The Guardian recently ran an interesting story about England football manager Fabio Capello; his compensation package if he gets dismissed was cited as a possible reason not to remove him. In this podcast, I discuss what went wrong for England’s football team at the World Cup: some combination of the team’s psychology, the sport’s governance, and/or the manager’s coaching style.
[Audio clip: view full post to listen]

Will these ongoing British Airways strikes give British Airways the chance to restructure? Robert Peston thinks so, and I agree. I was recently at a global conference in Australia on how supply chain thinking can better penetrate the boardroom, and one of the case examples was British Airways. I remember a very senior director remarking about BA as ‘yesterday’s legacy’ business — not just a legacy business, but yesterday’s legacy business that nobody had done anything about it when they should have. In effect he was saying that BA was going to go bankrupt, because they have problems that they should have sorted out yesterday, and these problems are getting worse. [...]

Andrew and I, together with Dr. Isaac Mostovicz of Janus Thinking , are in the process of developing a leadership questionnaire. We would like to test and validate the questionnaire so far before we proceed any further. Can you spare 10 minutes and test out our survey? Click on the following link to take it:
http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/leadership_opinions
Thanks very much.

The Walker report is a lowest common denominator response to addressing corporate governance at UK banks. We need a deep overhaul of the financial system: much better regulation, longer-term thinking, and a break up of the investment banking mindsets which led to the financial crisis.
Giving non-executive directors more powers, scrutinising how they are appointed, or increasing regulation alone will make absolutely no difference.  Non-executive directors already have the powers; it’s the culture of investment banking globally which must change.
Non-executive directors must spend more time understanding the bank on whose board they sit.  They have to understand the culture, get to know the key managers in the bank, and spend more time in the bank appreciating the way business is done there.  Banks also need to spend the resources to ensure their non-executives become familiar [...]

Prompted by this article on management gurus on Slate’s The Big Money, here is a video that contains my thoughts on the nature of management gurus, specifically how they can damage their reputations by offering the same thinking over and over again, and how gurus are different from high quality consultants:

In mature markets, where growth is slow and costs are managed to the extreme, what differentiates one company from another? Many organisations and managers have actually become rather indistinguishable in that they uniformly pay attention to teamwork and quality, reduce costs where they can (often through outsourcing) and get rid of poorly performing executives—these activities make for good organisations. But then what give some companies a leading edge over others? It comes down two factors.
The first is brand—a strong brand reputation makes people believe that a Mercedes is better than a Ford, and can help a company even if this belief proves not to be true (e.g. if Mercedes outsourced some faulty components and their quality did decline below the perceived quality of Ford).
The other differentiating factor is people. Better led teams will be more motivated; when there’s a single company mentality, especially among [...]

I was intrigued by this article in the Times last month about Nicholas Sarkozy. At first glance, Sarkozy appears unbelievably arrogant, denigrating other leaders and feeding his own insatiable ego, saying France is fine but everyone else isn’t. However there’s much more to Sarkozy’s comments under the surface. [...]

People are looking far and wide to identify the causes of the financial crisis. I recently described how a failure of policy design was one of the factors that lead to the financial crisis. Another factor that has been discussed widely is the role of business schools in creating the leaders who ostensibly brought on the crisis. Have these universities not fostered a proper sense of accountability and responsibility, and should they be teaching ethics? [...]

When I recently noted how some bankers might be self-deceptive narcissists, I didn’t mention any of the potential positives that narcissists can bring to the workplace as leaders. This recent article on Slate about narcissism and narcissistic personality disorder mentions some positives (and negatives) that Michael Maccoby recognized in his book The Productive Narcissist: The Promise and Peril of Visionary Leadership :
[Maccoby] makes a distinction between leaders with narcissistic traits and those who have full-blown NPD. He says narcissists can be charismatic forces for change—because of their drive, vision, risk-taking, and even ruthlessness, many corporations turn to narcissists for salvation. But such people can become dangerous because their success fuels their already ample grandiosity and feeds the sense they got there by disdaining the normal rules.
I agree that drive, vision, risk-taking and ruthlessness can be beneficial traits in a leader. [...]

Earlier this month Wally Bock of the Three Star Leadership Blog wrote a blog post offering advice for leaders on how to talk to team members about performance issues .
He describes the 3 Ws: a leader should describe what performance or behavior she wants the team member to change in non-judgmental language, explain why the behavior is worth discussing and what happens as a result of it, and then leader should wait for the team member’s response–the leader could have been misinformed. [...]