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The fine line between business vanity and genius…

FULHAM — The title should read: “The fine line between business vanity and genius: that’s change management.” But it was too long.

I have just read about the Galacticos Island this morning. A billion-dollar plan to build a Real Madrid theme-park island in the UAE. It was being derided as a wild and silly idea. Who would want to stay in a Christiano Rinaldo Suite? (Is it complete with single bed and pram?) Is the way the coverage seems to go.

Business vanity!

Until you know that the man pumping in good money after bad at Real these days is a construction magnate. And when you consider the demand for football experiences in the near and far east, anything is possible.

I met a lovely lady in Doha recently who explained that her husband had bought season tickets to Manchester City — for their two kids really — so the family flies from Qatar to Manchester to watch the home games.

Madness!

Yes. But it is also true.

Years ago the CEO of a Dutch bank came under fire for their sponsorship of the Volvo Ocean Race.

“Why do we do this?” someone was reputed to have asked him. “Because I like yachts,” was the honest answer.

There are as many hair-brained schemes out there as there are executives. And only the ones that work are really easy to qualify as corporate genius.

However there is another factor.

Acts of vanity / genius will rise and fall based on the ability to manage the transition from one way of thinking to another. That is the ability to manage change.

Change management is a fundamental ingredient of successful change in business. And without change their is no innovation or growth in business.

It doesn’t have to be an island in the Persian Gulf. But, yes, change management could help with that too.

/df

Business, politics and football

SOUTH KEN — The win seems easily in hand. It will be more of a TKO than a real back-slapping, headline-grabbing, crowd-pleasing victory. But that’s okay.

And then the player kind of clumsily sits down and then leans forward and back… and falls down.

Suddenly the game is not over yet.

I think I am describing an indescribably painful final 2 minutes of the SuperBowl this past Sunday.

But I could also be describing the twists and turns of the GOP presidential nomination process in the Land of the Free.

It’s not there that the comparisons end either:

the vast amounts of money spent on the event consistently exceed its real entertainment value.
the commercials are more fun than the live action.
the most important players are not on the field.
the strategists and power-brokers are in no shape themselves to play the game (physically or morally).
really, really short bursts of activity are followed by endless replays, analysis… and more commercials.
the average American sees the whole thing as an excuse to drink and eat more… and complain about everything.

Not bad. As far as analogies go.

And when you think about how much American voters like a quarterback (Kennedy, Reagan) it starts to actually get quite frightening.

And how far is big business removed from this kind of pantomime? To what extent are companies run as artifice, with rules that are too complicated, by actors who are standing in for the interests of others?

You can start to think of a compelling case, which institutional shareholders taking on a ‘strategists’ role, and unskilled middle managers stumbling around a field doing a job that is unclear to them.

But the comparison doesn’t hold up for long. Not in most well-run or actively trading businesses anyway.

Executives and managers are still surprisingly powerful. The decisions they make can have an immediate affect on the organisation. The enterprise should — and most often does — show results and involve people in a genuinely consuming way.

In fact, if there is a complaint about the work that we do (as white collar workers in the industrialised world) it is that it is too all consuming and too fulfilling. People complain about working too hard, getting stressed, not taking enough holiday, etc. None of those behaviours are driven by real coercion.

Business strategies are usually fairly coherent. The implementation sometimes needs work. But you’ll rarely find a business sitting down when the action starts.

/df

2012: A year of change

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.

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