If these conditions prevail at small companies and start-ups, would they not trigger similar top talent responses?
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12/14/2011 @ 10:31AM
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Top Ten Reasons Why Large Companies Fail To Keep Their Best Talent
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Whether it’s a high-profile tech company like Yahoo!, or a more established conglomerate like GE or Home Depot, large companies have a hard time keeping their best and brightest in house. Recently, GigaOM discussed the troubles at Yahoo! with a flat stock price, vested options for some of their best people, and the apparent free flow of VC dollars luring away some of their best people to do the start-up thing again. |
Yet, Yahoo!, GE, Home Depot, and other large established companies have a tremendous advantage in retaining their top talent and don’t. In our business, we see the good and the bad things that large companies do in relation to talent management. Here’s my Top Ten list of what large companies do to lose their top talent : |
Failing to Find a Project for the Talent that Ignites Their Passion. |
Poor Annual Performance Reviews. |
No Discussion around Career Development. |
Shifting Whims/Strategic Priorities. |
Lack of Accountability and/or telling them how to do their Jobs. |
Top Talent likes other Top Talent. |
The Missing Vision Thing. |
It’s never a one-way street. Top talent has to assume some responsibility as much as the organization. However, with the scarcity of talent — which will only increase in the next 5 years — Smart Organizations are ones who get out in front of these ten things, rather than wait for their people to come to them, asking to implement this list. |
"The financial impact of doing all the shifts together is extraordinary. Paradoxically, when the firm focuses on delighting the customer, it makes more money than if it focused directly on making money. Compare the ten-year share price of well-known firms implementing most of the principles like Apple, Amazon, and Salesforce, with increases of ten times or more, with that of traditional stalwarts like GE, Cisco, Wal-Mart, which struggle even to maintain their share price constant. "
daily dispatches from the management vanguard
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Busting Bureaucracy with Radical Management |
To transform organizations so that they are fit for human beings--more inspiring and engaging and yet just as disciplined and even more productive--we need to understand why promising ideas for improving management developed in the 20th Century--such as teams, empowerment, delayering or innovation--failed to become a permanent part of the standard management repertoire.
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The default mental model of management
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These improvements didn't stick because of the mental model around management should be conducted that is still remarkably pervasive in the Fortune 500. It comprises five interlocking principles.
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These five interlocking principles constitute an organizational culture. Single-fix improvements have difficulty enduring in this culture because they are usually incompatible with it. Improving one dimension of the culture is undermined by countervailing pressure from the other four dimensions. To achieve sustained change, we must move beyond single fixes and think in terms of systemic change.
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A changed business context has caused declines in firm performance
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Transforming management must also reflect the epochal change in the business environment. As Roger Martin has noted, we have moved from an age of shareholder capitalism to an age of customer capitalism. The balance of power in the marketplace has shifted from seller to buyer. Fifty years ago, big firms were in charge. Today, given the choice offered by global competition and customers' access to reliable information, along with their ability to communicate with each other, the customer is now in charge.
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A new mental model of management: radical management
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To deal with these issues, a new mental model of management is emerging. Its principles were developed in the software realm--beginning in the mid-1990s as "Agile and "Scrum." "Radical management" reimagines the five interlocking principles of traditional management for a new age:
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Communications shift from top-down commands to horizontal, adult-to-adult conversations. |
A new bottom line for the firm
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The gains in performance are extraordinary
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Editor's note: Do you have any ideas for busting bureaucracy and reinventing management? Share your progressive practices and disruptive ideas in the Beyond Bureaucracy Challenge. We're looking for STORIES and HACKS around making organizations more inspiring and engaging; developing an outside-in orientation; and managing without managers. Read more at www.managementexchange.com |
The Fukushima Project.
Interview with a leader of independent 3rd party investigation. Facts to be released in book format later. Fukushima Disaster：What was the key factor which brought about the Nuclear Power Plant Disaster? (「FUKUSHIMAを問う」英訳版) |
Interview with: Eiichi Yamaguchi, Professor, Doshisha University, Deputy Director of Institute of Technology Enterprise and Competitiveness (ITEC). |
"The disaster which occurred at the TEPCO (Tokyo Electronic Power, Co.) Fukushima No.1 Nuclear Power Plant, was simply brought about by human errors on the side of the technology management, and not by disaster or coincidence. This accident was 100% predictable. ---noted Professor Eiichi Yamaguchi, Doshisha University, Deputy Director of Institute for Technology Enterprise and Competitiveness (ITEC). |
Professor Yamaguchi has been in the process of researching the root of the disaster by taking a closer look at the technology management as the chairman of the "Fukushima Project". The purpose of this project is to analyze the disaster from a 3rd party stance in order to avoid problems of conflict due to financial or other interests which could potentially arise. After doing so a kind of recommendation plan for the future will be provided. |
Q. As a technology management and theoretical physics professor, what is your personal view on this recent disaster? |
Prof. Yamaguchi:
As I am an individual with no anti-nuclear or pro-nuclear views, who simply looks at this problem from a clearly objective point of view, I was quite surprised when the news reported that the tsunami had been the primary factor for the power loss and complete loss of control on site. Japanese engineers tend to work on the basis of social justice and ethics, rather than the order of an organization of which they happen to belong to. This means that Engineers generally plan out counter-measures in such a way to ensure that there is a fail-safe for any kind of situation, in this case it was their "last fortification" to protect against the unknown. With this in mind, it is hard to imagine that they would design the power plant without some kind of back up emergency power support plan to protect against power loss or malfunction. Having followed my hunch to begin researching this further, just as I had expected, I was able to find what they had designed as their "last fortification".
Q. What was it? |
The Single Most Important Question in Business |
…is the one we ask least often. |
As responsible business owners, we invest a lot of time answering the “what” question. What will I sell? What should my price be? What kind of marketing should I do? |
We find “how” intriguing as well – How will I find clients? How will I make ends meet this month? And we’re even okay with “who” (who is my ideal client) or “where” (where do I locate, advertise, network, etc.?). |
All of these questions – who, what, where and how can be just plain fun to play around with. Why? (hint – this is a pretty important question) – Because they are largely theoretical questions. I can answer ALL of them brilliantly and do absolutely nothing – frozen in my tracks but feeling as if I’ve made great progress. But we’re really just playing office again. Merely doing complex (but easy) things that make us feel important and impress others. |
European Credit Transfer and Accumulation System (ECTS) |
ECTS makes teaching and learning in higher education more transparent across Europe and facilitates the recognition of all studies. The system allows for the transfer of learning experiences between different institutions, greater student mobility and more flexible routes to gain degrees. It also aids curriculum design and quality assurance.
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Institutions which apply ECTS publish their course catalogues on the web, including detailed descriptions of study programmes, units of learning, university regulations and student services. |
Course descriptions contain ‘learning outcomes’ (i.e. what students are expected to know, understand and be able to do) and workload (i.e. the time students typically need to achieve these outcomes). Each learning outcome is expressed in terms of credits, with a student workload ranging from 1 500 to 1 800 hours for an academic year, and one credit generally corresponds to 25-30 hours of work. |
A series of ECTS key documents help with credit transfer and accumulation – course catalogues, learning agreements, transcript of records and Diploma Supplements (DS). |
Although ECTS can help recognition of a student’s studies between different institutions and national education systems, higher education providers are autonomous institutions. The final decisions are the responsibility of the relevant authorities: professors involved in student exchanges, university admission officers, recognition advisory centres (ENIC-NARIC), ministry officials or employers. |
An interesting take, yanking viewpoints back and forth. See if you agree, and if not, it is all fine. The occupy movement builds a space of collaboration, improv-style, They have a demand, many demands, and then none at all. They just show us facets of life. Which ones do you wish to see? OCTOBER 12, 2011. So far the Occupy events have managed to obscure and delay—or remain ignorant of—their precise agenda(s). This is taken as a sign of rank stupidity, but it may hold promise because, let’s face it, as soon as you state your political objectives these days, you’re pretty much finished. You trigger the opposition forces and you attract supporters, and then the whole thing eventually winds up in a muddy ditch, a car without traction… |
But if you obfuscate and hint and suggest and garble, while others interpret what you mean, you can play the media like a drum and short-circuit many brains and cause smoke to exit many ears. |
Yesterday, in New York, two guys in suits showed up at the rally with a sign that announced: WE ARE THE 1%. They intimated they were investment bankers. Police decided to keep them separate from the 99%, for fear of a clash. |
Were these two guys actors? Were they really part of the protesters? |
Now, I know these “occupations” could descend into violence, and if they do, there is a chance it will be provoked from the outside, to serve somebody’s political plot…but if that can be avoided, we have a chance to see something interesting develop. |
Wall St., big government, thieving venal corporations, recent college grads with heavy debts from student loans and no job prospects, unions, Obama operatives, the poor on welfare, small businesses wound up in bureaucratic red tape imposed by the government—none of them or their supporters are going to get what they want from showing up in the streets in various cities with signs. It’s not going to happen. This is not an A to B revolution. It isn’t a new political party. It isn’t a pressure group leaning on Congress. |
That can be a good thing if the glob expands asymmetrically. |
Media will see what they want to see and report on it, and the reporting will change from day to day. Against this backdrop of serious high-IQ idiots trying to analyze what is going on, we could get some real theater. |
Gregory looks at various sources relevant to the #OWS movement and poses a substantial question:
Is it more important to do something, or to not do the wrong thing?
He answers it with an insight worthy of reflection:
- At the level of the individual, it is more important to do something.
- At the level of society, it is more important to avoid doing the wrong thing.
Gregory goes on to quote John Robb：
Really simple: Occupy Wall Street is an open source protest. The Naive Search For Anachronistic Progress |
All plans imply an attempt to impose the values of the past…on the future.
- Alvin Toffler, 1969. |
As economic malaise persists we are now increasingly bombarded by analysts and pundits who correctly grasp some aspect of the situation but then persist in immediately jumping to the wrong conclusions. A few recent examples: |
Leopold Kohr warned 50 years ago that the gigantist global system would grow until it imploded. We should have listened.
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Yet, in the very first paragraph we encounter the following puzzling accusation: |
Living through a collapse is a curious experience. Perhaps the most curious part is that nobody wants to admit it’s a collapse. The results of half a century of debt-fuelled “growth” are becoming impossible to convincingly deny, but even as economies and certainties crumble, our appointed leaders bravely hold the line. No one wants to be the first to say the dam is cracked beyond repair. (emphasis mine) |
Call me an outlier if you like, but I hear plenty of people preaching about collapse to anyone who will listen. The author’s assertion is only credible if the only people who count are “our appointed leaders“. But, if what we are experiencing is a “crisis of bigness“, shouldn’t we expect the figureheads of the biggest organizations on the planet (governments) to be somewhat behind the curve? |
Systemic causes for the ongoing crisis come into in focus. A shrill highlight, related to earlier predictions, as a backdrop to the swelling #OccupyWallStreet movement. .. a few of us who know how to game the system can win big. Knowledge is power. Money rules. This was accepted. |
- a recent video (viral at 1M+ views) "BBC Speechless As Trader Tells Truth: The Collapse Is Coming...And Goldman Rules The World"
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- earlier predictions and solutions by Bernard A. Lietaer, below.
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First time to see an explanation like this for proverbial organizational disconnect, despite connecting more people cheaper and faster by open social media in the enterprise.
Here the blog post (minus examples) by Jeff Jonas, Chief Scientist, IBM Entity Analytics Group and an IBM Distinguished Engineer Another way to think about this is "the data is the question." |
As each new piece of data arrives in the enterprise, the enterprise just learned something. And with each new observation one should ask, “How does this relate to what I already know? Does this matter and, if so, to whom?" |
When organizations can process arriving observations for relevance … organizations will be more competitive, or might even, for the first time, seem to be “awake.” |
Note: The systems/technologies that are going to do this are very different than what organizations have in place today. Existing operational systems cannot do this. Neither can master data management systems, data warehouses, operational data stores, data mining engines … not even Hadoop Map/Reduce. |
Ever so often we heard it: capitalism is the worst system, except for all the others. Well, looks like there is an exception to that.
A value-oriented pamphlet/whitepaper. I do not agree with some 10-20% of the content, but then it's totally worth it. The Why, What, and How of Economic Revolution |
Introductions: Warming Up |
1. Foundations: Getting on the Same Page |
2. Analysis: What’s the Deal with Capitalism? |
3. Vision: Participatory Economics |
4. Strategy: From Here to a Free Society |
Conclusion: About Today and Tomorrow |
To sum up, if we haven’t lost you along the way, we should have an agreement on a few things. |
First of all, capitalism is not the party it’s cracked up to be. It’s oppressive, repressive and a lot of other nasty adjectives. It can be reformed, but it has essential features that make it inherently exploitative, and violent. However, despite the evils of capitalism, it is only fair that those who seek to dismantle it present an idea of what would be better. So we need vision, or else, even as bad as capitalism is, we’re not going to agree to go out and fight it. |
But – hold on – we do have a pretty good idea of what would be better, and that is a participatory economy. We know it’s not complete, and that we have more work to do on it theoretically, and that it will take a lot of trial and error to figure it all out. We know that even then it won’t be perfect, because humans (and therefore society), are dynamic, changing, critical beings (and perfection is just about the most boring thing out there). But we think it’s certainly a very good starting point. It is based on values we can agree with, truly human values: solidarity, self-management, equity, diversity, efficiency, and sustainability. It functions based on institutions that promote those values: participatory planning, councils, balanced job complexes, fair remuneration, etc. In short, it is an economy that reinforces the types of values we want to express, and empowers us to reach our human potential. |
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