Energy, food, fuel – the costs of all the basic essentials of life are increasing dramatically and rapidly. No wonder there is concern about inflation and widespread talk of a “cost of living crisis.” For all but the highest earners and the wealthy, life is increasingly becoming a question of what to do in order to survive.

This puts pressure on employers. After all, if you want to safeguard your operations, you need to ensure that you have the full attention, capacity and capability of your employees. In such circumstances this is hardly likely. Yet, while the news is full of stories of people who are struggling from payday to payday, there are never any reports of employers who are doing anything about it.  

There can be little doubt that the world is in crisis. The number of issues humanity is facing seems to increase daily. Soaring inflation and a cost of living crisis, climate change, the war in Ukraine and the threat of global food shortages, millions of displaced people, increasing political polarisation are only some of the challenges we face. And all are largely unprecedented. And one thing is certain – we cannot meet them with historic solutions. As Albert Einstein said, “You cannot solve a problem with the same thinking that created it!”  

Many of these problems are the result of issues that have troubled me for years. However, as someone who always looks to solve problems rather than criticising or complaining about things, I have always sought to answers. And as matters have increased my concerns, and made me anxious about the overall trend, my efforts have multiplied. This has led me to make more effort to develop and share my solutions, culminating in my latest book, “Searching For Better.”

“In this world nothing is certain but death and taxes.” Benjamin Franklin may have been correct about the inevitably of death and taxes, but they are not the only certainty in life. You can definitely add change to the list.

Describing change and the pace of change and the increased complexity it creates as a critical factor of modern life is rather a cliché. It is so much a factor of life that, as long ago as 2010, managing it was cited as the biggest concern for C-Suite executives. (IBM: Capitalizing on Complexity. Insights from the Global Chief Executive Study)  Yet it seems odd how little the need for adaptability follows from such discussion. Or, even worse, how little adaptability is recognised as being a people management issue.  

In his book, “Leadership” the Pulitzer Prize winning author, James MacGregor Burns defines leadership as, “The reciprocal process of mobilizing, by persons with certain motives and values, various economic, political and other resources, in a context of competition and conflict, in order to realize goals independently or mutually held by both leaders and followers.” When you distil this, you can identify two primary elements:

• Two parties - leaders and followers;
• Goals - each party wants to achieve a specific purpose.

You cannot have leadership without both these essential elements. Burns, however, expands on this and avers that there are basically two types of leadership: transactional leadership and transforming leadership.

Do you have a strategy-execution gap? This may not be something you would readily admit, even to yourself. But, please pause for a moment and consider the question deeply, seriously and honestly.

I suspect that if you were to do so, you will find the question more difficult than it seems. The term “strategy-execution” implies that:

• Strategy has two distinct parts – planning and execution; and
• Execution can be more difficult than planning.

This makes strategy a journey and not a destination. More significantly, though, it is not a journey you control.  And that is why you will find a continuing focus on controls counter-productive. Just as insisting on adherence to a particular, pre-planned route can result in reaching your destination long after you needed to be there, when finding alternative routes would have enabled you to by-pass problems and delays and arrive in time.

You cannot help wondering what management lessons need to be learned from the Grenfell Tower Fire disaster. Undoubtedly the Inquiry will highlight many. Yet it appears that there also plenty to be learned from the post-fire management.

It seems that every day a fresh incident raises somebody’s ire, and outrage and fury abound as those dealing with the consequences are portrayed as callous, unfeeling or bungling incompetents. In all likelihood some of the criticism is justified, but there seems to no allowance for the unprecedented nature of the catastrophe. For example, is it really realistic to expect all victims to be in permanent new homes just three weeks after the fire?

Goodness knows, identifying and acquiring a new home is difficult for most of us at the best of times. It certainly isn’t something that we normally do in a matter of days. So, why would we expect these poor people to be any different, especially given the difficulty of finding homes in London? So, would you or I do better if we were responsible for dealing with the aftermath of this tragedy?

If you think about it, no organisational failure of any magnitude can come as a surprise. Someone, somewhere, was aware that things were not right. Yet those people either did not say anything or their concerns were ignored.   

For instance, remember the Deepwater Horizon disaster? There concerns about the equipment had been raised, but simply ignored by management. Now we have another example.

Change has been endemic in business for decades. Yet identifying, initiating and implementing it successfully has never been straightforward and results almost invariably fall short of expectations. All too often this failure is attributed to employees’ reluctance to change and thus labelled “change resistance.” This is a phenomenon that is perhaps more easily understood when you consider the non-business changes we are encountering now.

In 1991 Charles Handy concluded that the basic purpose of an organisation is to perpetuate itself within the context of the environment in which it operates. You might not have thought about it in quite that way, but that conviction encapsulates and drives everything you do as a business leader. It shapes the way you think, the way you act and the way you expect others to think and act. That’s perhaps inevitable, but nonetheless spelling it out provides food for thought. Not least because it demands a long-term outlook.  

Most business leaders will plead that they are thinking about the long-term and will cite all their strategic planning efforts as evidence of this. Yet, notwithstanding this, there seems to be increasing consensus that focus is too much on the short-term. All too often corporate failure seems to come as a major surprise: whether after a long-lingering painful demise that drained energy and resources, without achieving anything and failing to avoid the inevitable, or suddenly, as with the failures that precipitated the 2008 financial crisis. This is subjective territory and open to discussion beyond the scope of this article. Suffice to say that we need a more effective way of addressing the longer-term measures of organisational performance.

Here too Handy once again gives us some pointers as to how. He said, “The companies that survive longest are the ones that work out what they uniquely can give to the world not just growth or money but their excellence, their respect for others, or their ability to make people happy. Some call those things a soul.” I call it ‘Love at Work.’ But whatever you call it, it stems from people – your employees, your customers, and your suppliers – and the way you treat them – and Science supports this!  

Rather ironically, hours after posting my blog last week (Cats, Caterpillars and Business), I received reinforcing information that substantiated all my points. And from no less an authority than Professor Gary Hamel. He enumerates the staggering scale of efficiencies that I alluded to but couldn't quantify for myself.

Believe me, when I talk about staggering numbers, I am not exaggerating! Talking about the US alone, he quantifies “the prize” for “busting bureaucracy” as $3 trillion p.a.! Perhaps, writing it as $3,000,000,000,000 gives you a clearer idea of just how much that is. Especially when you factor in this is an annual figure! Even if that number is 50% over-optimistic it is still significant. And what if it is conservative? No matter how successful you are, the possibilities this presents have to make you curious.