| Been a loooong year,” sang John Lennon, as the music faded away on the last track of his 1975 album Rock’n’Roll. This December we know what he meant.
It has been a year of high anxiety. Good news has usually been followed by bad, making it hard (and unwise) to believe that the worst was over. For those who had never experienced it, bumping along the bottom has become a meaningful concept. But let’s not slump into excessive end-of-year doom. Looking ahead, here are three ideas to help business leaders have a happier time in 2010. Having realised there was a problem, Commissioner Kelly took action. Four years ago, NYPD established its Real Time Crime Center, a 24-hour, seven-day data warehouse that provides information and support to detectives who are investigating violent crime. Information is delivered to them at the crime scene. Clear-up rates and speed of operation have both improved significantly. This is what managing with “analytics” can do for you. Successful companies – Google, Amazon, Tesco, Netflix – have got terrifically smart at extracting the right amount of relevant data from their businesses, and making it work for them: finding unexpected, unseen patterns in customer behaviour, and exploiting them. In 2010, it will be time to get serious about managing proliferating data more intelligently. But don’t spend all your time poring over the stuff, because idea number two is going to require putting the spreadsheets down and getting out of the office … When I asked the chief executive of the global recruitment business Manpower, Jeffrey Joerres, about his management style recently, he spoke eloquently about the need to get out of the office and meet people face to face. Being a leader involves a lot more than just sending e-mails and “gazing at charts”, he said. “We are a company of do-ers, and if you have this big chasm between executives and [staff], you have no idea what the challenges are.” Increasingly, the gurus tell us, strategy is execution. In other words, it’s how you do things that matters. Jeff Immelt, chief executive of General Electric, gets it. In a speech at the US military academy West Point two weeks ago, he argued forcefully that business leaders have lost their way. “We are at the end of a difficult generation of business leadership, and maybe leadership in general,” he said. “Tough- mindedness, a good trait, was replaced by meanness and greed, both terrible traits … rewards became perverted,” he added. Large sections of Mr Immelt’s speech could have been written by Ken and Will Hopper, authors of one the most important business books of the past decade, The Puritan Gift. Indeed, in it they salute the GE boss as their kind of leader. The Hoppers’ book emphasises “the importance of a good managerial culture in determining the nature and direction of any society”, as Will Hopper puts it. Good managers master their craft, while also possessing what Mr Immelt calls “domain knowledge” – that is, they know what they are doing in their specific discipline. If only bankers had been better at banking, how much happier we would all be. It has been a long year. With hard work, and after drawing on these ideas, next year could be better. ____________________________________________________________________________________ Resources: Stern, Stefan. “How to Raise Your Game in 2010.” Ft.com. Financial Times, 21 Dec. 2009. Web. 2 Jan. 2010. |
Tag Archives: onsite training
Professional Development in a Technological Age
Has your training budget been red-lined? Most companies, schools and non-profits are looking at their training and travel budgets and wonder what happened.
E-Learning and software available today makes it possible to deliver on-site employee training programs more cost-effective than face2face training. Company of Experts.net has the expertise to deliver, great software and outstanding content to engage employees at a time that works for employees and for organizations.
Whether you have cut back or cut out your professional development programs – you may be left wondering how do I effectively manage now? Lack of quality professional development training can be a serious and expensive problem. One direct and immediate impact may be the high cost of turnover and the cost of recruiting and retraining new employees now replaces the fund used to train and maintain your current talent.
With curriculum designed for adult learners delivered on-line in real-time or at the employees and the organizations schedule with outstanding facilitators, the learning is timely, effective and cost-efficient. In this new era we are all required to do more and to be more independent, communicate with people in other parts of the globe and be part of the “team”. Our programs include time management, communication, customer service, motivating employees, appreciating culture.
Can soft skills really save money? How much time do you spend with the same employees going over the same or similar issues. Perhaps these employees are great “technically” but are their interpersonal relationships slowing down productivity? Smart companies are taking advantage of the new professional development opportunities appealing to their employees desire to increase their knowledge, skills and ability to improve their working relationships.
Company of Experts has a solid set of workshops and webinars online and we can customize your professional development program for you.
