The customer at the window, the wolf at the door

I recently kicked off a series of posts on insulation that’s meant to talk about the critical ways leaders can become disconnected—and hopefully provide some ideas on how they can fight against it.

I listed four kinds of insulation in the introductory post:

-From the larger organizational context
-From the work being done on the ground
-From wider communities of practice
-From the marketplace

In this post I want to dig into the last one, insulation from the marketplace.

Heads down

I recently kicked off a series of posts on insulation that’s meant to talk about the critical ways leaders can become disconnected—and hopefully provide some ideas on how they can fight against it.

I listed four kinds of insulation in the introductory post:

-From the larger organizational context
-From the work being done on the ground
-From wider communities of practice
-From the marketplace

In this post I want to dig into the second, insulation from wider communities of practice.

Haven’t we got people for that?

I recently kicked off a series of posts on insulation that’s meant to talk about the critical ways leaders can become disconnected—and hopefully provide some ideas on how they can fight against it.

I listed four kinds of insulation in the introductory post:

- From the larger organizational context
- From the work being done on the ground
- From wider communities of practice
- From the marketplace

In this post I want to dig into the second, insulation from the work being done on the ground.

Rebel without a cause

I recently kicked off a series of posts on insulation that’s meant to talk about the critical ways leaders can become disconnected—and hopefully provide some ideas on how they can fight against it.

I listed four kinds of insulation in the introductory post:

-From the larger organizational context
-From the work being done on the ground
-From wider communities of practice
-From the marketplace

In this post I want to dig into the first, insulation from the larger organizational context.

Insulation

I get to meet a lot of leaders in my day-to-day work, from C-level executives to line-level managers and everything in between. And I get to see them at their best–fresh off the victory of getting X million dollars for establishing an enterprise content management (ECM) program–and their worst–in the middle of a mess they can’t fix, with their jobs (or maybe even their careers) on the line.

There are lots of interesting things to note about leaders in both of these positions, but the one that’s been on my mind lately is the importance of struggling against insulation.

Review of Open Leadership, by Charlene Li

Just finished Open Leadership, by Charlene Li, which is a follow-up to her best-selling Groundswell. And whereas that book focused on the social media technologies that are transforming how companies do business, Open Leadership looks at how leaders need to transform themselves to allow their organizations to use social media effectively.

There’s a real glut of books out there on social media, and I find many of them lack real substance or staying power, whether because the social media domain is evolving so quickly or the books have been rushed to market (or both). Li’s book, in contrast, has a good bit of depth and will have quite a bit of staying power despite its timeliness.

Alignment (part three)

I’m in the middle of a series of posts focused on corporate strategy that are going to be part theory and part practice, a way to mine the work I’ve been doing over the last couple of years for insights. Hopefully folks out there will find them not only valuable, but good conversation starters for sharing their own thoughts and experiences.

In the last post, I began demonstrating an exercise that can help turn a laundry list of aspirations into a prioritized (and actionable) set of goals. We got as far as determining the Top Two goals that the strategy would support and then using the remaining items on the laundry list to formulate guiding principles.

In this post, I want to take the exercise further to show how to connect your guiding principles to the capabilities and projects needed to deliver them.

The way you do the things you do

Out of all the things we could do at any given time, which of them should we do?

It’s a difficult question, and one that leaders face on a regular basis. There’s a long list of things they can do, want to do, plan to do, have been told do to, or are smack in the middle of doing. But without strategy it’s more difficult to be sure why they might do one over the other, more difficult to articulate clearly and convincingly why they did this thing and not that.

Results

I’m about 50 pages into Redefining Health Care by Michael Porter and Elizabeth Olmstead Teisberg, and while I’m a long way off from a review, it’s already providing lots of food for thought about leadership generally.

The most significant thing that’s struck me so far is the strong, almost relentless, focus on results in the book, and it’s gotten me thinking about the role of results in corporate decision-making and execution

Oblique influence

I just finished a long section of Getting Health Reform Right about the role of regulation in health care that was, to say the least, eye-opening. And as usual, I want to leave aside discussions of health reform and talk more about the implications for leadership generally.

My biggest take away was that changes in health care can rarely be legislated directly: if you want to lower the costs of services, it’s not feasible to just mandate lower costs; if you want more people to seek preventative care, you can’t make a law that they do so; if you want better providers in under-served communities, you can’t just tell them to go there. This kind of direct approach will ultimately fail, either because the link between cause and effect is too complex or because compliance with the law is difficult to enforce.