Tom Mendoza, vice chairman of NetApp, a storage and data management solutions provider, talked to The Economic Times about facilitating organizational change.

• Change Is All About Leadership and Communication
  The Economic Times
  
  Mendoza contends that, “Organizations are usually resistant to change because they don't have a perspective on why they need to change or what the benefits of change are (or the risks of not changing). Change is all about leadership and communication and often needs new individuals in key areas to lead it.
  
  “A key to successful change is communication and recognition. Assuming that employees have pride in the organization and want to see it succeed, change can be continually implemented. Most successful change involves people at multiple levels being involved in the planning and communication process.
  
  ”The benefits of the change should be measured and shared along with the recognition of people and groups who have done the most to achieve the results.”
  
  More than technology, “The human element dwarfs others when discussing change. Leadership, communication and recognition throughout the process are essential for changing behavior.”
  
  You can find the complete interview at The Economic Times.

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    Ken Blanchard writes in an article for Forbes, that according to a 2007 Dow Jones MarketWatch survey of international executives, only 24% of U.S. executives agree that an MBA "provides excellent and adequate preparation for a leadership position," Thus, Executive MBA programs must realize teaching leadership at the executive level effectively calls for an approach that places a premium on real-world learning, instead of theory and case studies.

• Why We Can--And Should--Teach Leadership
  by Ken Blanchard, Forbes, October 5, 2007
  Here are a few of his thoughts on teaching leadership:
  
  Whether one is born a leader or not, I have no doubt that leadership can be taught. And, most importantly, it can be learned. The transformation of EMBA programs now focusing on real-life leadership scenarios has taken the degree from a launching pad for success to a simulation of real-world challenges, preparing executives for the day-to-day operation of a business.
  
  Most business schools tend to jump right to organizational leadership and focus on strategy. Very seldom do business schools get personal with their students and really help them take a hard look at who they are and why they're leading. You can only lead somebody else, a team or an organization, if you have your own act together--effective leadership starts on the inside.
  
  Successful EMBA programs begin with lessons on self-leadership. Once students understand themselves and develop their own leadership point of view, the next phase of their transformational journey should be leading others.
  
  When you look at yourself, you gain perspective. When you learn to lead another person, you learn about building trust. Without trust, it is impossible for an organization to function effectively. Trust between leaders and their people is essential for working together. As leaders develop a trusting relationship with people in the one-on-one arena, they become trustworthy. This is great preparation for managing a team. Leading a group is more complicated than leading an individual, because the focus becomes building a community.

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    Following the recent scandals involving people holding positions for which they are not suitably qualified, Jason Lim, a fellow at Harvard Korea Institute researching Asian leadership models, shared some thoughtful words in an article for The Korea Times. Here are a few excerpts from Gimmicky Leadership:

As we stand in shock, we feel betrayed and angry. Our heroes turned out to be fakes. Yet after all the juicy stories have come and gone, with personal shame buried and forgotten, we need to examine the society that has allowed such people to prosper, so driven by an entitled sense of instantaneous satisfaction, get rich quick mentality, and celebrity culture that being rich and famous at any cost is considered to be the epitome of success. We see everyday the end justifying the means.

Until they are caught, that is. But there are always others to take their place.

Unfortunately, we can’t forget that we are the very authors of such a society. We are part of the problem. Whether it’s lying about academic credentials or plagiarizing, the basic problem is the lack of personal integrity. So, perhaps some of the betrayal and anger should be directed towards us.

Further, it should shame us into making sure that our children are armed with an unshakeable sense of personal integrity upon which to build their lives.

Without integrity and industry, people will produce gimmicks, not real creativity. Gimmicks may be cute, but they don’t have real beauty. Gimmicks may even be novel, but they are never original. Gimmicks can become a fad, but they never last. Gimmicks are merely shadows of the original, visible but not substantive.

Eventually, a culture of gimmicks, like a virus, will infect everyone that it comes in touch with. Such a culture will deprive us of authentic leaders who lead based on the substance of their character.

It will leave us with only those who seek to lead based just on the appearance of success. Such a culture of gimmicks will cheat our children of their right to earn a full and proud citizenship in the global village that they will live in.

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August 17, 2007, Bloomberg

Shirley Apthorp, Bloomberg News critic wrote an article about Nestle's commitment to sponsor the Lucerne Festival Orchestra through 2010. Nestle SA Chief Executive Officer Peter Brabeck-Letmathe said in an interview, “Abbado is an artist, but he's also a good leader. And one thing that leaders have in common — whether in art, business, or politics — is an ability to be sensitive toward people. You have to have the ability to motivate people to do more. A good conductor can change the sound of a whole orchestra with a glance or a gesture.''

Brabeck once took members of a conference of international Nestle managers to an orchestral rehearsal.

"I had given a talk in which I compared the role of CEO to that of an orchestral conductor,'' he said. "I invited all the managers to sit next to the musicians of a French orchestra during a rehearsal. The orchestra also tried to play for a while without a conductor, so that they could see the difference, and it wasn't long before the whole thing went astray. The quality of a performance depends on what the conductor does.

"There was a lot of discussion after that,'' he said. "They saw that if it is to work, the musicians also have to assume responsibility.''

Accordingly, Brabeck has dispensed entirely with job descriptions at Nestle.

"It would be wrong to write down everything that each job entails,'' he says. "It's a ridiculous idea. People must be able to define for themselves how they can create the most value for the company.''

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    Bill George former chief executive of Medtronic, professor of management practice at Harvard Business School and author of True North, recently made the following comments on PBS' Nightly Business Report:

For the past decade we've had a big problem in the corporate world, but no one will name it. The problem is that many leaders believe they are more responsible to Wall Street than they are to Main Street. But it's Main Street where the customers live and where the money is made.

The only way to create long-term value for shareholders is to create superior value for your customers. That comes from motivating your employees to create great products and superior customer service. But companies whose primary focus is on Wall Street, and meeting its short-term goals, are never going to create long-term value. You simply can't do it overnight. If you don't stay focused on your True North, you'll get buffeted by the winds of change, and wind up capitulating to playing the short-term game.

Unfortunately, many corporate leaders don't have the patience or the vision to do that. They bow to Wall Street, keep shifting strategies, and wind up destroying their value.
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    Steve W. J. Kozlowski and Daniel R. Ilgen write that “Given the centrality of work teams, it is more than a bit remarkable how much our society's perspective is focused on the individual. We school our children as individuals. We hire, train and reward employees as individuals. Yet we have great faith that individuals thrown into a team that has been put together with little thought devoted to its composition, training, development and leadership will be effective and successful. Science strongly suggests otherwise.”

“What team members think, feel and do provide strong predictors of team success—and these factors also suggest ways to design, train and lead teams to help them work even better.” They suggest that before we even get started, it would be prudent to ask whether or not a team is what is called for in the first place. Sometimes the work can be done more easily and effectively by an individual.

Their evidence indicates that while practical steps can be taken to improve the performance of teams, it rarely is. Leaders can play a crucial role in developing group skills. For example: "Prior to action, for example, the leader can help set team learning goals commensurate with current team capabilities. During action, the leader monitors team performance (and intervenes as necessary). As the team disengages from action, the leader diagnoses performance deficiencies and guides process feedback. This cycle repeats, and the complexity of learning goals increases incrementally as team skills accumulate and develop. This kind of feedback loop has been shown to reliably improve team thinking and performance."

Read the full article in the June/July 2007 Scientific American Mind or online at: The Science of Team Success by Steve W. J. Kozlowski and Daniel R. Ilgen

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   You've adopted codes of ethics and conduct but apparently no one knows about it. Apparently they can only be found buried on intranet sites where employees have to proactively seek them out.

• Survey Reveals Poor Ethics And Compliance Adherence
  TheLawyer.com
  The survey found that although 99 per cent of companies have codes of conduct or statements of values and principles, only 50 per cent ensured all employees were aware of the information contained in them.
  
  Additionally, fewer than one in 10 of the respondents expect budgets for compliance projects to increase significantly. More than half believe that conflicts with other business priorities are preventing companies from investing more time in tackling compliance and ethics issues. As a result, it's unlikely that companies will be able to attract suitable compliance lawyers to implementing effective ethics and compliance programmes.

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    CHICAGO: Stress Eats Up Available Working Memory For Talented People

• Highly accomplished people more prone to failure than others when under stress
  University of Chicago
  
  Talented people often choke under pressure because the distraction caused by stress consumes their working memory, research in Psychology has found.
  
  Working memory is a short-term memory system that maintains a limited amount of information in an active state. It functions by providing information of immediate relevance while preventing distractions and irrelevant thoughts from interfering with the task at hand.
  
  Highly accomplished people tend to heavily rely on their abundant supply of working memory and are therefore disadvantaged when challenged to solve difficult problems, such as mathematical ones, under pressure, according to research by Sian Beilock, Assistant Professor in Psychology.

    MIDDLE EAST: New Leadership Training Program In Jordan Uses Behavioral Science To Craft Leaders

• Leadership in Amman is Getting Personal
  ArabianBusiness.com
  
  According to the Young Entrepreneurs Association, leadership is the hottest item on every trainer’s agenda this year. But while all the others are preaching on how to act like a leader, their new Leadership by Design workshop is teaching participants how to be themselves. This new take on leadership forgets all the MBA theories and focuses on what each person’s unique strengths are, using a personality assessment to identify the strengths and weaknesses of each person’s personality. “It’s about capitalizing on your biggest asset,” says facilitator Zahi Abdein. “We’re all born with certain personal strengths, and if we learn how to make the most of our unique personalities, the sky is the limit to our success.”
  
  Behavioral science combines psychology, social neuroscience, and several other fields to understand why people make the decisions they do each day. It’s a way of understanding yourself, and predicting how another person will react to certain things. To put that into context, if a leader can predict how a person will act or react to each situation, then that leader can have a great amount of influence on the person. And when it all boils down, that’s the real secret to effective leadership.

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    On Apologies and Seven Failings of Really Useless Leaders:

• Carla Marinucci, San Francisco Chronicle Political Writer reports on the growing club of prominent public figures who have had to say "I'm sorry" in the glare of very big headlines in Public Figures in 'Sorry' State: Mastering Art of High-Profile Apology a Key Leadership Test
  by Carla Marinucci, San Francisco Chronicle
  There's a fine art to the delicate problem of making a public apology—and not everyone navigates the crucial steps to make it effective, said Barbara Kellerman, a lecturer at the Center for Public Leadership in Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government. She added, there are five simple rules when it comes to the art of a good public apology: Acknowledge your mistake, accept responsibility, express regret, say it will never happen again—and make it fast.
• The London Times reports on Steven Sonsino's seven failings of really useless leaders in Keys To Leadership Lie Within
  “I believe that it is quicker, easier and more effective for us as managers to stop doing the things that demotivate people than it is for us to bolt on radically new techniques from acknowledged inspirational leaders,” writes Steven Sonsino. He identifies “seven failings of really useless leaders”:
  

  1. Killing enthusiasm through micromanagement, coercion and disrespect;
  2. Killing emotion by being aggressive, lacking empathy and not supporting work-life balance;
  3. Killing explanation through incomplete or inconsistent communication;
  4. Killing engagement with limited team goals and an insistence on managers dictating objectives;
  5. Killing reward by rewarding the wrong things or doing it in the wrong way, for example, by offering a cash bonus to someone who is not motivated by money;
  6. Killing culture, for example by ignoring differences in working cultures when managing mergers between organisations or by “punishing risk- taking” while trying to introduce a culture of innovation; and
  7. Killing trust by making unfair decisions when hiring or rewarding staff.

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    Stephanie West Allen, JD of idealawg informed us of an upcoming webinar sponsored by strategy+business on the The Neuroscience of Leadership. Stephanie also has information on this topic on her blog.

• On Thursday, November 2, 2006 2:00 pm EST, strategy+business is sponsoring a free one hour webinar on The Neuroscience of Leadership. Description: Change is pain. Behaviorism doesn't work. And humanism is overrated. But management coach Mr. Rock (author of Quiet Leadership) and UCLA neuroscientist Dr. Schwartz (coauthor of The Mind and the Brain) explain breakthroughs in cognitive science and the resulting insights for organizational transformation.

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    The results of a study on cheating by graduate students were reported by Business Week. In it they found that B-school students are more likely to cheat than their counterparts in other disciplines. This doesn't speak well for the men and women that will soon be given positions of "leadership" in the business world. Honesty isn't something that can be compartmentalized—something you can turn off and on. In any culture, honesty is regarded as one of he most—if not the most—important quality of a leader. Without it you can't lead.

• A Crooked Path Through B-School?
  by Francesca Di Meglio in Business Week
  Excerpts: "A study released this month by researchers found that B-school students were more likely to cheat, or at least to admit to cheating, than students in other graduate programs. And schools are fighting back, with ethics codes, pledges, and, in some cases, a zero-tolerance policy.
  
  According to the researchers, 56% of graduate business students admitted to cheating one or more times in the past academic year, compared to 47% of nonbusiness students.
  
  Most educators agree that teaching aspiring MBAs to handle ethical dilemmas is fundamental because it will determine future practices in real business. Cheating or corruption in the corporate world might offer great results at first, but it will eventually have a catastrophic impact on the bottom line.
  
  "Without trust, honor, and integrity, business can't function for the long term," says Richard Brownlee, professor of business administration at Darden. And the company's name isn't the only one at stake when you make a poor ethical decision. Whether in B-school or at work, say educators, your reputation is only as good as your actions."
  
  
• Solutions? See these posts on Cheating and Personal Happiness and The Fight Against Cheating from the BizDeans Talk blog.
  
  Here's a quote from Santiago Iniguez, Dean of Instituto de Empresa Business School:
  "To start with, there is a need of clarifying a conceptual issue. Normally, cheating is considered a reproachable behaviour because, as the Oxford Dictionary explains, cheating is "to act dishonestly or unfairly in order to gain an advantage". However, the first person who looses out is the cheater: first, by potentially exposing one’s personal reputation to be affected, sometimes for life; and second, and more importantly from a personal point of view, for relinquishing all the benefits that brings the learning process. The expression "You are only fooling yourself" springs to mind. We all know the intellectual satisfaction that results from understanding, memorising, rationalising and discussing theories, ideas and concepts. Those who take the shortcut and skip the wonders of learning are giving up a decisive part of personal development that is directly linked—I believe, in line with many philosophers—with happiness."

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   From the premier issue of Good magazine comes this editorial on the ethics of corproate social responsibility by Jonathan Greenblatt (Co-founder of Ethos Water and a former vice-presdient of consumer products at Starbucks Coffee Company).

• Doublespeak: Do Companies Really Give a Damn?
  Here are a few excerpts:
  
  If you read the business press, corporate social responsibility (CSR) is the new new thing. At a time when oil conglomerates are "earning" record profits and the dust is still settling from the Enron verdict, social responsibility has become the latest mantra of corporations looking to redeem their public image. It's now vogue for captains of industry to claim they are motivated not only by a desire for better earnings but also by a desire to save the planet.
  
  Because of such naked deceptions, corporate social responsibility runs the risk of joining other management fads from the ages—in the dustbin. And if treated merely as a cosmetic, it is doomed to fail. The desire to do the right thing must be bound up in the very fabric of a business, helping to guide its efforts to increase revenue or reduce expenses, or else the business will invariably make short-term decisions that drive immediate profits at the expense of good long-term behavior. Authenticity cannot be cooked up after the fact: it must be present from the beginning.
  
  CSR does not stand for Corporate Spin and Rhetoric. It cannot succeed as a marketing plan to placate critics. Companies need to build brands and implement business strategies that are grounded in an ethical framework. When thoughtful behavior inspires a corporation from the start, the company can win on multiple levels. And when managers throughout the organization are rewarded for putting sustainability first, the company has a much better chance of creating success that serves the needs of all stakeholders.

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   A couple of links from Dubai's Gulf News concerning education in Dubai
   and India:

• Dubai: Unique Chance to Learn About Great Leadership
  Pupils in Dubai secondary schools will have an opportunity to participate in a unique educational, cultural, and scientific competition during the new academic year. The contest is about the book, My Vision: Challenges in the Race for Excellence, by His Highness Shaikh Mohammad Bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Vice-President and Prime Minister of the UAE and Ruler of Dubai.
  
  The objective of distributing the book to all secondary schools is to create a healthy competition among pupils and to teach the new generation lessons of "great leadership", said Ahmad Al Attar, Executive Director of the "My Vision, My Future" project.
  
  
  
  The book offers a detailed account of the vision that transformed Dubai and the UAE into international hubs for commerce and finance. His Highness holds Dubai up as an example of extraordinary development based on excellent leadership, management, teamwork and timely decision-making.
  
  The author, whose personal involvement in the process of development served as the basis for his work, also reflects on the current state of the Arab nation, which he describes as suffering from “a crisis of leadership and management". The book will be released in English in the near future.
  
  
• India: Schools "Must Teach Core Values of Life"
  Anubha Nijhawan, Principal of the Indian Public High School in Ras Al Khaimah, received the Indian national teacher's award. She said cultural values should be given a prime place in schools.
  
  She believes that traditional values should be revived in schools to enable students to lead their lives with a conscious awareness of their culture. "So that they are able to face the challenges presented to them from all aspects," Nijhawan said.
  
  In her view, nowadays youngsters are highly exposed to media and it could adversely affect their personalities. "The challenge is to maintain the student's personality. Education has a very significant role in teaching students the core values of life," she added. The world, she said, is changing rapidly and there is a keen need to "deepen the importance of maintaining our culture."

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    September 11th is a tragedy that struck all of us. It caused us to look deeper inside ourselves to see what we had and what we lacked. As any crisis reveals, leadership is something that is built over time and not something you dream up on a moments notice. A lot of character was revealed and developed that day.

• Five Years Later, Memories and Lessons of Sept. 11 Remain Strong
  by Stephen Barr, Washington Post
  Steven M. Carter Sr. and William Stout showed that day the importance of leadership, experience and training.

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Here are a couple of links to articles pertaining to your people:

• Avoiding the Stress of Generation Why
  Companies are just beginning to wake up to the havoc that the newest generation of workers is causing in offices across the globe. And adapt they must, because it is they who will dominate the workforce for the next 70 years or so. Quote: "Millennials are not looking for career paths - they are looking for life paths."
  From: Management-Issues
  
  
• Waking Up on the Wrong Side of the Desk: The Effect of Mood on Work Performance
  While a lot of research has been done in the past two decades on work-family conflicts, few studies have looked closely at how mood affects workers' performance. Wharton management professor Nancy Rothbard and co-author Steffanie Wilk wanted to find out which mood-altering events have the biggest effect, if any -- those that influence one's outlook at the start of the day, or those that nudge one's mood up or down as the workday advances. Among their key findings: The mood you bring with you to work has a stronger effect on the day's mood—and on work performance—than mood changes caused by events in the workplace.
  From: Knowledge@Wharton
  
  

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