Avainsana: Muutosjohtaminen

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Parppei: Tee, toimi, saa aikaan!

Kirjasta

Ria Parppei on väitellyt Aalto-yliopistosta, työskennellyt kotimaisissa tietoliikenneyhtiöissä ja konsultoinut yritysjohtajia. Ja sen kyllä huomaa. Kirja on kuin salapoliisiromaani. Sivu kerrallaan se imuroi lukijansa syvemmälle ja syvemmälle Parppein ajatusmallien pariin.

Minkälainen kirja oli?

Yleensä aloitetaan kirja-arvostelut kehuilla, mutta käännän sen tässä tapauksessa ylösalaisin. Kirja on huonosti markkinoitu, sillä en ole nähnyt kirjasta nostatusta missään mediassa. Näin mielenkiintoinen suomalainen kirja ansaitsisi tulla markkinoiduksi. Ilman sattuma kirja ei olisi osunut kohdalleen.

Kirjassa on kruusailematon lähestymistapa aikaansaamattomuuteen ja jossa turhat sanahelinät on unohdettu. Kirjassa puhuu suomalaisen johtamisen ammattilainen meille, jotka janoamme uutta tietoa. Jään odottamaan kirjaan jatko-osaan tai ainakin työkirjaa.

Mitkä ovat kirjan keskeiset ideat? 

Keskeinen idea on viiltävän tehokas. Englanniksi se olisi ”The Art of Execution”. Kirja esittelee motivaation ja volition välistä suhdetta. Volitio on toimeenpano taito ja motivaatio on ”innostuksen tila”. Työelämässä on kyse siitä, että pitää saada tuloksia aikaiseksi ja saavuttaa tavoitteensa. Ne onnistuvat, kun tunnistat mitä on toimeenpano taito ja erityisesti miten johdat sitä. Et pärjää pelkällä motivaatiolla. Tarvitset siis kumpaakin – motivaatiota ja volitioita. 

Voltio on Parppein määrittelyn mukaan ”toimeenpanon taito, joka mahdollistaa johdonmukaisen ja tavoitteeseen sitoutuneen työskentelyn myös silloin kun sisäinen draivi puuttuu”. Volitio voidaan jakaa kahteen osaan:

1.   Fokus.

2.   Työvire.

Volition puute tulee näkyväksi kun työn aloittaminen on vaikeaa tai annetaan periksi esteiden kohdalla tai työpäivä täyttyy epäolennaisuuksilla. Ne yleensä tulkitaan motivaation puutteeksi, vaikka kyse on taidosta kohdat ko. haasteet.

Koska volitiossa on kyseessä taito, niin sen voi oppia. Ja työkalut oppimiseen ovat sinällään tuttuja: tavoitteen asetanta, valmentava vuorovaikutus, itsensä johtamista, priorisointia, fokusointia, työn jakaminen saavutettaviksi osakokonaisuuksiksi ja välitavoitteiden saavuttamisen kautta tuloksiin pääseminen. Ehkä keskiössä näistä on:

–     Itsensä johtamisen eli ”ajattelun ja käyttäytymiseen liittyvien strategioiden lisäksi tarvitset” lisäksi tarvitset toimeenpanon taitoa.

–     Fokuksen avulla suuntaat toiminnan oikein ja sen avulla pyrit määrätietoisesti ja tarkoituksenmukaisesti tavoitteeseen.

–     Valmentava vuorovaikutus on esimiehelle toimeenpanon kehittämisen ja johtamisen työkalu. Se on käytännössä dialogia, jossa keskusteljen väli on tiheä. Dialogiset taidot sisältävät kyselemisen, kuuntelemisen, palautteen antamisen sekä ennakoinnin.

Jos oikein haluat systematisoida valmentavaa vuorovaikutusta, niin otat käyttöön GROW-mallin:

–     Goal = tavoitteen ja mittarin asetanta.

–     Reality = nykytilan kartoittaminen.

–     Options = toimintavaihtoehtojen tarkastelu ja valinta.

–     Way forward = eteneminen sekä yhteenveto. Olennaista on, että työntekijä tekee yhteenvedon, jolloin kummatkin ovat varmoja yhteisistä johtopäätöksistä.

Parppein oma työkalu on Volitio Booster, joka muodostuu kolmesta osa-alueesta:

1.   Tavoitteen hallinta.

a.   Sitoudummeko vai suostummeko tavoitteisiin?

b.   Odotukset eivät ole tavoitteita, vaan yhdessä ymmärretyt sekä niihin sitoutuminen on keskeistä tavoitteen asettamisessa. Ei niihin suostuminen.

c.    Selvitä etukäteen muiden odotukset ja lähde toteuttamaan niiden kautta sitoutumista.

d.   Tavoitteen merkityksellisyyden kokeminen on tärkein tavoitteeseen sitouttava tekijä. Merkityksellisyys voi rakentua joko hyötyyn ja/tai arvoihin.

2.   Itseluottamuksesta.

a.   Minäpystyvyys eli usko itseensä, joka ei ole kenelläkään vakio.

b.   Olet, mitä uskot olevasi.

c.    Itseluottamus syntyy onnistumisista ja niitä ”pieniä” voittoja kannattaa rakentaa matkalla tavoitteeseen.

d.   Onnistumisen vastakohta ei ole epäonnistuminen, vaan oppiminen.

3.   Volitio eli toimeenpanon taito.

a.   Suunnitelmallisuus.

b.   Fokus.

c.    Priorisointi.

d.   Keskittyminen ja keskeytyksemättömyys.

e.   Työvire eli motivaation ylläpito.

f.     Sosiaalinen tuki, negatiivisten tunteiden käsittely ja hallinnan tunne.

g.   Volition voi oppia.

Tavoitteen asettamisessa voit hyödyntää SMARTia. Mikä on hyvä tavoite?

–     Spesific l. täsmällinen.

–     Measurable l. mitattavissa.

–     Achievable l. saavutettavissa.

–     Realistic l. realistinen.

–     Timebound l. aikataulutettu.

Anna myös tavoitteelle tasot, joita voit johtaa:

–     Tulostavoite on määrällinen tavoite.

–     Suoritustavoite on vastaus mitä, milloin ja kuinka usein.

–     Kehitystavoitteella varmistat myös tulevaisuuden osaamisen.

Tavoitetasojen pilkkomisella varmistat myös määrän, suunnan ja laadun (M+L+S).

Oppiakseen volition taidon pitää tiedostaa uskomusten merkitys. ”Uskomukset vaikuttavat sitoutumiseen ja rohkeuteen”. Uskomukset ovat siis volition perusta. Ja erityisesti negatiiviset uskomukset alentavat volitiota eli heikentävät toimeenpanon taitoa.

Toinen vaikuttava tekijä on suuntautuneisuus eli oletko oppimis- vai suoritussuuntautunut. Ne eivät yleensä ole toisiaan poissulkevat ja toivottavaa on omata kummatkin. 

Parppei haluaa auttaa suomalaisia saamaan enemmän aikaan opettamalla meille, että itsensä johtaminen ja sisäsyntyinen motivaatio ei riitä. Erityisesti johtamisen näkökulmasta tärkeää on koko organisaation toimeenpanon taito, yksilötason toimeenpanon taito ei riitä. Hyvä johtaja synnyttää myös toimeenpanon taidon kulttuurin. Jos nämä ovat sinulle tärkeitä asioita, niin kirjan tietosisällön pystyy nopea lukija omaksumaan yhden viikonlopun aikana.

Mitä meidän pitäisi tehdä kirjan perusteella?

Neljä tärkeintä:

1.   Opi erittelemään mistä toimeenpanon taidossa on kyse

2.   Etsiydy oikeaan porukkaan, jossa on volaa! Eli toimeenpanon taitoa.

3.   Mieti ketkä 10 henkilöä ovat avainasemassa oman tavoitteesi saavuttamiseksi.

4.   Ole pomo tunteillesi.

Mitä minun pitäisi itse tehdä? 

Analysoida oma toimeenpanon taito.

Yhteenveto

Muistan vanhan IBM:n tv-mainoksen, jossa kaksi johtajaa istuivat juttelemassa. Ensimmäinen kaveri kertoo innostuneena edellisviikon strategiakokouksesta. Toinen kaveruksista kysyy mainoksen lopussa ”Did you talk about execution?”. Kamera kuvaa hämmästynyttä kertojaa ja loppuplanssiin nousee teksti ”IBM – it’s all about execution”.

Kirja kuudella sanalla – ”Fake it until you make it”.

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Kim & Mauborgne: Blue Ocean Shift

About the book

Blue Ocean Shift (BOS) is a systematic process to move you from fierce competition to new markets. You should be looking at wide-open blue oceans, which are without bloody competition and which can also engages company’s workforce. Successful BOS is a humanistic process. It should legitimizes our fears and deal with the issues.

W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne are trying to empower managers to make the shift from red to blue ocean with practical guidance. With these methods you might even win by creating value-cost.

How was the book?

To start with – I’m somehow baffled. The Blue Ocean Strategy book was well advertised and  hyped decade 12 years. Even today you might find people talking about the Blue Ocean Strategy. Secondly the cases they are presenting are minimalistic or to be honest some cases are trivial. Thirdly they are seriously repeating points of views that could be well understood when mentioned only once. Too late, too little and too repetition?

When we forget these issues, I will gladly recommend the book for those who have not read the original Blue Ocean Strategy. It’s a big merit that Kim and Mauborgne have created the Blue Ocean concept. And with this book you get a workbook built within. Those who have already read the Blue Ocean Strategy, I would recommend to read something else unless the original book is your favorite.

What are the key learnings?

Blue Ocean Strategy is about market-competing moves and market-creating moves. It is like two oceans – red is market with fierce competition and blue is market with high growth and profit. Red ocean companies are bureaucratic and resistant to change just like the companies John P. Kotter and Jim Collins are trying to help. For example there is a story about Kimberley-Clark Brazil which is one of the great companies in the ”Good to Great” book by Jim Collins.

Kim and Mauborgne talk a lot about superior technology as one of the key drives of change. Compared to Collins who did not see tech as a driver for a transformation to a good to great company. Kim and Maubrogne combines these ideas and introduces a hybrid term of disruptive creation which combines for example both new technology and the creative usage of it.

Creative destruction by Joseph Schumpeter plays a vital role as a concept in the BOS although the real economic growth comes from the creation of new markets. For example blockchain could be one of those new technologies that enables new markets. The book uses different kind of examples. Such as how to reduce of the cost of petty criminals and prisons in Malaysia? How to define French fry maker market in France? How to create a youth orchestra in Iraqi and travel to international orchestra competitions? How long does it take to make the transformation? New French fry maker – ActiFry, was launched in two years. Iraqi and Malaysian cases ”were made in a year or so”. These and other examples illustrated how BOS works. Three key components to BOS:

1) Adopt a blue ocean perspective to expand horizon and seek for opportunities.

2) To have practical tools for market creation which helps the companies building commercially compelling new offering.

3) A bult-in process that empowers people to ”drive the process for effective execution.

Kim and Mauborge want’s to teach us how to move from market competing to market creating. BOS way of working is to identify and challenge the industry’s fundamental assumptions. Kim and Mauborge introduces five steps to create new markets are. These steps are based on their study about competition and blue oceans:

1. Get started with pioneer-migrator-settler map.

2. Understand where you are now with strategy canvas tool.

3. Imagine where you could be with buyer utility tool.

4. Find how to get there with six paths framework.

5. Make your move with blue ocean fair.

By the way the pioneer-migrator-settler map is kind of BCG Matrix which communicates to the management how fit the company is for the future. And ”to build a shared understanding of the likely consequences of inaction”. Anyways leaders are tied into two fundamentals. Firstly market boundaries and industry conditions are given. Secondly typically organizations make choice between differentiation and low cost. So you can’t offer value (differentiation) and low-cost (cheap) according to this thinking.

Nondisruptive creation can generate new markets like ringtones did for mobile entertainment, life coaching did for personal & professional lives, Sesame Street did for preschool market, Viagra solved dysfunctional erectile or Grameem Bank did with microloans. These did disrupt any market per se. So embrace nondisruptive and disruptive creation in strategic thinking. Comic Relief’s Red Nose-campaign and Salesforce.com’s web-based CRM are examples how to re-define the market and move to blue ocean. A growth model for market-creating strategy:

1. Breakthrough solution for existing problem.

2. Redifining an existing problem and solve it.

3. A brand-new problem and solution for that.

Blue ocean strategist do’s and dont:

• They do aim to make competition irrelevant.

– How to differentiate so that your offering cannot be benchmarked?

• They do focus on creating and capturing new demand.

– Search for new demand from noncustomers.

• They do aim to break the value-cost trade-off.

– They pursue differentiation and low cost, not either-or.

• They don’t take industry conditions as given.

– Industry conditions are created by individual companies and those can be changed by individual companies.

I feel again that I’m reading John P. Kotter or Jim Collins when Kim & Mauborgne starts to talk about humanness. For them it is to help people develop the confidence to act. Way to use humanness are:

1. Atomization = deconstruct the challenge and focus on solving them one at a time

2. Firsthand discovery = let people to discover for themselves the need for change (brutal facts)

3. Exercise of fair process = engagement, explanation and clear expectations.

With the BOS methodology you will create six different blue oceans with strategy canvases, business models, ERRC grids etc. Kim & Mauborgne have a lot of different kind of tools that are freely available for download from HERE. Just to get a glimpse of the tools I’ll present two – The Six Paths and ERRC.

Six-paths to open new value-cost frontier where you:

1. Look across alternative industries

2. Look across strategic groups within your industry

3. Look across the industry buyers and redefine the industry buyer group (Ogilvy & wife)

4. Look across complementary products and services

5. Rethink your functional-emotional orientation of your industry

6. Participate in shaping external trends over time

A useful tool is also the the ERRC grid <= the way you define your blue ocean. For example the hotel chain citizenM is worthwhile of reading on how to deeply the ERRC grid.

– Eliminate factors that are granted. For example citizenM eliminated front desk operations.

– Reduce factors that are below standards. For example citizenM reduced room size.

– Raise factors above the standards. For example citizenM raised the quality of the sleeping environment.

– Create factors that has not been offered. For example citizenM created check-in kiosks.

How should we change according to the book?

Obviously – if you are interested on creating new markets for you company – you should evaluate this methodology. While thinking about the possibility you could start the thinking from ”customer first” to ”noncustomer first”. Secondly we should never forget – today’s negatives can be turned into tomorrows positives. And when building the buyers experience in blue ocean – we should really experience the buyers experience.

What should I personally do?

Start thinking how to move your operations to areas where there is no competition (blue ocean). 

Summary

The book in six words – ”What we look for determines what we see.” 

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John P. Kotter: Leading Change

About the book

Great many books want to take the place of John P. Kotter’s ”Leading Change. It is by far the best business ever. No need to state that it has sold so and so many millions of copies. When you ’ll read it you will know why it’s the best. All businesses or organizations are in transition all the time. That’s why the learnings of this book are crucial. Read it! By the way – originally ”Leading Change” was a Harvard Business Review article. You can still read it as an article – if you want to cut corners.  

How was the book?

Why to read this book? Reading this book is like combining meditation and product development of your ideas. Include the learning part also for the reasons as well. I have read this book for the first time about twenty years ago and it struck me at once. I knew instantly that these topics are universal and timeless. And the reading experience is even more pervasive than twenty years ago.

I could state that that there is a triangle between Kotter’s ”Leading Change”, ”The Goal” by Eliyahu M. Goldrattand ”Good to Great” by Jim Collins. With these books you could easily start any change management project.

What are the key learnings?

This is the Eight-Stage Process and it’s the essence of the book:

·      Establishing a Sense of Urgency

·      Creating the Guiding Coalition

·      Developing a Vision and Strategy

·      Communicating the Change Vision

·      Empowering Employees for Broad-Based Action

·      Generating Short-Term Wins

·      Consolidating Gains and Producing More Change

·      Anchoring New Approaches in the Culture

These stages will lead into a successful change. Many of the steps are self-explanatory and I won’t start scrutinizing these steps. It would spoil your reading experience. Hence more important is to raise some topics into your radar. Remember that the pace of change has changed from the times that book was originally published. So all time tables that Kotter suggest must be divided by two. The thing that he got right is that the change sticks only when people around you start saying that ”this is the way we work”. Then it’s time to celebrate.

How to fail in a change? Kotter uses a lot of time to explain complacency and why it is bad for any change management activity. Weak sponsors and committees will also deteriorate the change. And undercommunicating vision and where you are going will not either speed the change.

And two notions that we must not forget:

·      Managing change is important, but leading the change is crucial.

·      Training is something that makes the change stick, because culture is powerful and without training the new culture will not be embedded into the organization.

How should we change according to the book?

”If it ain’t broken, don’t fix it” seems to be still a valid fact in the change management business. But we often resist change unless it is crystal clear that the alternative is substantially better. For a successful strategy implementation process – however, it is useful to put the default the other way around: Change it unless it is crystal clear that the old way is substantially better. Execution involves change and you should embrace it. Empowering employees means that the leaderships must design a systems that allows the employees to act – ”Strategy implementation requires top managers to design the company’s internal system that does the selection for them.” So change leadership to fit the culture. Read more from these articles.

Drivers behind change have not altered from the days of Kotter. It is clear that globalized economy together with digitalized economy has made the change a default. So make change default in your organization and maybe you can skip stages 1-4? Then make change part of the culture and you will save 6-12 months? It might turn into a competitive advantage for your organization. So by making change your default and you will make change your competitive advantage.

At the end of the book Kotter is trying to predict the future company. How well did Kotter in his prediction of the future company? Pretty well:

·      He was thinking that we will witness higher sense of urgency. And it is here and we migh state that it is even a default.

·      Teamwork at the top – big egos and snakes have been killed. And so it is.

·      Kotter was also seeing that the number of people who can create and communicate vision is rising. He was right although there is a lot’s to do. 

·      Broad based empowerment was also in his agenda. Meh – might be growing, but that’s for start-ups. Right?

·      Delegated management for excellent short-term performance. Might exist, but mostly in lean and flat organizations.

·      Sorry, the unnecessary interdependence are still here. 

·      An adaptive corporate culture can facilitate adaptation and some organizations can witness this, because winning is fun and making a real contribution is pleasing to the soul.

What should I personally do?

Generating short-term wins is my favorite topic.

Summary

The book in six words – Walk the talk and lead by example.