Internal communication and innovation

Internal communication is inseparably linked to the development of any innovative culture. Whether this is improving the quality of service, delivering competitive difference, delight for the customer, better business processes, reduced marketing costs. The list goes on and on. All of this great, good stuff, which we all strive for, comes at some cost in energy and investment in skills but success is fundamentally limited by the ability to communicate effectively up, down, sideways, inside outside. The CEO’s moaning frustration of ‘Why don’t they just get it, can’t they see that this is not just good for the company and them too’, misses the big point. That it is up to them, and them alone, to communicate and to lead that communication effectively. This is their first and most important job, because without that ability no process, no initiative, no change, no improvement that needs to work will work. It’s that simple.

Yet many senior managers still persevere with the shouting louder, quickly followed by the placating ‘its fun to work here’ gesture. People are way smarter than most managers give them credit for. And, it has to be said, that the human condition often makes us all way too smart for our own good sometimes. We, largely anyway, have a disproportionate capacity for creating our own misery from the most tenuous of reasons. From one instance of inconsistency, one poorly used word, one miss-timed email we come up with an infinite number of possibilities that puts us on the road to the Valley of Despond and the recruitment web sites.

It’s a inbuilt survival mechanism. We are the only animal that imagines the future. On a personnel and organisational level this can be both a blessing and a curse. While we may look at future where the taking of risk, or the success of some personal initiative could be met with praise and prizes, equally, if we fail it means embarrassment, the loss of respect from our peers and managers. So why should we take any risks at all? The response is, in most cases, that we don’t. Unless we are motivated to do so. And motivation does not come from a snappy Power Point presentation, an email, a rousing speech but from one simple belief. Trust. Trust that you have the freedom and power to act without reprisal or criticism. Trust that what the management says the management actually means. Trust that they are making the right decisions for the good of the organisation and you as individuals.

And the killer of trust comes down to one thing. Inconsistency. You don’t have to be a great orator, a great writer or storyteller, although that helps enormously to inspire trust. Just applying consistent messages and the demonstration of management walking the walk works. It just does. But, one piece of hanging thread, if pulled - which it will undoubtedly will be - can unravel any strategy, any good intention and kill the momentum for change.

Effective communication is the be all and end all of any organisation. The worst of it is that most managers feel that they are great communicators. No doubt their intentions are good and their heart is in the right place. But in the thousands I have worked with over the eyars there are only a handful who actually get it. They are the true innovators who know that it is not just about having that great idea, or clarity of vision but know how to sell their idea, use their passion and are above all know that its about being consistent.

It could be worse.

So, you thought you were having a bad day?

We all have them. Dealing with the poor payer, a client who just doesn’t ‘get it’ and never will. A technical problem that you just can’t work around and the only guy who can sort it out is in a meeting (on the golf course). It’s what business is about after all, crisis management. If everything went OK and all of our customers were perfect we wouldn’t have a job now would we? And it wouldn't be half as much fun.

But, if today happens to be one of those days, spare a thought for one of my heroes. For those of you who know me you will be aware, as I’ve probably bored you to tears about this , that my big interest is the History of Science. The subject is filled with an unending list of people of passion, trying to deliver an idea, who demonstrate degrees of obsession and drive that makes most of us look like the simpering wimps we largely are. Me, especially, included.

Scientific endeavour has as many courageous and determined participants as any field of human activity. Probably more. For me their stories serve as a constant reminder of what 'graft' really is and make me truly appreciate that the entrepreneurial and innovational ‘risks’ we take are, in the grand scheme of things and as our mothers often say, 'not worth worrying about'.

I started my a career as a cartographer, so it won’t surprise you, armed with that little snippet, to learn that the people who fascinate me most are those who mapped the world; dressed in tweed and canvas, they waved goodbye to their loved ones and cheerily disappeared into the undergrowth of another Continent. Not just for a month or two but in some cases for a whole generation. So, if ever you feel the sphincter muscle of fear contracting or get that stomach churning feeling that something big is about to go wrong or you think you have a ‘problem’, spare a thought for just one of this merry band. One Gulliame le Gentil. Or ‘Mad Bill ’ as we know him in our house.


His story takes place in the late 1700’s. One of the major challenges facing the intelligentsia ( Did I spell that right) in their drawing rooms across Europe, was to figure out just how big and what shape this piece of rock we are hurtling through space on actually is. Not for the least reason so that the people who did want to have a look around other parts of it could actually find their way back home to tell everyone what they had found. Some couldn't. One of the basic gaps of knowledge that would help us to find out just exactly where they were was to work our just how far we were away from the Sun. To do this they decided to use the astronomical phenomenon of the Transit of Venus, when the earth and the sun and Venus are all in a line,taking measurements of the aforesaid planet as it scribed its path as a little disc across the face of the Sun. This is something which happens about once in a blue moon but is not quite as rare an event as a politicians apology. Fortunately one such Transit was on the horizon, if you will excuse the pun. The plan was to dispatch people to different parts of the World; observe the transit at the same time, measuring angles and azimuths and such like and from the trigonometry they would, somehow- although I think I missed that particular maths lesson - be able to work it all out. This was the first truly international scientific project, with 60 teams from eight countries sent off to the furthest flung outposts of the known World. And what was known at the time, wasn’t really that much.

Not surprisingly perhaps, the task was beset by problems; Not just of the airline, ‘loosing your bags' kind of problem but slightly more dramatic; shipwrecks, pirates, disease, mauling by wild animals, the odd war. All the participants obviously had their own adventures and stories. Bill's story started a year before the transit when our hero was sent out from France. His target was to reach an observation site in Central India. He probably assumed that this would be one of the easier venues to reach. He certainly had drawn one of the longer straws compared to some of the spots that had been allocated to other teams. Siberia and the Middle of Wisconsin being the pick of the away days. But, due to a number of delays, I’m guessing possibly palm leaves on the line or the late arrival of an inbound brigand, on the day of the transit, he was still aboard his ship in the Indian ocean, unable to take the critical observations from the bobbing platform of his ship. He could see it, just not do anything about it.

Now most of us would have given up at this time but not our Bill. Oh no. Presumably he didn’t fancy the return trip because he decided to wait and observe the next transit- which according to the almanac would occur eight years later. The day of the transit arrived 4th June 1769. It dawned with a clear blue sky. But, for the whole duration of the 3 hour transit, one solitary cloud appeared out of nowhere and blocked the view.

Le Gentil, I like to think probably muttering a few expletives or maybe he gave just a gallic shrug, decided enough was enough and set off for the nearest port only to contract mega-dysentery en route which laid him up for another year.

He arrived home eleven and half years after leaving and had achieved pretty well nada, to find he had been declared dead by his nearest and dearest; all his possessions and property had been distributed with enthusiasm amongst them. Maybe there was a note saying dinner was in the oven'? We don’t hear a lot of him after that.

Other, possibly more famous names, were involved in the Project too. Mason and Dixon, before their four year sojourn into the New World to draw their famous a line that would divide a Nation, where given the Sumatra straw. But they never actually arrived, having been attacked and caught up in a small war with the French; who somewhat ironically, and scientifically at least, were supposed to be on the same side. In fact the whole project was a bit of a failure all around. When the results came in there were just too many readings with too many errors and differences to make any mathematical sense. For the mildly curious, as I am sure you are by now, the problem was eventually settled by one James Cook, former resident of my home county. His observations of the next transit ten years later in Tahiti, (Now there is a gig) gave enough good information for another Frenchman, Lalande, to calculate that our mean distance from the Sun is 150 million miles, give or take little bit.

I recounted this story to a group of school children, whose first question was ‘whatever did they do it for?’. 225 years later their work is brought into relevance as mankind faces one of its biggest challenges yet, that of Global Warming. There are hundreds of people whose exertions, (If ever is ever there is a word which understates their achevements then that is it), have contributed to the body of work, many of whom literally gave their lives to obtain this knowledge and provide us with the fundamental information. Knowledge which allowed us to measure and map the world and now allows us to detect and measure and predict the changes it will undergo.

We take for granted that we can now map the planet in an instant, and then bitch and moan when our GPS system fails to tell us that the road we are trying to go up in our air-conditioned iPod on wheels, is actually a one way street and we are heading the wrong way.

Makes you think doesn’t it!

Waking up your Creativity Mojo

To Julia, who reminded me...

Creativity IS the best therapy. Tell your therapist that you won’t be coming in today. Next time you feel anxious, sick, frustrated (insert negative emotion here), don’t TAKE something,– go MAKE something. Anything. Doesn’t matter what. Bake a cake, make a snowman, blow upa balloon and paint a face on it. When you channel your energy into the creative process and enter into flow state, you’ll forget all about that feeling of hanging on the edge.

Try it. Every single day, spend at least fifteen minutes making something out of nothing. I absolutely guarantee you will feel better. And if you don’t, draw a picture of how stupid I am, then send it to me. What are you turning your problems into?

Wisdom without distribution is selfish and soul-less. What you scatter is more important than what you gather. And hording wisdom without circulation is a dangerous act of selfishness. Now, that doesn’t mean you need to publish or share every single thought you’ve ever had.

But if you’re debating whether or not to tell the world, ask yourself, “What’s the worst thing that could happen if I distribute this idea?” Odds are, the answer won’t be as detrimental as you think. Are you being selfish with your exeriences?

Brainstorming sucks,… mostly. You don’t need another meeting. You don’t need another conference call. And you don’t need to spend another afternoon talking the life out of your idea. You need to take massive action. Today.

Otherwise you’ll get hooked on the addictive power of brainstorming – when what you REALLY need is to slide down hill in the plastic sack of execution. That is what is truly exhilarating

Creativity without innovation is useless.Sure, creativity is fun and cool and healthy for the soul, but there comes a point when you need to stop thinking and start executing.

Because there’s a HUGE distinction between creativity and innovation: One is a state of being – the other is a practice of doing. Both are essential, but neither can sustain you alone. Are you an “idea guy” or an “execution girl”?

Inspiration isn’t a Pow thing.If you sit around waiting for inspiration, the only thing that will ever come to you is lower back pain. That’s not the way creativity works. You can’t force inspiration.

You can only live your life in a conscious, creative and adventurous way – listen carefully to everything that happens to you through the filter of your Theory of the Universe – and then render what wants to be written or accomplished in a disciplined, structured way.

You’ll soon discover that reckless brain engagement truly is the best idea-generator. And you’ll never have a creative block again. When was the last time you made the choice to be inspired?

Lack of discipline dulls the blade of creativity. Inspiration is overrated. If you want to make Idea Lightning strike, you need to make yourself into an earthing rod. The best way of doing this for doing so is to cultivate creative discipline. To make yourself sit down at the workbench at the same time, every day, ready to create.

As a writer, I call this being “due at the page.” That way, every morning at 7AM when I sit down to work, lightning strikes. Because everything yields to diligence. What is about to hit yo uin the face if you let it?

Innovation Is (not) Just a word

Which is the most successful company in your sector?
Depends what you mean by success of course. The chances are it’s the one that applies imagination and creativity to meet their customer needs.

Who is the most valuable person in your business?
It’s the girls or guys who actively think, and then helps others to think and provide solutions. Sometimes referred to as the mavericks, rebels, oddballs - they probably have a surfboard strung up over their desk. Sweeping stereotype there but my apologies. I just liked the image in my head.

And who is the happiest person you know?
Again what do we mean by happy? I'd venture that it is the one person you know who has found the point where their passions and talents meet.

What do all the three have in common? Well apart from feeling very proud of themselves, and so they should, you could say that each has found a way to plug into and use their creative power within themselves.

But, before we go on, let me tell you what creativity isn’t.

The word creativity has been hijacked somewhere along the line. Its use now is as a catchall, encompassing word, sometimes applied in a slightly derogatory way, especially when used by those who ‘don’t get it,’ to describe the slightly bohemian, hippyfied amongst us or those people who march to a different drum - It is used as both as an adjective and a verb to describe those that write paint, play, dance, sculpt, do stuff with their hands, generally hang around at Hobbycraft. It is often accompanied by a slight shaking of an exasperated head. We have a guy in Barnsley who wears shorts, knee high scarlet socks and a matching bobble hat every day of the year; He is just brilliant and you can see him marching proudly around our shopping centre almost everyday in any weather. Is he creative or just weird? Bit of both really but creative definitely.

So here is my view; It's so much broader than that - you just can't describe just how broad an impact creativity and innovation it has made and will continue to make in our World.

Creativity is what happens when imagination has focus; innovation is what happens when creativity has a bottom line; enterprise is what happens when innovation meets ability, entreprenurship is what happens when all the aforementioned are put on the same cart and passion becomes the fuel.

And, if you ask most entrapraneurs, which is what I do a lot in my innovator workshops ; after they get over the shock of realising that they can actually make money from something they love, most will say that it’s the fulfillment of creating something from nothing that makes them warm and fuzzy. And then it’s a compulsion to do it again and again. They like the money too, obviously. Now that is creativity. OK it’s a bit of simple analysis I grant you but at least it gets you thinking. And lets me move on a bit.

To this bit actually - There are roughly 6000 languages spoken in the World, ( although we have just lost Manx apparently) These weren’t dreamt up spontaneously by the dictionary compilers or an infinite number of blindfold monkeys with typewriters but all arrived at by humanity's inherent ability to create. There is a glorious bloke down my road who has some fantastic flower beds in his front garden. I see him everyday on my way to work. Bob at Number 48 is linked directly, in so many ways both genetically and spiritually, to another eminent biologist and current media flavour of the year, Charles Darwin - Why does it take an anniversary to remind us just how blooming remarkable people are. Each, in their own way, required a certain spark to illuminate, the ability to look at things in a different way, to see a new pattern.

But I am digressing slightly. Why is creativity or innovation so vital and especially now in our current economic and social conditions? Well some would say the current situation is largely the result of 'a distinct lack of innovation and a preponderance of 'karaoke' thinking in the banking industry; which became an exercise in jumping on bandwagon riding, in this case on the track that lead over the edge of a cliff. The fallout of of this Innovation Impotence will be felt for years. The old ways, methods and rule books are having to be torn up. The impact and success of companies will now depend on as much as the ethical way they do business, their CSR programmes and how they manage their customer relationships to establish trust and credibility as much as the value of product or service they market. Innovation and different thinking has never been so keenly needed to be enabled universally, not just by individuals but by every public and private organisation.

Innovative companies attract innovative thinkers who contribute to them becoming more innovative and attracts the….so the cycle goes on. What are you doing today to address the innovation gap?

You may like to reflect on this. ‘Creativity can be applied to any aspect of human endeavor and enterprise’. Well there is brassy and bold statement. Certainly it can be used to improve or change a process, or a product, or a service, or to improve a relationship.

For what its worth I believe that anyone can be creative. the label 'creativity' applies to just about any progressive thinking. The creative superstar starts to think where the others stop. They break out of pattern, they zig while the others zag. You both get there in the end but they go a different route. By doing so they uniquely separate themselves out from the rest. And, curiously they appear to have a hell of a lot more fun and fulfillment than the zaggers in doing so. The happiest person you know? Maybe, probably.

The really good news, and this is really, really good news, is that anyone and any organisation can learn to harness creativity in all its manifestations. Its not hard. Learning to unleash your creativity is like learning to play golf. We can all swing a club and hit a ball ( except my mum) but that every so often anyone can connect and hit that one beautiful shot. It is the promise of repeating that shot that keeps us coming back for more. Everyone has that in them, the possibility to hit a hole-in-one but…. not all of us can be Tiger Woods. Creativity requires practice and the more you practice the better you get. But somebody has to show you how to do it right to start off or help you so you can experience that feeling of the sweet sound of connection and power as the ball flies into the sky as often as possible.

Alternatively you and your colleagues can be (un)happy with your lot, and sit feeling sorry for yourself, quietly fermenting in the culture of mediocrity. Conformity and risk aversion has come home to roost and he is a big, big turkey with a bad attitude.

If you were to ask me, and I hope you are, embracing creativity and innovation, at its fundamental core, is the recognition of the fact that that we don’t know everything but it’s really fun trying to. Well that’s the answer I would give today, but I’m not sure about tomorrow. None of us are. That is the point. But what I am sure of is that the only people who will lead us out of this mess are those that can truly embrace change, and apply their creativity muscles.

Darwin was right on so many levels. We have before our own eyes proof that it is not the Survival of the Fattest. It is those that can adapt most quickly to opportunities that survive and flourish. And we have a tool that surpasses every other leaping, flying, jumping, seeing, skill. Our minds. An incredible tool that can visualise a Billion futures and a Billion solutions. We had better start learning how to use them again.

Fail Like You Really Mean it

Innovation is all about risk and failure so....

Fail quick, fail fast, give yourself room to fail. Then write it up, learn from it. Share it put it where others can easily find it and move on.

Apart from keeping you fast on your feet it simply helps undermine the emotional baggage that failure implies and allows you to move on and take more risks. Prevarication wastes more money than any aspect of innovation management and we keep throwing good money and time after something which isn’t working. Risk and failure happen. Most things fail- get over it and move on to the next opportunity.

But the crucial factor learn from it, don’t repeat the same thing. Know what failure looks like and trust your gut instincts along with the metrics. Don’t rely on just the numbers.

And if you want to change innovation into stagnation, don’t bonus your management on individual project successes. They will just keep persevering and spend too much of their energy to find something to blame when it does go pear shaped. You end up paying twice. At least.

Value added innovation

There is new value phrase that I’m hearing. Heard it in the early eighties too. Remember them? The last recession? The phrase is ‘If you can save me money PDQ, I’ll buy it.

That's the new value proposition for today, and you'll do well to think about the phrase as you look to grow or maintain your top line.

The number one concern for many organisations today (beyond mere survival for some) is cost reduction. So, if you can give them the chance to do this quickly, they'll be willing to pay you a premium to do so

This line of thinking was reinforced when I spent time two weeks ago with some friends in the South West. They gave a up a small but very successful pharmacy chain and settled down to ‘have a life’ .They've got a solution that can help families save quite a bit of money on their overall holiday spend. Given the scope of the potential savings, and the fact that they have maintained growth despite economic turmoil, they've got a key innovation strategy nailed. It’s called a camp site, but one with electricity and wifi. And some of the most stunning scenery in England as a perfect after dinner treat. It helps if you have a good product to start with of course.

What can you learn from this line of thinking? Well the key questions to ask could be....

How can you partner up with your customers to help them achieve cost savings with what they would like to do?

How can you help them quickly achieve those cost savings : faster, say, than in the alternate economy of a few months past? Remember, faster is better.


Are there changes that you might make to your product/service line that can help to accelerate cost savings?

Can you innovate like mad -- thinking about what you do and how you do it -- to generate cost savings for those who rely upon you?

Think about it in the context of any industry. If you are in travel/hospitality, and you offer cost savings with what you are selling, you've got a leg up on the competition. If you are selling a service, get the potential cost savings that the service provides out front, and clearly defined -- highlight them. If you are selling an industry solution, re-examine the cost savings that your solution provides -- and see what you can do to make them bigger.

Add value, drive down cost. Business is easy if you remember that.

Think about the phrase, and look for the innovation opportunity in it.

30 Email tips for Innovation Amplification

Love it or curse it, email provides either the super-lubricating oil or the over boiled jam in the gears of any organisation, depending on the skill of the writers and the culture of the organisation. How the hell did we manage to communicate before Outlook, or put a man on the moon, or organise Live Aid? The fact is we did and, some would say, communicate a whole lot better in the process. Certainly we wasted far less time, and had less 'noise' to deal with.

Following are 30 tips which will reduce the time we all spend wrapped up in our mail mess and hopefully gives us more time for productive and creative thinking and... er...work:

Email tips

1. Use subject lines and titles that mean something, precisely. It gives people a clue about what they have to do with it. And helps retrieving information from the fossil record of their in-box at some late date.

2. Switch off email incoming warnings. There is nothing that important that can't wait an hour or so. If it is mission critical then use telephone! They still work.

3. If you really have to write a long email put a 'contents' at the top and tell people what’s in the rest. And what they need to do, if anything.If nothing then tell them that too.

4. Think! Do I have another way of distributing this information; Intranet, Blog, or bless us, by getting off our behinds and walking over to the individual or using the phone. Word of mouth - that works too.

5. One sentence paragraphs are fine, absolutely.

6. Use Headings.

7. Use Bullet points.

8. Put the main information you want to convey at the top of the message. And work down in descending importance - Mission critical to, why am I actually writing this at all?

9. Ask continually 'Why am I writing this at all'.

10. Write warmly, not like a robot, which is a bit jerky and boring.

11. Bring your personality to work.

12. Remember the Three Tee’s

Clarity - Brevity - Personality.

13. Make sure the links you may put in actually work.

14. Don’t attach whole documents, just paste the relevant bits into the message. A 20 page PDF that you have to read through just to get to the with one relevant paragraph is worse than useless?

15. Use the spill chacker.

16. Don’t use texteese unless it’s for a colleague (you actually know)

17. Don’t send ‘thank you’ replies.

18. Don’t abuse the priority buttons.

19. One subject per email… or find another way of doing it.

20. Always bear in mind that you are, in general, asking somebody to put your email on their to-do list and they may be up to their eyeballs in their own to-do’s. Virtually every email is a sales letter to get somebody to do something, even if it is just to read the damn thing.

21. Wait 5 hours before replying to emails that wrankle. DO NOT hit the reply button immediately. Email is the fastest way to unintentionally upset people known to man. 80% of communication is non-verbal and it is very easy not to see or appreciate the smile or irony behind the phrase somebody may think was very clever when they wrote it. And if they are being a bit tart,.......... then a short pause helps everyone to cool down a bit.

22. If you can’t reply fully immediately tell them when you can and then do it. Under promise over deliver.

23. Your colleague is a customer too. Teatr them as if they were your best customer.

24. 90% of emails are persuading somebody to do something.

25. 80 % of emails travel less than 50 meters. Why not get off your ...... and go to see them and have a chat. Guess what? That works too. Probably better and it certainly helps for the next time you need some help.

26. Emails are not 'buck passers' or 'insurance policies'.

27. Think, before you CC, do the c-ceed really, really need to see this.

28. Use CC only when absolutely necessary. If they aren’t the prime recipient why are you CC’ing them at all?

29. Use the Intranet more. If you can’t, then fix it quickly. Spending £50K on a great intranet will save at least in less than a month in productivity for any organisation of over 100 people - FACT!

30. Try using other technology. Twitter, SMS, anything that works; If you don't know how then get a technology coach

Communication is the fuel for innovation - it shouldn't be the brake

Ready, set .... BANG!

More often than not, in my teaching and in writing about innovation and change management, I seem to spend a great deal of time looking at trends and explaining how organisations can adapt internally to position themselves to capitalise on the opportunities they may be presented with. And much of that time is currently spent trying to putting into perspective the fact that even though we've always had downturns there are still plenty of growth opportunities. But one thing is for sure, that applying creativity to those plans and making innovation the heart beat of an organisation, to allow you to hit the floor running when the ties loosen and things start to get moving again, isn’t just a nice thing to think about, but is going to be fundamental. And if you don't embrace that then you really will be toast, no matter what your size and resources.

What has become evident, to me at least, is that probably the most pressing issue for any business owner, leader and indeed any organisation leader, today is in bringing things back to the core. In order to take a step up in developing an internal innovation culture we have to take a step back first. While uncertainty and chaos disrupts local and global markets, there continue to be the basic truths that still apply: understanding your industry, competition, skills requirements, the gap in capabilities, but most importantly understanding your customer and having the ability to respond to their requirements quickly and effectively through outstanding internal communication, are the factors that will define any organisations’s future success. Thinking outside the box is all well and good but you still have to look in your own box too to see what really is there hiding in the corners. But look in a different way

So what can you do right now to make sure you are at least on the starting blocks when the pistol is fired?

Think expand.
The current climate it is undoubtedly depressing and demoralising and it's all too easy right now to lose your motivation and direction. It is easy to say but Don't let that happen! The future is out there still! So think opportunity: Apple, GM, (OK, Bad example ;-),Microsoft and my window cleaner, who now has 15 people working for him and is just as much a success as the big guys, were all founded in periods of recession.

Check your reaction times
Agility is the key word. You have to have a team that can react to opportunities faster than the competition. That means giving them the freedom to make decisions, not body-checked by internal processes and management pyramids. Allow them to take real responsibility for their own budgets and have fixed goal posts that everyone understands. Your people are way, way better and more capable than you think. Let them think and be inspired by taking off the shackles.

Immerse in creativity.

Idea generation is now at warp speed- products are insect like in their life span but appear out of nowhere. Twitter didn’t ‘exist’ 12 months ago until Stephen Fry talked about it on national TV. Incidentally have you ever seen an ad for Twitter? Rapid product change is not just desirable it is what is happening now: we don’t have choice in dealing with it, reacting to it and embracing it. We just have to face it.

Check your knowledge.
Your ability to access ever more scarce, specialised skills will define your future success. It's your ability to establish a fast, agile, quick-to-assemble collaborative team that will define your ability to grab all the opportunity that is emerging out there. If you don’t have, it get it. Creative talent is your most valuable asset. Not mini-me’s and karaoke ideation. Look outside your industry. A sign of a truly crap company, waiting like a dinosaur for the meteor to hit, is their recruitment advert which says must have xxx years experience in such and such an industry. The job that should be advertised in that company is for a new CEO .

Know thine enemies.
Where are the threats likely to be coming from? Could new business models, technologies, new regulatory, political or social trends impact your bottom line in a way that you hadn't thought of before? The biggest clothing retailers are now the supermarkets!

Scout for talent.
Heads and ideas are your most precious asset and are going to be a scarcer and scarcer resource. Just as football teams scout the playing field of the world you must do the same. And don’t look in the normal places such as the Universities and the Milk round; look outside, at the new entrepreneurs, the children in school enterprise clubs, the single mums with passion, the new entrepreneurs, give them a platform and develop the management skills to utilise these in the best way for them, not you. People leave bosses, they don’t leave companies. The rewards in developing your talent pool are way above any ROI calculation.


Define your voice.
You have to keep people focused on the future. Not what happened last week. Leadership is largely about keeping your team focused on opportunity and goals, and then carrying the water for them to allow them to deliver. Positivity, talking about the future and consistency reinforce that. If you waver, so will they and then you are on pushing a snowball up a volcano.

No time to do a to do list

No time to do a to do list

If I hear another person say to me, ‘You have to work smarter not harder’ I may loose the plot. It’s the sort of consultant speak sound bite that wrankles to the core of my bone marrow. This is not just because everyone uses it; it’s become a consultant's karaoke song, like 'Imagineering' or 'lean manufacturing' or 'just in time'. Urgh! Even simple act of just writing the phrase down gives me that squirmy goose bumps feeling. Because, as a piece of advice, it is sooo utterly useless.

If I was smarter I wouldn’t have to work harder now would I?

I’d love the time to get myself smarter. To be ultra efficient, successful, smug. It can’t be that hard. I mean look at my dingbat competitor down the road. He's playing golf everyday and picking up his kids from school and was in the bottom set for maths!

‘What you need’ the life coaches and mentors say,’ is to take control of your 'to do' list’. It’s a start I suppose, and I take their point but I am a little bewildered. Exactly which list are they talking about here? Is it the one I have on my Windows Outlook that I started in the airport departure lounge in a fit of organisational sobriety while I had nothing better to do? Would this be the very same task list that I’ve forgotten to update or delete the items I actually did remember to do, that pops up with those annoying reminders every time I open my e-mail?

Or, perhaps they mean the list on that piece of paper in the hole thingy in the car door where you put stuff so it doesn’t disappear into the foot well while your testing your ABS. Under the sticky stack of car parking tickets?

Or, possibly is it the list stuck under the magnet on the fridge beneath the pizza delivery number and the invitation to a swimming party. Excuse me while I go off at a tangent here, just because I can - Those invites often say ‘Adults are welcome'.….welcome to do what exactly? To turn an interesting shade of pale blue and stand around catching veroucas’ in last year's all too snug swimsuit, trying not to look at cleavage or cesarean scars while you try to suck it in to the point of hyperventilation- Mental note to self. Book tanning session at gym before aforesaid party. Membership should be used for something. Better put it on the to-do list.

There must be some better way of organising our lives. If we can put man on the Moon and crash a beagle into Mars surely we can have bash at some personal organisation?

Frankly, I’ve got no tips to offer personally. I could try to delude myself that I am some sort of guru or practitioner in the art of time management. But numerous editors and colleagues will gleefully attest to by deficiencies in this area. Frankly, and I can say this from behind the sofa of anxiety attacks, the finding this article on my to do list was a bit of a surprise and completing it almost a herculaneum task. Whenever, by some chance of fate, I do actually remember what the knot in my hanky is actually tied to remind me to do, I have to lie down in a dark room with a wet towel on my head to recover from the shock.

But, I know a man, or in this case a women, (why isn’t that so surprising?) who really knows about this stuff. She is one of those adorable American woman who can run a law case in three cities, solve a murder, referee her kid's softball game and figure out how to print out her spreadsheets so that they fit on just one piece of paper and maintain readability without optical aids, all on the same day…and then. to add insult to injury, she even has the time to share with you, on her life coaching blog site, her daily dose of assertiveness training and motivational adrenalin while casually throwing in the fact that she has today, a well as qualifying as an airline pilot, won the high school moms home baked cookies competition. She is Oprah on speed…

So I asked Melissa.

Melissa’s number one tip is to actually use paper, don’t make digital to do lists on your computer or electronic devices. Now before I get the tree conservationists rounding on me, and rightly so, I probably will need to remind the readers that even though they, and they know who I am talking about, will probably input all the relevant information into the ether of their hard disk, more likely than not they will probably only print this list out anyway. This will take up three lines on a piece of A4 paper, in the corner, and then they will stick it in their filofax or under a pile of papers and loose it. The paperless office is just a mirage. (Interesting side note here. Just read a pamphlet on the paperless office. Did the irony get lost somewhere?).

The advantage of using paper is that you may also use both sides, which will probably be really useful as you have run out paper anyway as you didn’t put ‘getting more printer paper’ on your to do list. The technophiliacs amongst us, may well be using a spreadsheet to help you with managing this list. Now this is fine but, if this is the case, my advice to you is that you and your Excel really should really be getting out more often. I used to work at a company (in fact most of them) where Excel prowess was seen as some sort of light sabre for the Jedi management classes, where management peer respect was judged by your manipulative skills of spreadsheet dynamics. It was not uncommon to see a 'droop' (my collective noun) of managers peering intently over a screen of grids with numbers in hushed conversations about what the benefits of a ‘pivot table’ in this application could be. (See, I know the jargon at least)

But that’s another story, for another time. The point is paper to me is so err …substantial. There is something oddly alluring in experiencing the pleasure of scribbling in the margin and that thoroughly satisfying feeling you get when crossing something off the list. It is the same feeling you get when watching the Sunday afternoon films after your mum’s Sunday dinner and the dishwasher is on its cycle. I know it's pathetic, but these are small battles won.

Somehow, if it is on paper, you feel you own it, it's personal. Digital is antiseptic. Not quite there. Maybe it one of these left side, right side brain things, a psychologist somewhere will undoubtedly have a word for it. Its like your pump bag at school; it may be embarrassing but it is yours and if anyone nicks it you will cry. If you ‘own’ it, you are more likely to take an interest in it and actually do something about it.

M’s next world shattering point knocked me bandy. To be honest she was on a roll and there were several she mentioned actually but I want to build up the excitement. She asked me to ask myself, or indeed you, this question. Should the item even be on your to do list? Does it actually need to be done? What would happen if you didn’t do it? Would the sky fall on your head? Should somebody else be doing it? If not, why not?

I felt a wave of feng shui flow through my nether regions. Here was a new personal mantra. I was aligned! And then she gave me a new chant. Only ever put three things on your to do list. Wow there, mister! Three? Really? But, she added, keep two lists; I knew there was a catch.

Apparently you have to have two lists, one in the back of your filonotethingybook, and one in the front. You move things to the front only when they have to be done. Now this is radical stuff. But it actually makes sense. I can cope with about three things at a time, anymore and I get sidetracked and end up not finishing anything. I can hear the sound of heads being slapped across the Kingdom. There is nothing common about common sense is there? We just need to be reminded about it once in while. Pity it has to be by an American.

My friend also told me to tell you that say if you do something for 21 days you will develop the action into a habit. For most of us getting past 21 minutes is tough enough. There are so many more interesting things to distract us. Like the satellite remote control or putting the kettle on. Not necessarily to make a drink, just put it on and forget you have.

By now light bulbs were popping on in my head like a deserted fairground and a kid with a catapult and grudge but we haven’t finished yet.

Don’t open your e-mail box before you look at the to-do list. E-mail and to do lists are non-compatible. Like olive oil and gravel. Didn’t Bill and his buddies realise this when they wrote Outlook. It has become some unwritten law, but one I’ve never actually seen it in any operations manual, that the reading and the replyment thereof of the new e-mails of the day shall take preference over all life processes in the Universe, even it is only from your mate discussing the lamentable merits of Leeds United FC’s 4:3:3 system. As soon as you hit your mail in-box your intentions to tackle your tasks, keenly honed on the commute to work, are gone like a leaf on the breeze. Take a deep breath and be brave! The World will not collapse into a black hole if you don’t look at your e-mails for ten minutes. Honest Injun!

Finally, two gems Melissa thought we should share in the spirit of sharing and caring as her 'Blogyourwaytolove' web site puts it.

Firstly, prioritise the list, even the three things you have on it. OK, so that is pretty obvious but some tasks are always much more important, relatively. An air traffic controller’s to do list- example, item 3. Must get the other plane to change altitude and course in the next er.. five seconds, has a smidgen more urgency than say, putting together a budget for indoor plant decorations.

How to prioritise though? That’s easy. Number one priority every time, is the completion of task on the list that is going to make my boss look good? After that, really just take a pin.

Mel's last tip was how to deal with the big items that sometimes appear, hysterically, the week before you go on holiday. For example, the complete, new interactive catalogue for a brand new e-commerce site in fourteen languages that the MD wants to launch at the sales conference in two weeks. Piece of cake!!!

Before we go into M’s solution I just wanted to flag up this Alert! More consultspeak. You may well have been wooed with the idea that you ‘should break these big projects into smaller projects; that you really can ‘eat an elephant, if you do it one piece at a time’ or that ‘epic journeys start with one step’. OK, that’s fine I get that. The fact is though that you will still have to eat some pretty unsavoury bits of an elephant that frankly make the bush-tucker trials look like a picnic. (Which, agreed, to some extent it is). So, and I agree with Melissa here, you should be thinking of ways to make the unsavoury bits more user friendly. Maybe share that task with a friend or colleague. Or better still, delegate.

The Pass the Buck technique only works, of course, if there is actually somebody to delegate to. You may well be looking down from your heady heights at a responsibility vacuum. The clue for you here that this strategy won’t work for you is when you realise that you don’t actually have to appraise anybody yourself.

Or, you could try to do it in a different way, in another environment. Like brainstorming at Starbucks and wash it down with a Caramel Machiatto to get rid of the taste.

Speaking of which, that reminds me, I notice that beverage replenishment is fast approaching on my mental to do list. Now if I could only find my filofax, make sure my PowerBook is charged up and my PDA is synced I’ll be in complete control of my appointments, contacts and list and able to work on the run. I’ll be off but before I do I will leave you to ponder this.

In the words of Melissa. ‘The knot in the hanky of life is there to simply to remind you. It won’t do it for you. Getting your thumb from out of your arse will always help’. Thanks Melissa. Hold on a sec, was she talking about me? Must add doing a to do list on to my to do list.

Give them new eyes not new landscapes

Employee engagement Part 1
Extract from ‘Defrag your business’.

I’ve been working on one truly inspirational and breathtaking charity web based project for over eight months now. It is just mind boggling and humbling to log on every day or so and see what the boys and girls have achieved. No-one can say that web technology hasn’t taken massive leaps forward over the last few years and changed our horizons and expectations of how we find information and interact massively. Except, that is, if they look at one specific area. Intranets.

Almost without exception they look exactly the same as they did five years ago. While the wide-scale adoption of social networking and the early stages of true Web-based rich media applications are part of our daily out-of-office lives we haven’t seemed to connect our intranets, our most powerful internal communications tool, to the benefits and opportunities they provide. Sure, they may have added a few tweaks and funky functions but actually and fundamentally not much has changed.

I find this both bewildering and exciting. Exciting as it presents me and you with tremendous opportunity. Bewildering because the power and potential is, more often than not, passing by with scarcely a nod or glance.

Intranet audits were a staple of my experience. I have seen lots of them. Way too many for anyone who wishes too maintain their sanity. With some glorious exceptions, which I can count with my socks off, there is little to suggest that intranet teams, (where the intranet has acknowledged by management as a key lubricant for internal comms programmes), are utilising the true power of technology and adopting the characteristics of the “read-write” Web to develop the concept of two way communication, engagement and all the fluffy pink stuff we like to put into our mission statements.

Forums, blogs and wikis are finding their way onto some intranets, but the number of companies employing these social computing tools is a bare fraction of the total number of intranets functioning today. As for the other elements of Web 2.0, I’m aware of less than a handful of intranets that have embraced notions like social tagging (as exemplified by del.icio.us, the social bookmarking Web site. The opportunities and benefits for social computing applications on intranets are huge.

Some enterprising companies are starting to use Wikipedia to develop an in house internal knowledge bank. (Arguably more useful is actually a 'failure bank' but that’s another story) These tools are used so not much for communication but address the ‘at least we know where it is when we want to find it’ principle. But the true asset value of a company is its knowledge repository. It is 60% and more or your net worth if you believe Harvard Business School. Can you think of a better reason than giving the management of knowledge flow, its retention and acquisition in your organisation anything less than 150% support and making it your number one priority? I can’t think of any either but amazingly, although internal communications, innovation and differentiation features in pretty well every survey of corporate priorities, (even more annual reports) few pay it more than lip service. Why? Because it is hard to do and few know really where to start. ‘We tried the intranet thing but it doesn’t work ‘is probably the most often used phrase I hear. So you give up do you? Or, do you just get better at it?

Lets just pick one simple example. The commonest .net2 deployment are, or at least should be, blogs used for collaboration and project documentation but even these only have even now a tentative deployment. This is frankly bonkers as they take seconds to set up and can save thousands of pounds

Imagine, just for one dizzying moment, that the CEO has a blog for a new product and then, just imagine, and I know this is a stretch, the impact and discussion arising from 40 sales people dealing with the inevitable launch issues and how quickly these issues would be flagged, fixed and customer facing people made aware of solutions.

The often quoted example of this in practical action is BT's launch of their Home Hub. Initially it was an unmitigated disaster but, by using a blog site to give direct feedback from sales people, installers and development engineers to the CEO, it was transformed into the biggest selling device of its kind, not just in the UK but across Europe.

Imagine her feeding back to the team, the whole team, by video with a small thank you and identification and appreciation. It really isn’t hard this stuff, but lets not get too giddy here.

The phrase I often hear from frustrated CEO's who are bemoaning the lack of communication is that 'my door is always open'. Yes, it might be but it works both ways too.

As I keep saying, there is nothing common about common sense.

So, why have so many intranets become covered in dust and moss? Mistrusted and a place of last resort for finding information.

Frankly, because it is not that big a signal on the corporate radar simply. On the face of it, there are few metrics that can get put on the spreadsheet for the weekly meeting that get the juices going. It is true to say that the benefits (and costs) are largely hidden. But if you have to pick one try just this one. Staff retention. Then look at the incurred costs for loss of knowledge and recruitment and training. Now that is truly scary. It can wipe of the profit for a business unit in no time. One key loss alone will pay for the tweaks in the intranet that may (I would say probably) alleviate much of the frustration in allowing them to do their jobs effectively. Which, if you are still awake, is cited as the number one reason individuals leave jobs

This position is reinforced by the often prevailing view that it is just good money chasing after bad. The existing intranet hasn’t lived up to expectations in the first place; why invest more time and effort in it now? Many executive teams, optimistic about the intranet’s potential in its early days, now wonder what all the noise was about. While there certainly are productivity tools online—that’s just a matter of common practice in the workplace anyway—the innovation and the knowledge sharing that was supposed to flow from the intranet just never materialised.

Why? Well we could point to a range of contributing factors. Actually you can generally just pick one of the following and you won’t be far wrong. Ill advised planning, design, not enough thought given to search and findability but in most cases it's just simply down one major decision, often made at the beginning of conception- who will be its owner? Who looks after it, nurtures it and cultivates it? For the answer to that see Chapter 8. ‘What should a knowledge manager manage then?

So who does own it. It is seen by many as a poison chalice - it is easy to pass the buck to IT departments. Too easily in most cases. Now, and this may surprise a few people who know me but I’m going to stick up for them, well, for a minute anyway. It’s a s**t job. That is why they bring their own sandwiches - it is their one small pleasure. (It's really so they can play war games at lunch and not leave their desks).

It is a close tie as to whether HR or IT departments get more bad raps. To be fair to IT, they have probably invested time and effort into developing the infrastructure of the current iteration of the intranet and, unsurprisingly given their workload of fixing printers and replacing laptop keyboards that are allergic to Starbucks Latte, are in no hurry to move in a different direction. They haven’t had their lunch yet anyway. Intranet software vendors aren’t exactly blameless either. Few are using .NET2, most use ASP. or ASP.net at best, which is five year old technology. Do you get the theme here? And then we haven’t even mentioned Sharepoint!!! Or bless it, Lotus Notes and making all that compatible with their new ERP system or SAP.

Corporate IT staff and corporate comms staff, some of them, anyway—are largely under informed, if we can put it delicately, about what’s happening on the Web and often have a blind-spot that something they use daily actually could actually be hugely relevant and have a massive benefit to them. They hold the belief, justified or not that ‘Our company would never sanction that’ so they don’t suggest or push their ideas forward. Its a self fulfilling prophecy and a depressing spiral. 20th century communication in a 21 st century world. And any way, should the IT department be doing that. Who should be keeping on top of this - Can it really be the IT department’s responsibility, most of which are stretched pretty thin just keeping the meter fed, and coping with Mr. Gates First Tuesdays. And beating their previous best in Call of Duty 4.

Many communicators/managers ( if that is not a contradiction, sorry but I'm just a bit skeptical), figure the intranet is working just fine the way it is; why fix what isn’t broken? This is an interesting view from those who inhabit the dreamworld of delusions of competence. How do they know??? By definition, at least for every IC and innovation projects I know and have worked on, is that its about change and change is not discrete but is perpetual motion. It’s a classic mistake to look at the project having an end date, think that box is ticked and walk away from it when it goes live and not put continuity and development factored in to its ongoing life-cycle. Even more so for the company Intranet. It should be the heartbeat of any organisation. If it is put down on a shelf you can’t be surprised if it just gathers dust and gets ignored.

Trust, and that is the key element in all effective communications, is developed through consistency, relevancy, timeliness and accuracy. One intranet I recently was asked to look at had not had anything added to it for three years. That is not an intranet, it is an historic document. Is it any surprise I some times have to run out of meetings screaming.


Inevitably at some point we have to start talking numbers to justify investment in fixing tweaking or ripping up and starting again. As you or somebody else from higher up the food chain will undoubtedly obligingly point out, there already has been an investment that been made in the existing portals that haven’t produced the kind of results most companies hoped for. It’s difficult for organisations to write off significant investments in order to start from scratch. But that doesn’t mean you should persevere with old tools and tactics otherwise we would all still be pushing paper memos around. It is interesting to see the metrics applied to measure its affect, success or return on investment. Generally these amount to a big fat none, which, for any management process is just plane daft. Its tricky yes, but hardly impossible.

And, if you don't think your intranet may not be mission critical in your organisation, here is one statistic you may like to reflect upon. Even if this is only half true is still truly breathtaking. On average the typical administrator in any office environment spends 45% of their working day looking for information to help them do their job. I am assuming that those who could make the decision to invest time, effort and funds in getting the intranet right have no concept or are remotley interested in the impact that freeing up 25% of their colleagues time could have on, their customer focus, their efficiency and even, their bottom line. If this tone appears slightly sarcastic my apologies, but it arises from the huge frustration that my experience has shown me that faced with all the other daily challenges what is looking them, literally in the face, every time they log on to their network is often the cause of so many of their problems.

The really infuriating thing is that none of this has to be expensive to implement.

There are some practical limitations too and by far the trickiest for most organisations, both public and private sector, is struggling to retain a command-and-control structure for their intranets. Tools that put control into employees’ hands are an anathema to intranets where only authorized representatives of the company can contribute content. But is that what they should be their role anyway? Is there an argument for loosening the approval processes in key areas? I’d argue, yes absoblinkinlutely yes. Should senior management really be a feared of any possible negatives and shouldn’t they be aware of them and manage them anyway? We live in a world of 360 degree reviews and employee engagement surveys, you carry out them of course don’t you? You don’t? Well you are in trouble then and the best intranet in the world won't help you.

Or maybe you subscribe to the view I saw recently in a post from an HR VP which was a thinly disguised ‘You should be bloody lucky to work for us, just get with it’. And then to sweeten the message, guess what, we are having a pajama day next week just to show you how cool and cute we are. Erm, yeah. Really? I see that in any comany and I’d be polishing up my CV. You will be needing it when your competition cream you into history or you get ‘outsourced’.

Just ask for this stuff, what can they say? No? Its just a word and won’t kill you. I’m hoping here that you actually have some form of innovation and idea management built into your intranet. No? Then start reading at the top again and pass this onto your boss and her boss's boss

Rainmaker 2009

21 tips to make you a world class (knowledge) manager by next friday

OK, here is a big statement. You may or may not agree with it but if you would kindly indulge me for the time being I would be most grateful.

A CEO, in virtually any organisation, has primarily one role. She, or he, is the person who has to find and implement the most efficient methods of consolidating, directing and dispersing knowledge. Internal communications to you and me.

Firstly, let us assume you think there actually may be something in this? As evidence to confirm our suspicions let me offer up this. A recent survey of the CEO's of 100 of the Fortune 500 companies by Boston Consulting found that they thought that, 'they could do better with corporate communications' and that it (communication) was one of their top five priorities. I draw two conclusions from this; Firstly, you can make a lot of money by carrying out studies of the obvious, and secondly, they didn't ask the right question. Interestingly, the other four items on the list, the usual suspects of profitability, cost reduction, sustainability and innovation, can only be influenced if you manage the knowledge flow in the organisation in the first place. You can argue about that over your next strategy/ priority meeting.

While you are doing that and mulling it over, you may also choose to reflect on the overwhelming obviousness that Intellectual Property is probably the only asset that gives your company its value. It isn't your bricks and mortar, your inventory, your capital investment. Another survey states - and this one is actually much more telling - that Knowledge accounts for, on average, 67% of the net worth of every corporate entity. So, if I was you, I'd better start looking after it. if you haven't already started. You may have a facilities manger but where is your knowledge manage? And if you have one, are they in the right place and are they actually managing knowledge.

It probably isn't surprising then that many companies - at least those who have got the point - have established a board position with responsibility to manage the knowledge processes, and implement those strategies and processes that will enhance this value further. The postings come under various business card guises; CEO, Knowledge Manager VP's, Chief Information Officers, Innovation Managers, Front Line Change Coordinators. If the company body have really been thinking with their heads on and not taking the first answer that they think of then hopefully have figured out that these positions do not necessarily have to fall within the shadow of the IT department. (Maybe I don't have you explain why to you but if I do drop me line and I'll send you my paper on the subject).

Internal Communication is often seen as something of an organisational poison chalice. And everyone, but absolutely everyone thinks they can do it better than the next person and has some, often less than constructive view, on it. How IC effectively works isn't just about intranet usage rates, or cascading briefs, the software, usability, or sorting data. That is, to be honest, the relatively easy bit. The real difficulty is the effect of the 'social software' within an organisation. What happens in and around and despite these mechanisms. Add to this the truism of every organisation, that everyone wants to change but nobody wants to change themselves. Getting people do something real and positive about improving communication requires developing a set of skills which is more akin to duck herding. Trying to get lots of individuals, with their own sensitivities, experiences, references and paranoia's and trying to get them all talking and moving in the same direction ( known as Quacking and Flapping in IC parlance). You need to delicately move them forwards without moving too quickly yourself so they all end up in the same place, without scaring them off to fly off somewhere else and onto somebody elses pond. Some people are really good at it. Most of us actually aren't, including many 'people persons' who truly believe they are.

With that in mind I've put together a few tips, which may or may not help people in coming to terms with their new job specification and working in the 21 st Century. How communication can effectively harness the talents of your colleagues and generate a truly innovative and empowered culture.

These are the twenty (or so) CEO/CIO/Knowledge manager's , or indeed any managers management principles of.. err...management

1. Don't always question.
I know it is what most of us do, and what the Gurus told you do in the old days of last year's fad management strategy. They implored us to 'Question everything. Challenge every assumption'. You still do that, just don't get obsessed with it. Instead, revitalise the casual conversations and information sharing as a normal business practice. And devote as much as half of your time to developing that dialogue. You can't expect to learn a lot just by challenging your staff. They will, more often than not, give you the answer they think you want, especially if they have to give answers off the cuff. Welcome, unreservedly, anothers thoughts and opinions and give them time to respond.

2. Establish a nil tolerance for Mediocre Practice but don't polarise the process and focus too much effort on establishing Best Practice.
Instead focus on ways to eliminate worse practice. When is best good enough anyway? A Best Practice will invariably come out in the end if you are initiating the other 19 ( or so) principles. Incrementally eliminating worst practice is a much quicker fix, for both you and the customer. In any case the question you should be asking is 'whose best practice are you adopting? Are you benchmarking yourself against the mediocre, the safe, and the obsolete? Is it a 'me too' action. Do you want to give Karaoke performance of Britney Spears or Ella Fitzgerald. For a lot of people Britney is good enough. But for some....?

3. Actions SHOUT.
I'd like to introduce you to the CASER principle, with apologies to Gordon Gould, the first man to use the word, laser, whose acronym I have blatantly hijacked. (Laser actually stands for Light Amplification by the Stimulated Emission of Radiation for all you pub quizzers out there, which is why you shouldn't really spell it with a 'z'.)

I have made up my own version. CASER which stands for Creativity Amplification by the Stimulated Emission of Results.

If you can vividly show the effect, good or bad that results from the implementation of their ideas then you reinforce the feed back of the original signal. Which is how a laser works. Show them that you take their ideas seriously, and they will trust you more seriously to share their ideas. It is absolutely not about a new staff suggestion scheme.

3. Actively Look Out.
Scan the horizon, not just through the myopia of market analysis or the telescope of your marketing or sales department. That is an awfully narrow field of view.

And have regard not just for at the usual suspects, the competitors in your field or your own market. Navel gazing eventually makes you look silly or deranged.

Most of the good ideas don't come from your own staff (Or you for that matter). You are not the stewards of all things 'magnificent'. Humbleness is truly attractive and inspiring. Acknowledgment of others contribution wins friends and accomplices, not just internally but with the external stakeholders too. Your customers will have way more ideas do how you product is and could be used.

4. Experiment Persistently.
Enlightened trial and error outperforms the planning of intellects however flawless their rationale.You can, and must, plan ahead to know where you want to go, and what steps you will have to make to get there. But then put the plan aside and focus on the first steps. Regularly stop to reflect on the action and repeat the process.

3. Let go of the need to be right. It's OK to make mistakes as long as you learn from them.
Your mistakes are your experience. Pass it on. If you malign failure, you destroy entrepreneurship, snuff out innovation and in the end you harm the company. If you "forgive and forget" because you want to be that great boss you always wanted to work for, that same mistake will be repeated twice or a dozen times. Failure is normal, accept it, move on but demand that lessons be learned and communicated through the entire organisation.

Expect no less from everyone in your organisation.

4. Empower but support
It is absolutely all right, positively, to give assignments to people who have never done that task before. The codicil is that, if you do, then it is your absolute responsibility as a manager to provide them with a network of expert advisors whom you trust. Legitimacy lies in competence as much as position in the organisation chart. Position without competence results in disaster. Competence without position results in helplessness.

5. Don't refer to the 'Internal organisation'.
Talk about specific people. Referring to other organisations of the company as "them" is laying the ground for future excuses about the lack of results for everyone.
Organisations are almost inevitably impersonal, complex, and change every 24 months anyway. People and communities however are far more stable, resilient and trustworthy.

7. Kill off internal client-supplier relationships.
The internal market approach is the very worst possible form of internal collaboration. A client-supplier relationship in a monopolistic environment is the epitome of bureaucracy. It damages the social network and value of the company and paralyzes its ability to solve problems for the customer. If you want to reinforce the silo mentality then ignoring this is the very best way of doing it.

8. Before deciding on a plan, always ask with whom the plan was discussed.
The raison d'etre of the corporate manager is not to come up with the bright ideas, but with ideas shared with other stakeholders. Reject all proposals and action plans bearing only the signatures of your staff or the CE0 for that matter. Ooop's, Did I say that out loud?

9. Involve people collectively in your thinking.
If you merely want compliance (at best) rather than real commitment then use managerial authority to deploy programs and plans from the top-down. Then you can buy a ticket and sit back and watch it all unravel. If you want people to adopt your views and act accordingly, you must engage in meaningful conversations with them, and not "cascade down" or "communicate messages"by e-mail. If you have a teenager you will l know exactly what I mean.

Think about the power of stories. No-one is won over by a PowerPoint slide, a chart, other people's quotations, or an Excel spread sheet. Well they shouldn't be. Nor will they ever adopt for themselves another persons goals. Intellectually in the short term it may possibly: the short term in this case being the five minutes after the Ra-Ra speech until the next problem hits them as they get back to their desk. For medium or long-term participation you need to connect emotionally. How to do that? Well that is the tricky part and the reason why 99.999% of all managers, including you and me are not Steve Jobs.

10. Management is not so much about delegating to individuals than about organising and empowering groups.
Effective action ("execution") in any organisation is all about coordination and synchronization. Speed of execution is best achieved by self-synchronisation of competent people who understand and trust each other. The first job of a manager is to detect who these people are and make sure they work together in the right setting (working group, project team, community of practice...) Or separate them if they or in a dysfunctional group. .

11. It's not about giving objectives.
It's about making sure they understand your intent. If they really understand your goals and if it makes sense to them, they will figure out what to do by themselves. It is by far more difficult to articulate a clear intent than to give objectives. Those that figure out that particular trick are the true leaders. Remember the power of the story in communication of this intent.

12. Never give targets without negotiating them first.
Giving measurable quantitative targets without negotiating them with those responsible for making it happen is just bad and poor management. But negotiate hard and if you do shift their comfort zone, give them the support to deliver. Not an excuse to fail.

13. Don't Squirrel knowledge
Don't think that you always know what information is 'good' for your staff. Let them know what you know, give them access to every document you have, unless it is explicitly confidential or for a damn good reason. Don't work on a "need to know" basis. No one ever said 'Oh, that Barry bloke, he communicated way too much'. Let them sort out the information overload. There are plenty of tools and tricks to help them. Even if you do cocoon them they will always find out indirectly but via the noise half-truths, conjecture, second-guessing, the water cooler whispers and arrive, probably, completely at the wrong picture. Paranoia is a part of almost every human activity so don't give it more oxygen. It is far easier to manage any fallout than motivate the disenchanted.

14. History is good- Look back.
Balance market studies, action plans, specifications etc. with case studies, lessons learned, good practices. Spend some time reflecting on past experiences. And ingrain all new employees and stakeholders with the story. Encourage the promotion of the myths and legends. Commitment to the past reaffirms the company's culture and the brand.

15. Don't promote people that sound smart, but those who make sure that smart things happen.
The company's promotion process is the primary driver of employees' emotional positivity. It isn't, no matter what you may think about money, or perks or glory, at least the truly valuable people in your organisation. It can build or destroy confidence or simply reinforce the CGAS attitude.(CGAS is an ancronym I will let you work out for yourself)

16. Don't expect dedication from someone who fears for his job.
All efforts are stalled by the fear of job loss. If you need to fire people, do it at warp speed, and make sure it appears to all as an exceptional event. Don't subscribe to the deadly spiral of cost cutting.

17. Never manipulate your staff. You actually can't!
Employees are hypersensitive to inconsistencies and incoherence across an organisation. They immediately detect every ripple of manipulation when they hear conflicting messages. Largely, because they are looking for them and we come circling right back to the paranoia thing again. Establish trusted relations with your peers first. Trust is the bandwidth of communication.

Juts one big note. Poor e-mail communication, drip feeding strategies, poorly timed. (Never send mission critical stuff out on Friday) is the fuel of inconsistency. Fast isn't always best.

18. Get yourself a knowledge technology coach.
Communication and collaboration technologies are dramatically changing. E-mail is becoming extinct. You need to up your game.

19 and 20. Ask yourself and everyone else you can think of, this question
What are you going to do to make sure you and your organisation have mastery of the flow of knowledge, bearing in mind that this skill will probably be your only competitive advantage next year?

OK, maybe you wont get around to it all by next Thursday.