Powerpointless musings i) Always check your audience's body language...

  From the Times a few weeks ago - it certainly got me thinking!

Sex and PowerPoint

Prepare to be startled by the next sentence. More than 60 per cent of business executives think about sex while listening to boring presentations. Shocking, eh? Most of us would have put that figure nearer to 99.9 per cent, the other 0.1 per cent possibly being dead. But research by the Aziz Corporation finds that on average only 76 per cent of men and 35 per cent of women eye up the speaker’s bottom or scan the room for totty during a slideshow. This is a risible performance and perhaps confirms that long working hours really do sap the libido.

Take heart, though. A stonking 88 per cent of business people aged over 60 admit to thinking about sex during presentations. Or maybe it’s just that as you get older, you’re more likely to tell surveys the truth.

Six Sigma, Innovation and "shrinking your way to greatness"...

I picked up a copy of Business Week earlier in the week, attracted by the cover story : "3M's Innovation Crisis - How Six Sigma almost smothered its idea culture". It provides an interesting commentary on the leadership styles of CEOs, McNerny and Buckley at 3M, and their respective attempts to introduce (or sheep-dip?) and then refocus Six Sigma to avoid that particular cuckoo pushing all the golden eggs out of the nest...

Some choice quotes:

"Perhaps one of the mistakes that we made as a company - it's one of the dangers of six sigma - is that when you value sameness more than you value creativity, I think you potentially undermine the heart and soul of a company like 3M."

Whilst I allowed myself a private smirk at the critical stance of the article, it got me reflecting on whether some of the tools of knowledge management, inappropriately applied, could equally easily undermine the heart and soul of a company. Too intense focus on continuous improvement and good practice sharing, at the expense of boundary-scanning, making connections and opening up resources, relationships and organisational boundaries...

Jeneanne Rae follows up the main story in Business Week with a short article on how Ambidextrous Companies can "have it both ways" and simultaneously handle incremental change and bold initiatives. She references O'Reilly and Tushman's HBR article on the Ambidextrous Organisation - I must read this, as some of the organisations I know (and have worked in) struggle to have the left hand know what the right hand is doing, let alone successfully harmonise their activities!

Jeneanne finishes with three strategies for managing incremental and disruptive innovative initiatives simultaneously:

• Separate the efforts. Don't expect people running mature businesses to behave the same as those in charge of startups. Each type has its own incentives, organizations, and talent needs.

• Appoint an ambidextrous senior manager to oversee both efforts. A general manager with responsibility for both traditional and new businesses will foster efficiency by sharing such resources as HR, marketing, and finance, and by promoting integration of the initiatives when the time is right.

• Support both teams appropriately. Don't shortchange one over the other. It kills me to see so much investment in reengineering, training, and employee time being poured into Six Sigma initiatives in the name of cost savings when innovation gets starved for critical research requirements like white-space analysis, ethnographic research, or prototyping. It's as if leadership believes companies can shrink their way to greatness.

That final quote is one to savour - and will be going into my favourite quotes list...

"It's as if leadership believes companies can shrink their way to greatness."

Dubai invests $10bn in a "knowledge-based society"..

Saw this interesting full page advertisement describing one of the largest charitable donations in history in today's Times.  Sounds like a laudable goal...   We know what a learning organisation looks like - but what about a learning Kingdom?

10 Billion Dollars

His Highness Sheikh Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum announced the establishment of his foundation with an endowment of 10 billion dollars, focusing on human development in the region. The foundation will facilitate and promote knowledge creation and dissemination, and will nurture future leaders, providing them with equal opportunities with the aim of building a knowledge-based society.

Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum Foundation

www.mbrfoundation.ae

More background from bbc.co.uk here

Community views...

I ran a training programme last week on "Building communities of Practice" up at TFPL in London. Early on, I used a number of photos to encourage the participants to discuss the business challenge that communities help them to overcome.  Flickr was a great source of shots of islands, silos, jigsaw puzzle pieces...  but it was this one of vineyards in Geria, Lanzarote which prompted the most discussion - so I thought I'd share it here.  Anyone got a better one?

Judgement day...

It's been a healthy last couple of weeks.I attended a "Patient Harm Conference" last week (provocative title, eh?) - organised by Tricordant, for the NHS and a number of health-related organisations all focused on improving patient safety. I had the privilege of hearing leadership speaker Alistair Mant discuss complex systems (using frogs and bicycles) the subject of Judgement (not in the biblical sense - that's another story!)

Alistair came out with a couple of quotes which made me think:

Judgement is what you do when you don't know (and can't know) what to do - and you know you need to do something fast!

Good judgement is based on experience; experience is based on bad judgement...

I guess I'd better be the judge of that!

Lights, Camera, (after) Action (review)!

I spent a fascinating day last week with some senior NHS clinical staff at a Leadership Development Centre in Leicester. From the outside, the building looks like any other office in the city, and as you go past the smart reception, it still looks relatively familiar, although signs pointing to areas like "Narrative Centre" hint at a something out of the ordinary. Then, turning the corner and pushing though a pair of double doors, you suddenly find yourself in the middle of an NHS hospital ward, - it even has that disinfectant-like smell like a hospital ward! This one, however is devoid of any staff or patients, but has a number of hidden cameras. Kind of like Big Brother meets ER. In fact, it was built by the same company that constructs the set for the British medical drama-soap, Holby City.

This elaborate and incredibly lifelike environment has been built as part of an "immersive" senior management development programme. Professional role-players act out scenarios involving the real professional staff - often tough, highly emotional scenes, whilst the other delegates observe the video relay, debrief and discuss . Speaking with some of the participants, they were all amazed at how quickly they found themselves "believing" what was happening during the role plays.

My role was to provide some input relating to After Action Reviews (AARs), and to use the role-plays to help the clinicians translate this input into real life - well, it felt real to us!

I was really struck by the power of simulation in learning - we don't use this nearly enough in business. I was also really encouraged that parts of the NHS are sufficiently progressive to develop their senior staff through such innovative approaches - and are committed to learning-whilst-doing.

CQ + PQ > IQ

Whilst on holiday last week, I finally got around to finishing a book I'd started to read a while ago - The World is Flat, by Thomas Friedman. All 569 pages! I'd petered out earlier when Mr Friedman had turned his focus onto the consequences of the flat world on the US specifically.

Anyway - I'm glad I picked it up again, for the gems relating to "Curiosity Quotient".

To quote Thomas: "I have concluded that in a flat world, IQ- Intelligence Quotient - still matters, but CQ and PQ - Curioity Quotient and Passion Quotient - matter even more. I live by the equation CQ+PQ>IQ. Give me a kid with a passion to learn and a curiosity to discover and I will take him or her over a less passionate kid with a high IQ every day of the week."

It reminds me of a discussion we had in BP in the late 90's - do we recruit drillers who can learn, or learners who can drill?

With Friedman's focus on China and India, I was also struck by the telephone conversations I have been having with a client in Bangalore over the past few months. I have been conscious for a while of the intensity and detailed attention that I was receiving - feeling that every word I spoke, or had written in "Learning to Fly" was being unpacked, weighed, set in a new cultural context and applied with a fervour. It's that fervour - hunger to learn - that I have rarely experienced with clients in the UK and Western Europe in general who are more often inclined to display the book up on a shelf near their desk, and (I fear) leave it there. A kind of intellectual trophyism that I'm not entirely immune to myself.

So my mid-year resolution is to finish the books I've started, to see what else I've been missing out on. That 11 hour flight to Bangalore should be a good opportunity!

Lessons from Herodotus

I ran a workshop for "Connecting for Health" yesterday, and someone gave me this little story, entitled "A classic example of knowledge in practice". They have no physicians, but when a man is ill, they lay him in the public square, and the passers-by come up to him, and if they have ever had his disease or have known anyone who has suffered from it, they give him advice, recommending him to do whatever they found good in their own case, or in the case known to them; and no one is allowed to pass the sick man in silence without asking him what his ailment is.

Histories of Herodotus: A history source of Persian Empire of Achaemenian era. Herodotus (c. 484-225 BC); Translated by: George Rawlinson. Connecting for HealthConnecting for Health

In our "knowledge-sharing civilisation" I wonder whether we have the equivalent of too many physicians, no public square, a lack of passers-by or just a lack of intellectual compassion?

In-know-vation

I was with the Henley KM Forum last week running a workshop with Christine Van Winkelen. I'm part of a project team looking at the relationship between knowledge management and innovation, and in particular, at the way in which KM practices can support innovation. A number of the members organisations conducted local research drawing out their innovation stories, which were scanned for recurrent themes. As a group, we then put some "flesh on the bones" and created a self-assessment tool (maturity model) , based on the combined experience of the room, plus an analysis of current research. I thought I'd share the high-level headings here:

Recognising/finding high-value opportunities to innovate, Re-using Knowledge, Internal collaboration, External Collaboration, Learning from Innovation activities, Building a learning organisation.

Next step is for the member organisations to self-assess and identify areas where they can share and learn from each other using the "River Diagram" approach - setting off a number of new conversations, and a whole lot of new learning...

Tagged!

I got tagged by Nimmy to play along with a "blog meme" which discloses a bit about my use and sources of media, so here goes... (I'll post something a little less self-indulgent shortly!)

Print - Books – I’m one of those people who is good at starting books, but less good at finishing them. (and even worse at knuckling down and writing them!) As a result, I enjoy books that I can dip into more than those which need to be read sequentially. You can browse my bookshelves at Librarything.com. I’m enjoying “Watching the English” at the moment, in which anthropologist Kate Fox explores and exposes the unsaid nuances which make the “English” so difficult to understand! Freakonomics was fun too. I’ll dip into Ed Schein, Bill Jensen and John Kotter, and them get my bearings with Rob Parson’s “The heart of Success – how to make in it business without losing it in life”. Out of the work themes, I enjoy John Ortberg, Rick Warren and Philip Yancey’s perspectives on real-world Christianity. Give me some free time by a pool or on a beach, and a Grisham novel will keep me entertained. Oh, and you’ll find Jeremy Clarkson in the bathroom!

Print – Magazines/Journals – KM Review and Inside Knowledge, HBR (Borrowing Geoff’s copy!) and occasionally Fast Company.

Print - Newspapers – Guardian and Independent, but new more generally through Google News – so I can and do end up reading anything from Al Jazeera to the New York Times to keep a broader perspective. The Web - Google as a starting point. Wikipedia for a more focused result, the blogosphere for a playground mix of current opinions, gems and rants, aided by Technorati. Flickr for some fantastic images for presentations, Worth1000.com for more creative ones, YouTube for video, needless to say and Linked-in for renewing contacts.

Communication – A chat over a coffee always wins! Then email (but I haven’t succumbed to a crackberry) and Skype (occasionally from my wife downstairs!), Mobile and txt.

Audio - Radio – Radio 4 and is a great source of things I didn’t know I didn’t know, and is often my companion in the car. Melvyn Bragg is particulary mind expanding. However, after an hour or two I hop back to Virgin Radio to pretend I’m still young.

Audio & Video - Films/Movies – Favourites would be the happy ending genre of Shawshank redemption, Apollo 13, A Time to kill, but Saturday evenings I’m out-voted and end up with the likes of Nanny McPhee, Narnia High School Musical and any of the Disney-Pixar/Aardman animations.

Audio & Video - Music – Pretty mainstream really - Keane, Kooks, Coldplay, The Feeling, Mika, Seal, Corrine Bailey Rae, Jack Johnson, Beautiful South, Chris Tomlin, Matt Redman, Susan Ashton… Like the rest of the world, I'm an Ipod owner (although it doubles up as a nifty voice recorder), and use a Slimplayer to stream it around the house.

Audio & Video - TV – I always seem to end up watching the usual family-oriented X-factor-on-ice-academy with the children… Later in the evening I’ll stop what I’m doing to watch Spooks, Dragons' Den, Grand Designs (apparently I look vaguely like Kevin McCloud - a bit generous hair-wise, I think!), Catherine Tate, anything with Ricky Gervais…

OK, my turn to tag: Denham Gray, David Gurteen (second time lucky?), Caroline De Brún, Alex Manchester and Bernie DeKoven (Dr Fun)