MARYLEBONE — This year is a big year of change. In technology, in the world economy, the world of sport, even in the way all our countries are run.  There are elections in America, France, India…

What is more significant in a country than a change of government?

And that’s what is promised in India, Malaysia, Taiwan, Serbia,  Kuwait, El Salvador, The Gambia, Armenia, Algeria, Madagascar, Libya, Mongolia, Mexico, Cameroon, Kenya, Sierra Leone, Ghana, Belarus, Ukraine, Ghana, Angola, Bhutan, Guinea, Lesotho, Zimbabwe and Togo.

New presidents in Yemen, Senegal, Mali, Russia, Dominican Republic, Mexico, Albania, France, Kenya, Turkey, the United States of America, Venezuela, Sierra Leone, Egypt, Kosovo and Zimbabwe.  Yes, Zimbabwe.

We know that the United States presidential election of 2012 is to be held on Tuesday, November 6, 2012. It will be the 57th presidential election.  And it will get a lot of attention.

But how about the world’s largest democracy?

Yes.  That’s India.  How about that one?

Or the big red splotch above?  Russia.

That’s important too.

There are other changes coming too.  Some, we seem to know for sure:

• Gold prices will keep going up.  And hit $2,000 and ounce in 2012, they say.
• The Internet is going to change.  A new IP address protocol will mean that companies may start building two sites for a doubled up Internet — the old one, and the new one.
• We’ll all be talking about faster, slimmer smart phones and The Cloud.  If you don’t know about either, now is the time to do some research.
• Plus many more things you may want to share?

This time next year things will be very different.

I promise.

Businesses will fail.  Some will be dominant that you haven’t even heard of.  Yours will merge, divest, make a 90 degree turn, or implement similar significant changes.

So, what are you doing about it?

Well it is a topic that is quite dear to our hearts at Able and How.  We are launching our Able and How Change Index this year.  And our change management work the world over continues at a pace.

We will be keeping an eye on business, political and social trends this year.  And keeping you up to date with the Able and How Change List (look for it soon in our News section).

Change is good.

Get into it with us.

/df

P.S. And, by the way, NASA assures us that the world is not going to end.  After many years of fielding wild calls, they were forced to put up this website.

LONDON — It’s been hard not to think about Korea this week.  But I have different things on my mind.  Not the loss of a dictator.  Not the worry that still has South Korean’s practicing evacuations like WWII Britain and Cold War America.

I am thinking about Korea’s fertile business culture and the country’s uncanny ability to reinvent itself, rebuild and refocus just in time for tremendous success.

See if you can read this bit without stopping in your tracks:

• in 1961 South Korea ranked 117th in the world for arable land per capita (behind Saudi Arabia and Somalia)
• in the last 50 years Korea’s per-capita GDP has grown at 23,000 percent
• today the tiny country (smaller than Iceland) has the world’s 12th largest economy by purchasing power
• unemployment is 3.2 percent
• one of the world’s lowest rates of public debt
• 80% of the 49 million people live in urban areas
• Koreans are four times as likely to have high-speed internet access as Americans and they pay very little for it

A series of seemingly prescient government decisions have constantly shoved the economy in the right direction.  Even through the tough economic times in the late 90s and mid 2000s the countries has seemed to make the right choices.

Today they are pushing — against their own traditions — for more entrepreneurship.  And I wouldn’t bet against them.

In fact, I’d like to be there now. If the chaebols’ would give us a call? Samsung, LG, SK… we’d like a word.

/df

DOHA, QATAR — We’re working on four different ‘transformation programmes’ at the moment. Combined they are on three continents, in over 30 countries.

You would think that would provide some shocking contrasts.  But it does something quite different. It shows startling similarities.

Everything has superficial differences: language, geography, industry, structure…

Yes, those can seem superficial.

The issues in big business transformation generally fall into two buckets: human and process.

Human
When I worked in the airline industry we used to talk about “human factors in aviation”, and I thought that was very funny.  In that, without humans we would not need commercial aviation at all… so humans were a pretty key ingredient.

Transformations can be seen the same way.  Strategy teams and professional project managers can seem quite content to act as if humans are not involved.

And how many businesses exist without ‘human factors’?

Coordinating, informing, involving, managing, aligning, working with and working around humans is one of the hardest parts of any transformation.

Ask anyone with the scars of a big change programme, successful or not, and they’ll say communication and people are the two most under-appreciated areas.

Process
Businesses need a sense of direction.  Even restaurants must know what is important (filling tables) and what to do to try to fill more.

However most large businesses are more complex than that.  With function, regions, business units and many horizontal layers of people influencing or directing each others’ work.

To create and sustain a sense of direction you need processes.

There is no one set of words or no single way of talking to people.  You cannot expect a data specialist to need the same information as an assembly line worker.

In order to be clear on what you are saying, to create a core of content and to move and support the transformation you need to have a plan… several plans often… and many processes to follow to see that you are consistent, coordinated and coherent across all of your business.

And then you need to sustain that over time.

Easy. Right.

Same, same, not always different.

/df

BAHRAIN — This is my first time in Bahrain.  That leaves only really Oman in the area that I haven’t been to / worked in.

United Arab Emirates?
√ Check
Saudi Arabia?
√ Check
Kuwait?
√ Check
Qatar?
√ Check

It’s a part of the world that many people can’t (or choose not to) understand.

In the last three weeks I have flown over it 5 times.  Three of those times I have flown over Iraq.

Well, it’s on the way.

The other two times we diverted.  And flew over Syria instead.

But although areas of conflict may be the image and abiding sense that many people have of the Arab Gulf states, it’s not representative.  (No more than when I was a boy living in London and people always thought I’d be caught up in IRA bombs.)

‘The region’, as locals call it, is very diverse and very active in sport, culture and business.  The region is quietly taking on the world.

And that’s not a bad thing.

Change is good.  And planning and communicating change in this region is important.

The oil and natural gas revenues have allowed visionary leaders to invest heavily in construction and in businesses.  The foreign investment is well documented — both successes and failures.  What is less well documented is the local investment.  It’s immense.

And as a result the region is re-writing business laws.  Some of the smartest people working in business anywhere are working here.

It’s something to see.  Long may it last.

/df

LONDON — Kim’s in Egypt this week. 

Yea.  That’s something isn’t it?

You wouldn’t imagine that someone is in Egypt, after we watched the recent (mostly peaceful) revolution, and not think it mattered.

Detroit.

It’s a city that may have passed it’s prime.  Today I read that 25% of the population of Detroit has left in the past 10 years.  And that is equivalent to one person leaving every 22 minutes.

That’s amazing!  What does it tell you about Detroit?  Quite a lot.

Many of those who enthusiastically inhabit the wired world — Twitter, Facebook, etc. — will try to tell you that location is no longer important.  But it is. 

We are formed and constantly prompted by our environment.  To forget that is to do both communications and people a disservice.

/df

MY KITCHEN, VERY EARLY — Out of the corner of my eye I spotted an article this week:

The Environmental Protection Agency set the value of a life at $9.1 million last year … [recently] the agency [had] used numbers as low as $6.8 million.

So said The New York Times.

And that is a very interesting state of affairs. 

There used to be a concept in journalism of how many deaths in a third world country it took to warrant similar space to a single death in our own.  An unseemly concept, I know.  But one that can be shown in research.

When I was a boy in Africa you could buy a drivers licence, with the right amount of money or friends.  And so The Standard and The Nation used to compete for the number of deaths they could declare in a single matatu (see photo above) accident.

This week the heart-stopping story of a US journalist who was assaulted by a crowd of men when she was separated from her crew in Egypt, is a good example of our different views on the newsworthiness of a life.  There were 3.5 million people convicted of crimes in Egypt last year.  And 48 people executed.

In the USA it is estimated that someone is sexually assaulted every 2 minutes.

When I first started working in the 1980s, I was in a newsroom with a researcher friend called Christophe.  A lovely, peaceful guy.  He used to whisper is the library stacks with a woman called Rosemary about the inequities of the world.  And how businesses and governments, and people who didn’t care — like you and I — were responsible for making the world the mess that it is.

Christophe got his big break when a boss decided to approve his request to go cover a ‘peace’ conference in Libya.  It turned out to be filled with radical groups, including neo-nazis.  Christophe was thrown from the roof of a building.  Not yet 30 years old.  It took quite a while to even get his body back.

So why is the cost of life important?

Because it has a direct, if subtle, impact on all of us. The higher the value, the greater the cost of insurance.  The higher the penalties for things like environmental mismanagement.

And at the same time companies like GSK spend a fortune in Africa to save lives.  Or Rio Tinto [disclosure: they are a client] who invest in communities in ways that bring health and safety — as well as work — to small communities.  There is no set level of investment or any really, really clear return on that investment.  (And, yes, Christophe would never have accepted it as useful enough.)  But the world is starting to balance out its responsibility for the cost of a human life.

Whether it’s demands for better social support mechanisms in countries where ‘consumerism’ has run the economy — like Egypt — or businesses that are finding themselves drawn into communities where they have hired smart people — like call centres in India and Ireland.  There is a bigger and more global cost to supporting the 6 billion people on the planet.

In Uganda the population has doubled to 33 million in the last two decades.  In the next 10 years it will double again.  The US insurance industry and regulators don’t value those lives at $9 million each.  Or Uganda wouldn’t be in 162nd place, of the world’s 182 national economies.

For western economies and ‘first world’ nations think of it like this: your kids have just brought home about 5 friends each.  You should be prepared to feed and support them all.

/df

WORLD’S END — I hadn’t realised how odd an address this is to be writing from.  But maybe it’s fitting.

30+ years ago I arrived at a boarding school in rural Ontario.  I had been living the previous two years in Paris and two years before that in Kenya.  While still a Canadian, I was a smart-ass, and a French-fueled nihilist.

The Cold War was on, and it was cool to smoke, wear big raincoats and assume the worst.

While on a bus tour with all the ‘new kids’ I was talking about where I had been the preceding years.  A large, younger kid poked his head over the bench and said to me:

“Wow, what does your dad do?”

“He assassinates Presidents,” I said dryly.

“Oh.”

“And he’s headed to Egypt next…”

I have no idea why I said that.  There must have been a reason.  But when a few days later the Globe and Mail newspaper arrived with banner headlines about the murder of Anwar Sadat, the kid from the bus approached me in awe…

It’s not a great story.  But at least it shows the bridge that Mubarak has spanned.  I was 15 when he came to power.

From 1981 to today.  A lot has happened in that time.  There’s been a lot to change.  And we like to pin it on men, and make every story a human story.  One person (male or female) actually has pretty low odds of changing the world.  1/6,000,000,000 anyone?

And yet we continue to put our faith and hope in individual leaders.  And we continue to lay the blame on individual villains.

Is one person really capable of so much?

I am not trying to let violent or tyrannical regimes off the hook.  But really?  Can the whole world be in the thrall of one man?

Surely our systems have changed.  The level of education in most countries has risen sharply in recent years.  Communications has expanded rapidly.  I was constantly amazed by the number of satellite dishes in Saudi Arabia… A country that does not have a free press, and yet most people were watching the Super Bowl and CNN live.

We like to think that one person is the source of power for our work issues as well.

“If only the CEO would get behind this programme (of mine) everything would be great.”

The truth is that change takes many, many people.  Systems have to change.  Processes have to change.  And people have to change.

This last one is the most important.  And often the most overlooked.  No one man will make everyone change.

It’s hard work for a lot of people.  But it can be done.

/df

OXFORD STREET — Okay you’re not running Egypt.  But imagine you were.   Or let’s be clearer.  You have been given a new project:

Get that Egypt thing sorted out.

Easy, right?  They made it through the frogs and locusts, etc.  No, okay. Seriously.  (And apologise in advance to the people who are working hard to bring change to that country.)  But what is it that the country faces?  And can some of our common change models give a clue as to where the difficulties may lie?

Burning platform?

Is there a ‘burning platform’?  In other words do people see a real and compelling need for change? 

[I noticed with a bit of the nervousness yesterday that the new Canadian head of Nokia was worrying about the burning platform at Nokia.  Not the first time they've questioned their own strategy and operations publicly... and probably because they still can't see where their many strengths are... but that's another blog.]

So this one’s easy: Is there a burning platform for change in Egypt?

Yes.  People in the streets for two weeks.  Government in panic.  Rock and multi-lingual posters flying to and fro.

That’s a yes.

Clear goals?

Do we know what we are changing into?

No. 

Do we have a shared idea? 

Well, it’s not this…

So that’s a no?

Hmm.  Maybe that’s a bit tougher.

We know what we DON’T want to be.  But there’s less clarity on what we do want to be.

So that’s a tricky one, but not beyond repair.  The difficulty will be to set and agree an achievable goal. 

Let’s start with what we don’t want to be and make goals for change that are achievable.  But in Egypt even that will be hard.  People don’t go into the street for ‘moderate, incremental change’.

Plan for change?

Yea.  No.

Aligned leadership?

Right, let’s break that down… define ‘leadership’?

Yea. No.

Stakeholder engagement?

Well, engaged is certainly true.  But that’s semantics.  There are lots of people inside and outside the country who are interested in knowing where this goes.  Who is talking to them?  What are they saying to them?  What are they hearing back?

Put that in a box marked: Dunno.

Sustainability of change?

For more than two weeks people have been coming out onto the street demanding change.  And they don’t seem keen to go home.

So what do we do?

/df

P.S. More to follow.  (Ideas and comments welcome.)

P.S.S. The photo is a ‘photo-illustration’. (It’s not real.)

PICARDIE — It’s like the world’s biggest gossip column has just brought out dozens of consecutive bumper, Christmas, double-issues.

Anyone who likes:
• reading rude comments about other people,
• listening in on boorish dinner table raconteurs, or
• subscribing to a Hello! magazine variant on public figures…
…will be delighted with the reading of the past few days.

Leaders are called names.  Petty gossip is repeated.  Minor faux pas are explained in painful detail.

It’s like reading your sister’s diary.

You are amazed, but instantly remorseful.

None of this was ever written for publication.  Can you imagine seeing everything you’ve said about your friends and relatives in the papers?

But there are (at least) two real and important points to take away:

1) Life is a pale extension of high school

This may be a 20-year-old quote from the TV show Thirtysomething, but that doesn’t make it any less true.

Business, diplomacy… life remains a low quality soap opera in which we get too excited about the personal and private.   And not enough about the ideas and actions.

2) There is no ‘private’ anymore

If you write it, it will be stored.

If you say it into a machine, it will be saved.

If you went there, it will be found on a video.

Some people get a rush of ego-maniacal excitement from that.  So its worth pointing out: No one really cares about you enough to want to sift through the entrails of your private life.

However, if they had to… if there were reason to… there’s is a fighting chance that they could.

Forget the idea of privacy.  Or that someone has to have a good reason to access your data.  It doesn’t seem to work that way anymore.

And therefore there are things that we as people — and as employees and employers — should be doing differently.

Maybe now is the time to start to do that.

/df

HYDE PARK CORNER — I love Doha.  I was thinking about that as I wrote a friend at QTel in Qatar.  It’s a lovely place and I know some lovely people there.  This week we have seen lots of poorly disguised derisive comments made about Qatar and it’s rulers.  They are unfair.

Of course I like Dubai too.  And I have special memories of all the time I spent in Riyadh as well.  Particularly the mice in my flat, and the strength of the coffee.  But I do love to work in new and exciting markets.

I’d like to do more in India as well.  I’d like to work for Tata in India.  Or help Infosys.  There are issues in China and other parts of Asia that I am sure could be fascinating to learn from and about.  When I taught a course in Kuala Lumpur in 2009 there were communication professionals who came from around the region.  Vietnamese who spoke English as a second or third foreign language.  People from Indonesia managing one of the biggest financial service sector mergers that I have ever seen.  Government workers from Brunei — I can’t even start to talk about that.

The fact of the matter is that many businesses in these regions are managing change in ways that should make western firms blush.

We can learn from them.  And we should.

A fair exchange of expertise and experience.  That’s what I would like.

/df