuits that make you a rounded, healthy and happy person, the top jobs that enable that kind of choice, perhaps they’re more worth choosing.
Photo credits: Victor1558 CC-BY-2.0
Remarkable purple cow
I just finished reading Walter Isaacson’s excellent warts and all biography of Steve Jobs. As I was reading Jobs’ own words about his legacy it occurred to me that one way of characterising part of that legacy would be to say that Jobs was a master of transforming sacred cows into purple cows. Let me explain.
In a business context, a sacred cow is an unexamined assumption about the business: its fundamental business philosophies, the strategies it pursues, or perhaps the values it holds. Sacred cows are often worshipped as conventional wisdom. Sacred cows are believed in by top management and followed blindly by employees, without analysis, argument or overt dissent. With a few sacred cows running loose in the top paddock, a business can be in peril with leadership in danger of groupthink and losing grip on what creates success and enables an organisation to flourish.
For example, Jobs’ fierce conviction when Apple began was that the meeting of design and engineering to make great products that people loved was fundamental to Apple’s success and longevity. He fervently believed that high tech consumer products could change the world and that the world could be a better place with Apple in it. His obsession with this, with being a ‘product person’ rather than a business person, along with his boorish (some said nasty) behaviour and inconsistent micromanagement, led to his being ousted in 1985 by Apple’s then CEO John Sculley. For Sculley, the design-consumer product issue was a pipe dream: “Apple would never be a consumer products company”, he is quoted as saying. To Sculley, I believe, this notion was a sacred cow for Jobs and his supporters within the company. Whereas, after Jobs had been removed, Apple began to focus upon maximising profits to the exclusion of making great products, surviving on a temporary dominance in desktop publishing. Ultimately, this strategy became a sacred cow of its own for Sculley and successive CEOs, leading to the loss of market share to Microsoft and eventually the profits themselves. The stock price fell from a high in 1991 of USD $70 to only $14 by 1996.
What’s a purple cow then? Coined by the writer and blogger Seth Godin, a purple cow is worth talking about, its something amazing, something remarkable. A purple cow in business is the art of building something remarkable, noticeable into your products or services themselves. By using innovative design, by being courageous and willing to take risks and break the rules, purple cows can be built into the products and services we create.
Re-enter Jobs in December 1996 with his sacred cow in tow: build innovative, beautifully designed products and build a lasting company. Apologies for the cliché, but the rest is history:
Purple cows. Each one a high tech innovation that blends design and engineering at the intersection of art and technology. Apple stock is now worth $535 (just checked on my iPhone). Jobs took what many thought to be his downfall, his sacred cows, and used them to transform his company into the biggest in the world.
So I wondered, how might you transform your sacred cows into purple cows? The first step is to take a good look at the sacred cows running round in the top paddock – what are the unexplored assumptions and conventional wisdom about your business? Dissect then, reflect upon these things in order to understand how you or your business achieve the success you have (or not), what makes you or your business flourish?
Time to make some brave decisions, to break some rules. Gather together your teams or associates, ask yourselves how you might redesign or create products or services that transform your customers’ experience. How might you make their experience of your products or services remarkably good? Think how you might combine ideas you wouldn’t normally consider doing – ask the ‘what if..’ question. Get rid of what doesn’t work any more – put the sacred cows out to pasture. Take a leaf from Apple: ‘Think Different’, and you’ll be well on your way to transforming your sacred cows into purple cows.
Picture credit: Purple Cow by Terry George. CC-BY-NC-ND 2.0 Rye and District Camera Club
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