#HR #RRHH Making love and making personal #branding #leadership

"Like a well-played symphony, when nonprofit leaders partner well with their staff and volunteers, magic happens.  Leadership & Partnership in the nonprofit sector:"

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Shared leadership can catch new leaders off guard. 

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All organizations, even those currently enjoying low turnover, cannot afford to rest on their laurels. Experts warn that despite rising slightly for the past decade to the current average of 4.6 years per person/per organization*, employee tenure will begin to wane in the future as the job market continues its recovery and more Millennials enter the workforce.

So, how can an organization increase employee retention and slow the “revolving door” of turnover? We explore this topic in great detail in our professional development course that examines employee engagement through the lens of Disney Culture. But, for the purposes of this blog, we offer this advice: Leaders should start by asking the question “Beyond a paycheck, what do my employees value?”

We’re all trying our best to remain standing, but the ground beneath us is shifting at an accelerating rate. The implications for strategy are profound, but few have explored this terrain.

Corporate culture is an incredibly powerful factor in a company’s long-term success. No matter how good your strategy is, when it comes down to it, people always make the difference. Strategy is rational and culture is emotional. 

Frugal innovation is associated with resource-constrained and low-income emerging economies such as those of Africa, India, and China, but we have recently seen the rise of frugal innovation efforts in developed nations including the U.S. and in Europe. These are not primarily cost-cutting measures, a response to financial constraint or a tepid economy. Rather, across the developed world, companies are beginning to use frugal innovation as a growth strategy. They are introducing a larger lineup of new products and services, often with greater economic and social value, at a much lower cost and using fewer natural and financial resources. Their goal is not to create cheap offerings. They want to create more effective offerings that draw people in with their simplicity, while also cutting down on the use of various resources.

It turns out that the four key attributes of frugal innovation — affordability, simplicity, quality, and sustainability — are exactly the qualities that customers in mature markets want most. This makes frugal innovation a viable growth strategy for companies expanding in those markets, not just in emerging economies.

Many business leaders subscribe to the classic definition of strategy as a set of actions designed to achieve an overall aim. In other words, they believe strategy starts with a goal. But for companies that have implemented winning strategies, that’s not how it typically happens.

Consider the recent article, “Why Strategy Execution Unravels — and What to Do About It“ by Donald Sull, Rebecca Homkes, and Charles Sull, in the March 2015 issue of HBR.  Articles like this are well meaning and all set out to overcome the shortfalls of “execution.” But they all fail, including this one, and for the same reason: you can’t prescribe a fix for something that you can’t describe. And no one can describe “strategy execution” in a way that does not conflict with “strategy.”

Blaming poor execution for the failure of your “brilliant” strategy is a part of what I’ve termed “The Execution Trap” — how “brilliant” can your strategy really be if it wasn’t implementable?

Intuition forms over time. When McKinsey began publishing the Quarterly, in 1964, a new management environment was just beginning to take shape. On April 7 of that year, IBM announced the System/360 mainframe, a product with breakthrough flexibility and capability. Then on October 10, the opening ceremonies of the Tokyo Olympic Games, the first in history to be telecast via satellite around the planet, underscored Japan’s growing economic strength. Finally, on December 31, the last new member of the baby-boom generation was born.

In the last years of the nineteen-eighties, I worked not at startups but at what might be called finish-downs. Tech companies that were dying would hire temps—college students and new graduates—to do what little was left of the work of the employees they’d laid off. This was in Cambridge, near M.I.T. I’d type users’ manuals, save them onto 5.25-inch floppy disks, and send them to a line printer that yammered like a set of prank-shop chatter teeth, but, by the time the last perforated page coiled out of it, the equipment whose functions those manuals explained had been discontinued. We’d work a month here, a week there. There wasn’t much to do. Mainly, we sat at our desks and wrote wishy-washy poems on keyboards manufactured by Digital Equipment Corporation, left one another sly messages on pink While You Were Out sticky notes, swapped paperback novels—Kurt Vonnegut, Margaret Atwood, Gabriel García Márquez, that kind of thing—and, during lunch hour, had assignations in empty, unlocked offices. At Polaroid, I once found a Bantam Books edition of “Steppenwolf” in a clogged sink in an employees’ bathroom, floating like a raft. “In his heart he was not a man, but a wolf of the steppes,” it said on the bloated cover. The rest was unreadable.