Needlessly Blind Demand a Better White Stick!

Pace of change ‘too quick’
Dominic Walsh - The Times - Published at 12:01AM, May 21 2012Companies are struggling to keep pace with a rapidly changing business environment, putting their futures at risk, according to a survey of business leaders. The findings of the Fit to Change report, to be published today by the IT services group Fujitsu, place a question mark against Britain’s ability to adapt and remain competitive.
Two thirds of the 150 senior executives surveyed said that the pace of change was too quick for British business, while 57 per cent felt an inability to respond rapidly to change was one of the most significant risks they faced. The report highlights the falls from grace of Nokia and Kodak as examples of a failure to keep up with changing consumer preferences. In extreme cases, companies such as Woolworths and La Senza had failed.

Fujitsu's report actually said

To tackle change successfully, respondents were clear that strong leadership is the key ingredient – 97% felt this. Additionally, the capacity to change and available resources topped the list of ingredients required to be fit to change. However, when comparing the ingredients that business leaders believe are essential to being fit to change with those they believe are most lacking across UK plc, the gaps occurred in three areas – a robust ecosystem of suppliers; a long term vision and the right technology solutions.

Bah Humbug!   What a disastrously missed opportunity, and yet, how inadvertently revealing this report is about the mindsets that cause the problem. .

The key factor in the solution of this problem is the organisational and personal attribute that we call Changeability.  This manifests itself as the capability of being effective in making change happen.  It is rooted in a complex array of attitudes, behaviours and beliefs. Although an individual leader can exhibit this attribute, and we have met several that do, this alone is never enough to transform the performance of an organisation.  That requires the majority of the people in the business to develop Changeability as well.  Few leaders have the ability to do this themselves, or know how to make that happen.

The desperately sad fact of life is that if you do not understand what Changeability is, you will not recognise it, even when you are looking straight at it.  


So, when a number of typical business leaders are asked "What do you think the problem is?" they will say only what they know, and then parrot, "Oh teacher, teacher, it's a leadership problem".  In Shakespearean terms "Stap me vitals lads, I thought you were the leaders!"

And then, if they are asked the "right" questions in the "right" way, they will agree that the answer is provided by the researcher's agenda - supplier (Who? Me?), vision (What?Mine?), and technology solutions (Oh gosh, that's what we do. Fancy that?).  Oh dearie, dearie me.

Changeability is possessed naturally by a minority of individuals, but, it can be acquired through application and practice.  We know how to do this, we have been developing the capability to do this for more than 15 years.  We have achieved this with a wide variety of organisations from SME to corporate divisions.  And, this is the killer, we have developed our Competitive Strength Report process, a powerful tool to measure it in a business leadership


Frankly, we are becoming frustrated by the failure of UK business leaderships, and the business commentariat,  to realise that the key to survival of their businesses and our economy (and my pension, dammit!), lies in facing up to, and tackling the management of attitudes, behaviours and beliefs in a rational, structured and disciplined manner.  That means that they will need to abandon their comfortable excuse of Blindness ("Leadership failure", Indeed!) and learn something new, a different way of thinking.

Exceeding Expectations is brought to you by Steve Goodman and Tony Ericson partners in Achievement Coaching International where we help businesses to learn different thinking to enable different actions that deliver the different results that Make a Big Difference.. It is one of our "Excellence Quartet" of blogs promoting the cause of Excellence as the key to prosperity. We publish regular articles using a recent business/financial topic to highlight different perspectives and conclusions to those obtained by conventional thinking and techniques. You can read the other three blogs at "Business Bloop Award", "You're having a laugh ... seriously?"and "Capitalism or ... Common Sense".

What Do They Know That Others Don’t?

Three cleans up as larger rivals flounder

Nic Fildes, The Times - Published at 12:01AM, March 30 2012

Britain’s smallest mobile phone network has racked up more than eight million customers after scooping up defectors from larger rivals in the second half of last year.

Three, which is owned by Hutchison Whampoa, Asia’s largest company, recorded an 18 per cent rise in customers to 8.2 million as larger networks reduced their previously unlimited data packages.

Other British parts of the Hutchison Whampoa empire have also thrived. Cheung Kong Infrastructure, which includes Northumbrian Water and EDF’s British energy distribution network, boosted revenue by 8 per cent to HK$30 billion (£2.4 billion) in the year, while its operating profit increased 26 per cent to HK$13 billion.

Meanwhile, its ports business, which owns Felixstowe, Britain’s biggest port, and Harwich and Thamesport on the Medway, improved revenue by 8 per cent to HK$33 billion with operating profit up 16 per cent at HK$8.2 billion.

Its retail arm, A. S. Watson, which owns the Superdrug chain, reported revenue growth of 37 per cent to HK$144 billion with operating profit up 18 per cent to HK$9.5 billion.

Three reported an operating profit of £30 million, which was 83 per cent lower than in 2010. However, Richard Woodward, the chief financial officer, said that the profit in the previous year was boosted by a significant one-off gain and the 2011 performance was effectively its first year of profitability.

“This growth is not a flash in the pan. We’re not a one-hit wonder,” he added.

This is a really interesting story. It opens up many issues about the sources of outstanding results and leadership mythologies.

Robust research, by Dr Vinod Singhal of Georgia State University, established that companies that achieved operational, managerial and organisational excellence delivered massive Comparative Competitive Strength that, in turn, produced outstanding financial results.

This point of view suggests that Hutchison Whampoa should be expected to be significantly more competent across a number of dimensions than their competition.

Financial experts might well look to see where else that competence is going to deliver outstanding results.

Competitors might seek to find out what there is in the behaviour, attitudes and beliefs of managements and people in Hutchison Whampoa's widely differing companies that delivers such a consistency of excellent performance?

The "flash in the pan" question depends on whether the leadership of Hutchison Whampoa are consciously competent in their Competitive Strength. Have they developed a really robust business culture? The fact that they are ahead in four such distinctly different business sectors suggest that they might have. On the other hand, the potential fragility of such winning cultures was well illustrated by Jim Collins in "Good to Great" where he examined the relationship between outstanding business performance and individual leadership; not every company continued to prosper after changes of CEO.

We know from our direct experience with clients that the behaviours, attitudes and beliefs that can deliver outstanding Competitive Strength can be built and sustained. Different thinking can enable different actions that deliver significantly different results – it is simple, but not easy. We have also seen that this outstanding Competitive Strength can be destroyed, even within a few months, by a different leadership that fails to understand the importance of the behaviours, attitudes and beliefs that have made such a difference. Such effects are not unusual in takeovers and mergers, as we have written in other blogs.

So there could be much to learn from Hutchison Whampoa. There could be much that they have to teach us all. There could be much for their future competitors in any new market they enter to worry about!

Exceeding Expectations is brought to you by Steve Goodman and Tony Ericson partners in Achievement Coaching International where we help businesses to learn different thinking to enable different actions that deliver the different results that Make a Big Difference.. It is one of our "Excellence Quartet" of blogs promoting the cause of Excellence as the key to prosperity. We publish regular articles using a recent business/financial topic to highlight different perspectives and conclusions to those obtained by conventional thinking and techniques. You can read the other three blogs at "Business Bloop Award", "You're having a laugh ... seriously?"and "Capitalism or ... Common Sense".