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One Change at a Time

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An organization's performance and the environment in which it operates change dynamically. Subsequently, most measures reflecting these performance variables are also dynamic; challenging analysts to interpret historical and predict future movement.

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StrategyDriven Podcast Special Edition 15 – An Interview with Susan Bloch and Philip Whiteley, authors of How to Manage in a Flat World

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StrategyDriven Podcasts focus on the tools and techniques executives and managers can use to improve their organization’s alignment and accountability to ultimately achieve superior results. These podcasts elaborate on the best practice and warning flag articles on the StrategyDriven website.

Special Edition 15 – An Interview with Susan Bloch and Philip Whiteley, authors of How to Manage in a Flat World explores the challenges and solutions to effectively managing multinational teams. During our discussion, Susan Bloch and Philip Whiteley, authors of How to Manage in a Flat World: 10 Strategies to Get Connected to Your Team Wherever They Are share their insights with us regarding:

  • overcoming communications challenges associated with geographic separation, time-zone differences, and cultural dissimilarities
  • leveraging cultural diversity to benefit the team and improve its outcomes
  • efficiently transitioning the team through its forming, storming, norming, and performing phases of development
  • providing feedback and performance reviews

Additional Information

Susan and Philip’s book, How to Manage in a Flat World, can be purchased by clicking here.

Final Request…

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About the Authors

Susan Bloch, co-author of How to Manage in a Flat World, has coached top teams in many of the FTSE100 and Fortune 500 companies across the globe over the past 20 years. A truly global citizen, she has lived and worked in five countries; South Africa, North America, Israel, the United Kingdom and India. She is currently Chief Learning Officer at the Aditya Birla Group. Prior to that she worked at Reliance Industries in the Retail Division, as Chief Culture Officer. Before coming to India she was Partner and Head of Thought Leadership at Whitehead Mann in London where she was operating as an executive coach, working with executive teams and conducting board effectiveness reviews. Previously she was global head of executive coaching for the Hay Group. A Chartered Psychologist, Susan has co-authored, How to Manage in a Flat World, Employability, and Complete Leadership (translated into Mandarin, Vietnamese, Russian, Polish, Turkish, Greek) and has produced a number of research publications.

Philip Whiteley, co-author of How to Manage in a Flat World, is an author and journalist, specializing in management, particularly the areas of leadership, motivation, and strategic people management. He has written numerous articles for The Times, Personnel Today and Coaching at Work among other titles, and has appeared on BBC Newsnight discussing the portrayal of the workplace in the media. He is author of People Express, Motivation, Unshrink the People and Complete Leadership and his books have been translated into six languages. Now based in the UK, Philip has previously worked in Latin America.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 33:40 — 46.3MB)

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Business Performance Assessment Program Best Practice 4 – Random, Unannounced Inspections

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StrategyDriven Business Performance Assessment Program Best Practice ArticleIt’s perfectly natural and expected that individuals want to do a good job and be recognized for it or at a minimum want to do a good enough job to avoid what are to them undesired consequences. Subsequently, people look to what their superiors communicate as required job performance to gag the level and timing of their efforts.

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The Advisor’s Corner – If I Don’t Measure, Can I Manage?

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Question:

There are several axioms regarding measurement such as:

  • What gets measured gets done.
  • What gets measured and rewarded gets done well.
  • If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.
  • What gets measured gets managed.

Is it really true that if something is not measured it is not being managed? Not everything can be measured simply because of resource constraints and I would hesitate to assert that these areas subsequently suffer from management neglect. What are your thoughts?

StrategyDriven Response:

The short answer is no. Not measuring something does not necessarily equate to its not being managed. An organization’s limited resources dictate that only a finite number of activities can be directly measured; just as a manager’s limited available time prevents all activities from being directly monitored. But while these cliches do not represent an absolute truth, managers do need to recognize current realities in terms of defined future goals in order to possess the knowledge necessary to formulate their organization’s activities. Performance measures represent one very effective means of acquiring this knowledge on a routine basis with relatively minimal cost.

Therefore, a key manager responsibility is to identify those few performance measures that will best enable him or her to guide their organization in the achievement of the company’s mission goals in the most efficient manner possible. These measures must necessarily monitor the conduct of ongoing production work and support identification and implementation of improvement opportunities. Because an organization’s circumstances and the market environment change over time, the adopted performance measures will likely be changed and/or replaced over time.

Final Thought…

Since having no performance measures is not an option, the real challenge becomes determining what to measure in order to effectively manages while at the same time remaining within the organization’s constrained resource budget. Several StrategyDriven articles, podcasts, and whitepapers are dedicated to the topic of identifying the right performance measures including:

Articles

Podcasts

Whitepapers

Lastly, it is important to recognize that the reverse is not necessarily true either; having performance measures does not necessarily result in a process or activity being managed or managed well. Performance measures are simply a management tool without which effective management is difficult.

Leadership Inspirations – Making Mistakes

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“A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable, but more useful than a life spent doing nothing.”

George Bernard Shaw (1856 – 1950)
Irish playwright and the only person to have been awarded both the Nobel Prize for Literature (1925) and an Oscar (1938)