Utveckling är en av de absolut viktigaste sakerna för anställda idag. Det visar undersökning på undersökning. När bemanningsföretaget Xtra ställer frågan till 1300 svenskar i olika yrken och branscher om viken den viktigaste löneförmånen är blir vidareutbildning det vanligaste svaret (31 procent).

Mest viktigt är det för högskoleutbildade där 42 procent tycker att kompetensutveckling är den bästa löneförmån de kan få. Bland de som gått grundskola var siffran 22 procent. Yngre tycker också att vidareutbildning är viktigare än äldre. För de över 60 år ligger siffran bara på 23 procent.

Näst viktigast anses möjlighet till fysisk aktivitet på arbetstid vara, vilket 15 procent har svarat. Personer i företagsledande ställning verkar inte skatta träning på arbetstid lika högt, endast 6 procent i den gruppen uppger fysisk aktivitet som den viktigaste förmånen.

Förmåner i all ära, men om man tvingas välja är det mer pengar på lönekontot som gäller. På frågan om vad man skulle välja en löneförmån eller höjd lön som motsvarar samma värde, då svarar hela 74 procent lönen.

Topplistan – De populäraste löneförmånerna:
- Vidareutbildning och kurser 31,3%

- Fysisk aktivitet på arbetstid 15,1%

- Företagshälsovård 8,3%

- Sjukförsäkring 6,7%

- Tjänstebil 6,3%

- Mobiltelefon 5,6%

- Julbord 1,7%

- Julgåva 1,2%

- Vet inte 23,8%

Källa: SvD.se, april 2012
Länk

Malkin är på väg att föra sitt Ryssland till VM-guld och han själv dominerar rinken i varje byte.
Man kan fråga sig hur han kan vara så bra?
En orsak är att han har att brås på. Kolla bilden på hans mamma:

You can’t spend wisely unless you understand marketing’s full impact. Here are five questions executives should ask to help maximize the bang for their bucks.

It’s 8 AM, and the chief marketing officer is wading through his inbox. A board member has e-mailed him about an opportunity to invest in an emerging digital platform. It looks cool, but it’s speculative and not cheap. Minutes later, the chief financial officer appears in the doorway: “The boss wants to sign a big sponsorship deal. Can we drop out of TV for a couple of months to pay for it?” The CMO has barely started to explain what happened the last time the company went dark on TV—an aggressive rival grabbed market share—when his assistant interrupts. The CEO is calling. “What’s going on with our brand image?” she asks. “The latest monitor report looks bad.” The CMO promises a full debriefing later in the day, but he’s not looking forward to the conversation. Brand scores are down, and the reasons are tough to manage: factors such as bad experiences with intermediary retailers and mediocre word of mouth.

The number and strength of such competing pressures has been growing. Seven years ago, when digital advertising was still in its infancy and long before social media had become a marketing force, we described in a McKinsey Quarterly article how many traditional mass-marketing advertising models were under attack and suggested some approaches to make marketing investments count in an increasingly complex environment.1 Since then, we have been fortunate enough to see more than 200 organizations tackle the difficult issue of how to improve marketing’s return on investment (ROI). Over that period, as new kinds of media have grown in importance and mobile communications have created new opportunities to reach consumers, the ROI challenge has become more intense.

In the face of growing complexity, relentless financial pressure, and a still-challenging economic environment, marketers are striving to exploit new-media vehicles and to measure their impact through new analytic approaches and tools. Most are making progress. Yet we are consistently struck by the power of asking five seemingly basic questions. These questions, detailed in this article, cut to the heart of the quest to drive returns on marketing spending. Coming to grips with them, and gaining alignment across the C-suite, is critical for making real progress rather than becoming bogged down by excessive firefighting and ultimately futile debates about the precision and certainty of measurement.

1. What exactly influences our consumers today?
The digital revolution and the explosion of social media have profoundly changed what influences consumers as they undertake their purchasing decision journey.2 When considering products, they read online reviews and compare prices. Once in stores, they search for deals with mobile devices and drive hard bargains. And after the purchase, they become reviewers themselves and demand ongoing relationships with products and brands. Although companies have access to terabytes of data about these behavioral changes, many still can’t answer the fundamental question: how exactly are our customers influenced?

One global consumer products company, for example, had for years relied heavily on traditional marketing, such as television and print ads. Concerned about the growth of new media, the company decided to research just what was influencing the choices of consumers—and found that only 30 percent of them cited traditional advertising. In fact, in-store interactions with consumers were more important in communicating the company’s message and driving potential buyers to consider its products. Yet salespeople, once critical to actually closing deals, had declined in importance because consumers regarded Internet reviews as more objective. In addition, these trends were not universal. While the influence of advertising had declined for existing products, the impact of TV remained strong for some new products, especially in emerging markets. Armed with insights such as these, the company was able to construct a marketing allocation model that factored in both the consumer importance and cost-effectiveness of different points of interaction. This enabled much sharper decisions about its marketing mix, both by geography and in relation to specific product situations.

Time and time again, we find that companies are aware of the growing importance of touch points such as earned media but don’t understand the true magnitude of their effects or how to influence them. The solution is usually to commission research that gets at the heart of understanding the consumer’s decision journey. Such foundational work must shine a light on the touch points and messages that actually influence consumer behavior. Marketers must be ready to use the findings to debunk accepted wisdom and legacy rules of thumb. In today’s fragmented media world, only by knowing how the way consumers interact with your company has evolved can you begin to make more cost-effective marketing investments that truly influence purchase decisions.3

2. How well informed (really) is our marketing judgment?
Marketing has always combined facts and judgment: after all, there’s no analytic approach that can single-handedly tell you when you have a great piece of creative work. A decade ago, when traditional advertising was all that mattered, most senior marketers justifiably had great confidence in their judgment on spending and messaging. Today, many privately confess to being less certain. That’s hardly surprising: marketers have been perfecting the TV playbook for decades, while some of the newest marketing platforms have been around for months or even weeks. But it can be tough to admit publicly that your judgment is incomplete or out-of-date. And given the money required, it’s hard both to make a rational investment case for additional marketing spending and—in the same breath—to admit that you are really making a passionate guess.

Marketers often hear that the answer to improving their judgment in this rapidly changing environment is data, and some companies have sophisticated analytical tools. Yet it’s difficult to integrate all of this information in a way that not only provides answers that you trust but can also inform smart marketing changes. We counsel a return to what creates great marketing judgment: start by formulating hypotheses about the impact of changes to your marketing mix and then seek analytical evidence.

One insurance company, for example, spent a year working on a complex demand model to try to understand the impact of its growing marketing spending in light of declining sales. Yet output from the model “felt wrong,” and the analytics were too complicated for business leaders to understand. It was only when the company articulated specific questions it was trying to answer, and designed targeted modeling exercises to prove or disprove them, that it was able to eliminate a lot of “noise” in the data and uncover a clear relationship between marketing spending and business results. That’s when the internal dialogue shifted from “should we be spending on marketing at all?” to “what’s the optimum marketing spending needed to hit our targets?”

We are excited by the possibilities that “big data” and advanced analytics create—no question. But data remain only as useful as the expertise you bring to bear, and good judgment will remain a hallmark of the best marketers.

3. How are we managing financial risk in our marketing plans?
Successful communication requires hitting the right audience with the right message at the right time: a small, moving target. With traditional media, marketers have mitigated the risk of failure through years of trial and error about what makes great advertising. That’s not the case with today’s new media. Influence can shift rapidly, and there is little accumulated experience about which messages work, when marketers should apply them, how they can be scaled, or even whom they influence. Looking to external agencies is little help; they’re in the same boat. At a basic level, the degree of ROI risk—getting the sales results you want from a given amount of marketing spending—has increased.

Yet while spending on new media is a risky bet, it’s a bet companies feel compelled to make. So the question becomes how much risk is too much—or, for that matter, too little. We’ve seen efforts that result in short-term sales dips: a retailer moving too quickly away from circulars and a consumer-goods player reducing TV spending too fast. We’ve also seen companies feel the heat from investors for rapidly ramping up spending on digital channels without cutting it elsewhere.

The global consumer products company we mentioned earlier offers an alternative approach. While its customer research suggested that significant changes were required in the way it allocated marketing spending, executives didn’t want to choose an excessively risky path. They therefore set risk parameters that enabled some changes in the marketing mix but limited the total shift in any given year. There was a maximum percentage for spending on unproven vehicles, for example, as well as limits on annual spending reductions in some channels or increases in others. This simple allocation model ensured a gradual move to emerging media, mitigating risk while providing breathing room for piloting, testing, and learning.

That approach also can help with scenario planning: one media provider developed a straightforward decision support tool for precisely that purpose. Geared to brand managers, not postdoctoral researchers, the tool used simple response curves that allowed the marketer to simulate different scenarios of marketing spending. The tool was embedded in an easily used PowerPoint slide and proved invaluable for settling on marketing approaches that hit the sweet spot for a number of variables, from cost to effectiveness to risk.

Such decision tools do more than provide marketers with valuable information. They stimulate dialogue about real trade-offs and help to manage expectations across business units and functions whose cooperation is often critical when companies change the broader commercial mix. Managing risk is critical, and marketers shouldn’t be shy about putting this issue squarely on the table. With thoughtful scenario planning and cross-functional participation, such discussions can be extremely rich and rewarding.

4. How are we coping with added complexity in the marketing organization?
As the external marketing environment becomes more complex, so must the internal environment. Marketers historically had only a handful of communication vehicles; now they have dozens of them, and the number is growing rapidly. This proliferation has led to the emergence of both external and internal specialists, with accumulated experience not only in media channels (such as social media) but even in individual vehicles (such as Facebook). The exponential growth in marketing complexity seems unending and needs to be managed.

We’ve found three things that are always true in managing complexity within the marketing organization. First, you’ll require a number of specialists. You just will. You can’t get the skills and knowledge you need in just one person, and you’re not likely to get everything you need internally. Second, you’ll need somebody who both integrates marketing efforts across channels and communications vehicles and focuses on the bottom line. In packaged-goods companies, this was—and may still be—the role of brand managers, but the basic requirement is that it must be done by someone. Finally, you’ll need absolute clarity in processes, roles, and responsibilities not only within the marketing organization but also throughout your company (across functions and business units) and externally (with agencies and external vendors). The trust-based relationship between companies and agencies isn’t at risk, but everyone will have to accept that roles are changing. (For more on organizational moves companies should make in a world of more pervasive marketing, see “Five ‘no regrets’ moves for superior customer engagement,” forthcoming on mckinseyquarterly.com.)

Addressing complexity in a comprehensive way requires a dedicated effort. Senior executives at one North American consumer-packaged-goods company, for example, tried to sketch out their own “future of marketing” with an eye to how they would need to work differently over the coming five years, given the company’s growth priorities. No one pretended to have a crystal ball, but examining the implications of several generally accepted trends in consumer behavior and media consumption habits made some bold forecasting possible. The company then debated the future of brand managers and specialist centers of excellence and what that future implied for resources required centrally and in business units. Finally, it asked what should be stopped or dramatically deprioritized. By undertaking this exercise, the consumer-packaged-goods company saw how it could keep its marketing headcount and budget relatively flat, while massively shifting senior leadership’s role, the culture of marketing, and the capabilities of specialist and generalist resources.

5. What metrics should we track given our (imperfect) options?
In an ideal world, the financial returns and the ability of all forms of communication to influence consumers would be precisely calculated, and deciding the marketing mix would be simple. In reality, there are multiple, and usually imperfect, ways to measure most established forms of marketing. Nothing approaches a definitive metric for social media and other emerging communication channels, and no single metric can evaluate the effectiveness of all spending. Yet you must have a way to track progress and hold marketers accountable. That’s nonnegotiable. How do you do it?

Even in the absence of a single way of measuring ROI for different channels, marketers should move toward an apples-to-apples way of comparing returns across a range of media. One international logistics company, for example, faced this necessity after committing more than $200 million to rebrand itself following a series of acquisitions. Senior executives wanted proof that the effort was working—and in a form they could readily understand, not marketing jargon.

So the company adopted a simple three-step approach: measuring the impact of advertising on consumer recall, on the public’s perceptions of the business, and on sales leads and revenue. With these data in hand—and proof that the rebranding effort was ultimately improving performance—members of the C-suite had the assurance they needed to reaffirm the investment and to commit themselves to more complex measurements, such as marketing-mix modeling. Because the metrics were developed internally, members of the company’s board were similarly reassured.

Likewise, one consumer-packaged-goods company uses econometric analysis and frequent brand tracking to assemble a scorecard of returns in the short term (average and marginal marketing ROIs within 12 months) and the longer term (progress on brand equity and brand loyalty for periods of more than 12 months). The company is tantalizingly close to its ultimate goal of truly being able to make decisions about short- versus long-term trade-offs and to deliver complete answers to “show me the money” requests.

Metrics are rarely perfect. Yet the volume of data available today should make it possible to find metrics and analytic opportunities that take advantage of your unique insights, are understood and trusted by your top team, provide proof of progress, and lay a foundation for more sophisticated approaches to tracking marketing ROI in the future.

The marketing environment continues to change rapidly and often feels like a moving target that’s impossible to hit. It’s genuinely difficult to overemphasize the magnitude of the change or the challenge. Yet time and time again, we find that marketers who have good answers to the five basic questions are better equipped to do battle for the effectiveness of marketing and to win the war for growth.

Source: McKinsey Quterly, May 2012
Authors: David Court is a director in McKinsey’s Dallas office, Jonathan Gordon is a principal in the New York office, and Jesko Perrey is a director in the Düsseldorf office.
Link

Interview with Joe Payne, CEO, Eloqua

Situation:
A company is the leader in an expanding market. To sustain growth, they must transform how their people operate so that they better address and serve the needs of their target customers. How do you transform company culture?

Advice from Joe Payne:
We have a saying at Eloqua: Culture eats strategy for breakfast. More important than this year’s product strategy is the culture you build that let’s employees make decisions on the fly because they know “that’s how we do things at Eloqua.” Look at how you pay and reward your people. We all receive bonuses on the same team metrics: company sales, profitability, and customer satisfaction. If the team wins, we all win.
We are not a democracy, but everyone has a voice. Although we make decisions as a business, we avoid top-down management. We push as much authority and accountability as far down the organization chart as we can. You can only do this well with a strong culture.

We adopted a mantra to guide our way, “Get it done – Do it right”, and a set of metrics to make it part of our culture. We created a two-by-two grid, with “Get it Done” on the Y-axis and “Do it Right” on the X-axis on which all employees, including the Executive Team, are plotted. If rated in the top right quadrant, that employee is doing well. If someone finds himself or herself plotted in the Upper Left quadrant (getting it done, but not doing it right), that person has one quarter to improve. Lower Right people get two months. Lower lefters are out that day.
We can measure “getting it done” using standard quantitative metrics, but “doing it right” is more qualitative. We ask questions like, “Is the person a positive source of energy for the team? Does she go above and beyond for other staff and for customers?” We provide examples to help evaluators plot individual performance.
Once we instituted this matrix, one of our top selling sales reps was evaluated as being in the top left quadrant. When he only paid lip-service to changing and didn’t correct this behavior after a quarter, we let him go, numbers and all. This decision was both a major “wow” and a major win for the company.

Culture and culture change start at the top.

Source: ceo2ceo.com, Joe Joe Payne, December 2011
You can contact Joe Payne here
Link

Ett ständigt diskussionsämne i mitt arbete med executive coaching, ledar- och ledningsgruppsutveckling är lönens betydelse för den individuella prestationen.
Om du är en av dem som brottas med denna frågeställning i ditt dagliga arbete rekommenderar jag följande artikel ur dagens Svenska Dagbladet:

Bara en tredjedel nöjda med sin lön
Vi mäter oss hela tiden med andra och löneskillnader har betydelse för produktiviteten, men bara till en viss gräns. Därefter kan de få motsatt effekt. Och jämförandet gör oss inte nöjdare. Två tredjedelar av svenska folket anser att de har lägre lön än de förtjänar.

Den ödmjuka skara som tycker att de har högre lön än de förtjänar består av 2 procent av svenskarna.

Betydligt vanligare är att tycka att man har lägre lön än man förtjänar. Det uppger 67 procent av svenskarna i en internationell undersökning om social ojämlikhet, International social survey program (ISSP). En förklaring skulle kunna vara en utbredd felaktig lönesättning i Sverige. En annan det djupt mänskliga faktum att de flesta människor överskattar sin egen förmåga när de jämför sig med andra. Det finns studier som visar att en majoritet jämför sig med de högst presterande kollegorna, vilka man anser sig vara mest lik.
– Det är mänskligt, men det sätter också fingret på hur viktigt det är för ledningen att kommunicera. Vad är det vi ska göra, varför har just du den här lönen och vad behöver du göra för att få högre lön, säger Magnus Sverke, professor i arbets- och organisationspsykologi vid Stockholms universitet.

Få vill tjäna under det som är medianlön i Sverige, som var 25 300 kronor år 2010. Men den bistra statistiska sanningen är att halva befolkningen måste göra det.

Lönen har ett stort symbolvärde, menar Magnus Sverke. Om någon får en löneökning som de inte tycker står i proportion till vad de gör eller vad deras kollegor får i löneökning kan det få negativa konsekvenser. Det finns en risk att personen drar ner på sin prestation eller slutar att hjälpa andra.

Samtidigt som en majoritet tycker att inkomstskillnaderna i Sverige är för höga är det en nästan lika stor majoritet som tycker att de själva borde tjäna mer, visar siffror från ISSP-studien som genomförs av Sociologiska institutionen vid Umeå universitet.
– Som individuell arbetstagare finns inget skäl att inte vilja ha mer betalt. Däremot kan man på samma gång vara bekymrad över hur de samlade inkomstskillnaderna ser ut. Det är inte nödvändigtvis något motsägelsefullt i det där. Inkomstfördelningen i Sverige beslutas ju inte av någon politisk instans utan påverkas av en rad faktorer som marknadsförhållanden, kollektiva förhandlingar och många andra saker, säger Stefan Svallfors, professor i sociologi vid Umeå universitet.

Sammantaget visar studien att det finns ett stort missnöje med lönen hos många människor, som skulle kunna ha negativ effekt på hur engagerade människor är på jobbet.
– Lönen är betydelsefull, men kanske inte alltid så betydelsefull som man tror. Arbetsglädje, stimulerande arbetsuppgifter, bra arbetsmiljö, bra ledarskap, känslan av att göra något vettigt – det är viktigare än lön för att skapa engagemang och bra prestationer, säger Magnus Sverke.

Hur motiverande lönen är beror också på hur ens arbetsuppgifter ser ut. Är prestationen lätt att mäta är det också lättare att förstå vad som krävs för att öka lönen.
– Om du är dammsugarförsäljare är det glasklart att ju fler sålda dammsugare, desto bättre prestation. Men inom vård, förskola, skola eller tjänstemannayrken är det mycket svårare att mäta vad som är en bra prestation, när den är färdig, när den har tillräckligt hög kvalitet. Därmed krävs mycket mer när det gäller lönepolicy. Ledningen måste ha konkreta lönekriterier och en dialog om vad som är bra lönekriterier. Utan det kan du aldrig få en acceptans för varför en viss person har en viss lön.

Oavsett yrke kan lönen vara en bekräftelse på att man är en duglig person, ett vuxenbetyg. Det kan tära hårt på en del att se en kollega få 100 kronor mer, medan andra inte bryr sig om sådant.
– Visst kan lönen ha betydelse för självkänslan, men självkänsla kommer från så mycket. För en del kan det ha större betydelse att man känner att man gör ett bra jobb eller att man får uppskattning från kund, patient, elev eller brukare, säger Magnus Sverke.

I de flesta studier om löneskillnader har man bara tittat på anställdas löner och inte inkluderat företagsledningen. De senaste åren är trenden att företagsledares löner ökat kraftigt, medan de anställdas löner inte ökat i samma takt.
– Det finns en väldig symbolik i det. Om man kommunicerar att vi måste hålla igen på lönerna och att vi inte har råd att betala ut mer än så här stor procentsats i potten medan det händer betydligt mer på chefsnivå har man ett legitimitetsproblem. Det kan skapa ett missnöje, säger Magnus Sverke.

Fredrik Heyman, docent i nationalekonomi och forskare vid Institutet för näringslivsforskning, har gjort en forskningssammanställning för att se om det finns något samband mellan lönespridning inom företag och produktivitet. Jobbar folk bättre om somliga har betydligt mer betalt än andra?

Vid ett positivt samband tänker man sig att skillnad i lönegrupper ger de anställda anledning att arbeta hårdare och förkovra sig för att höja sin lön. Enligt den teorin ger högre lönespridning högre produktivitet för företaget. Men det kan också vara så att stor lönespridning leder till konflikter och att folk låter bli att samarbeta eller kanske rentav saboterar för varandra. Det kan ha en negativ inverkan på produktiviteten.

I sammanställningen är det fler studier som pekar på ett positivt samband mellan lönespridning och produktivitet än som finner ett negativt eller neutralt samband. Men det är svårt att dra en generell slutsats eftersom sammanställningen bygger på studier från olika länder med olika lönebildningssystem där data och tillvägagångssätt skiljer sig ganska mycket åt.
– Det som många hittar och som är lite intressant är att när löneskillnaderna är väldigt små så har ökade löneskillnader positiv effekt, men över en viss nivå blir det i stället negativ effekt, säger Fredrik Heyman.

Går det att räkna fram vetenskapligt den optimala lönespridningen för att folk ska prestera på topp?
– Ett tråkigt svar är att det nog är väldigt svårt. Även inom ett land kan man tänka sig att det finns en lönestruktur som är bra inom en bransch, medan andra passar bättre i andra branscher. Men det är intressant att både väldigt marknadsliberala länder och länder som har mer reglerad ekonomi har kommit fram till att det förefaller finnas en brytpunkt där ökad lönespridning inte har några positiva effekter.

Det kan förstås vara svårt att i en undersökning bryta ut vad i produktiviteten som beror på just lönespridningen.
– En invändning som folk har haft är att det skulle finnas andra icke pekuniära motiv till att jobba som yrkesstolthet, göra rätt för sig och olika värderingar som inte riktigt kommer fram i det här ramverket där man tänker sig att lönen är drivkraften.

Källa: SvD.se, Anna Asker, 15 maj 2012
Läs hela artikeln här på SvD.se
Läs gärna “Lönen inte drivkraften” (SvD.se) här och “Tjänar så sjukt mycket mer än jag är värd” här.

Crowdsourcing your strategy may sound crazy. But a few pioneering companies are starting to do just that, boosting organizational alignment in the process. Should you join them?

In 2009, Wikimedia1 launched a special wiki—one dedicated to the organization’s own strategy. Over the next two years, more than 1,000 volunteers generated some 900 proposals for the company’s future direction and then categorized, rationalized, and formed task forces to elaborate on them. The result was a coherent strategic plan detailing a set of beliefs, priorities, and related commitments that together engendered among participants a deep sense of dedication to Wikimedia’s future. Through the launch of several special projects and the continued work of self-organizing teams dedicated to specific proposals, the vision laid out in the strategic plan is now unfolding.

Wikimedia’s effort to crowdsource its strategy probably sounds like an outlier—after all, the company’s very existence rests on collaborative content creation. Yet over the past few years, a growing number of organizations have begun experimenting with opening up their strategy processes to constituents who were previously frozen out of strategic direction setting. Examples include 3M, Dutch insurer AEGON, global IT services provider HCL Technologies, Red Hat (the leading provider of Linux software), and defense contractor Rite-Solutions.

While such efforts are at different stages, executives at organizations that are experimenting with more participatory modes of strategy development cite two major benefits. One is improving the quality of strategy by pulling in diverse and detailed frontline perspectives that are typically overlooked but can make the resulting plans more insightful and actionable. The second is building enthusiasm and alignment behind a company’s strategic direction—a critical component of long-term organizational health, effective execution, and strong financial performance that is all too rare, according to research we and our colleagues in McKinsey’s organization practice have conducted.

Our objective in this article isn’t to present a definitive road map for opening up the strategy process; it’s simply too early for one to exist. We’d also be the first to acknowledge that for most organizations, “social” strategy setting represents a significant departure from the status quo and should be experimented with carefully—whether that means trying it out in a few areas or creating meaningful opportunities for participation in the context of a more traditional strategy process. (For more on intelligent experimentation, see sidebar, “Collaborative strategic planning: Three observations.”) Nonetheless, we hope that by sketching a picture of some management innovations under way, we will stir the thinking of senior executives eager to benefit from experimenting with such approaches. If you’ve ever wondered how to inject more diversity and expertise into your strategy process, to get leaders closer to the operational implications of their decisions, or to avoid the experience-based biases and orthodoxies that inevitably creep into small groups at the top, it may be time to try shaking things up.

Lessons from the fringe
The best way to describe the possibilities of community-based strategy approaches is to show them in action. Two examples demonstrate the lengths to which some companies have already gone in broadening their strategy processes, as well as the degree to which the executives who participated are convinced of the benefits.

Rethinking planning at HCL Technologies
HCL Technologies, the Indian IT services and software-development company, had enjoyed rapid growth since its founding, in 1998. With growth, however, the company’s business-planning process had become unwieldy. Vineet Nayar, HCL’s chairman and CEO, along with his top team, were providing input to hundreds of business unit–level plans each year. Nayar realized that he and his team had neither the expertise nor the time to deliver all the detailed feedback that each business plan deserved, so he challenged his colleagues to use three key principles to revamp the planning process: make peer review a core component of strategy evaluation, create radical transparency across units, and open up the conversation to large cross-sections of the company.

The solution was to turn the company’s existing business-planning process—a live meeting called Blueprint, which involved a few hundred top executives—into an online platform open to thousands of people. The new process, dubbed My Blueprint, was launched in 2009, with 300 HCL managers posting their business plans, each coupled with an audio presentation. More than 8,000 employees (including several members of the teams that had submitted plans) were then invited to review and provide input on the individual blueprints. A surge of advice followed. The inclusive nature of the process helped identify specific ideas for cross-unit collaboration and gave business leaders a chance to obtain detailed and actionable feedback from interested individuals across the company.

This exercise quickly began yielding business results. One HCL executive we spoke with credited the new process with a fivefold increase in sales to an important client over two years. The key, the executive explained, was the detailed comments—from more than 25 colleagues, ranging from junior finance professionals to software engineers—that together highlighted the need to reframe the business plan away from an emphasis on commoditized application support and toward a handful of new services where HCL had the edge over larger competitors. The employees provided more than good ideas: several even helped assemble the materials the executive needed to deliver the successful proposal.

The high degree of transparency increased the quality of insights, not just their volume. As Nayar notes, “Because the managers knew that the plans would be reviewed by a large number of people, including their own teams, the depth of their business analysis and the quality of their planned strategy improved. They were more honest in their assessment of current challenges and opportunities. They talked less about what they hoped to accomplish and more about the actions they intended to take to achieve specific results.” At the conclusion of the inaugural My Blueprint process, there was broad consensus that participatory business planning had been far more valuable than the traditional top-down review process.2

Red Hat’s new road map
Red Hat is the leading provider of open-source software. In 2008, its leadership team began taking a new approach to strategy development. After defining an initial set of priorities for exploration, Red Hat’s leaders formed teams devoted to each priority. To boost the odds they would stretch toward new solutions, the company ensured that the team leaders—all members of the company’s C-suite—were far removed from their areas of responsibility. The company’s chief people officer, for example, was tasked with analyzing its financial model, while the CFO explored potential operational enhancements.

The teams used wikis and other online tools to generate and organize ideas and made these “open” so that any Red Hat employee could respond with comments or suggestions. The idea generation phase lasted five months and included company-wide updates and online chats with the CEO. Over that period, the best ideas coalesced into nine strategic priorities.

To ensure accountability for developing the priorities further and for making them actionable, the company tasked a new group of executives to lead teams exploring each of the nine areas. These leaders were senior functional ones whose responsibilities put them a level or two below the C-suite. Each of their teams fleshed out one or two of the most important strategic initiatives and was empowered to execute the plans for them without further approvals.

This effort has reshaped the way Red Hat conducts strategic planning. Instead of refreshing strategy yearly on a fixed calendar, the company now updates and evaluates strategy on an ongoing basis. Initiative leaders use customized mailing lists and other tools to receive input continuously from employees and communicate back to them via town hall–style meetings, Internet chat sessions, and frequent blog posts. The company maintains its annual budget process, which is informed by the evolving funding needs of the initiatives.

The fresh perspectives generated by the new planning process have been instrumental in spurring value-creating shifts in the company’s direction. For example, a respected Red Hat engineer used the new process to make the case for a significant change in the way the company offers virtualization services for enterprise data centers and desktop computer applications. The changes led to the acquisition of an external technology provider—a move that would have been unlikely in the days when the company used its old, less inclusive planning process.

Red Hat’s vice president of strategy and corporate marketing, Jackie Yeaney, cites three key benefits of the company’s new approach: first, the process generated “more creativity, accountability, and commitment.” Second, “By not bubbling every decision up to the senior-executive level, we avoided the typical 50,000-foot oversimplification” of issues. And third, “We improved the flexibility and adaptability of the strategy.” With the responsibility for planning and execution now in the hands of the same people doing the work, responsiveness to new opportunities or shifts in the market has increased dramatically.

Closer to home
Some leaders may wonder about borrowing approaches from Red Hat, Wikimedia, or other companies that consider crowdsourcing a part of their institutional DNA (and for which confidentiality issues may be less pressing than they are for many organizations). For these executives, we would note the experiments of more traditional companies, such as 3M, AEGON, and Rite-Solutions. A look at how these organizations are introducing a social side to strategy can help senior executives determine how much further they want to go in their own companies.

Market-based strategy at Rite-Solutions
One way of experimenting with more open strategic direction setting is to create internal markets where legacy programs and new perspectives compete on an equal footing for talent and cash. Rite-Solutions, a Rhode Island–based software provider for the US Navy, defense contractors, and first responders (such as fire departments), is pioneering a game-based strategy process whose foundation is an internal stock exchange it calls Mutual Fun.

Would-be entrepreneurs at Rite-Solutions can launch “IPOs” by preparing an Expect-Us (rather than a prospectus)—a document that outlines the value creation potential of the new idea—as well as a Budge-It list that articulates the short-term steps needed to move the idea forward. Each new stock debuts at $10, and every employee gets $10,000 in play money to invest in the virtual idea market and thereby establish a personal intellectual portfolio. The money flows to ideas that are attracting volunteer effort and moving steadily from germination toward commercialization. A value algorithm revalues each stock, based on the number of Budge-It items completed, inflows and outflows of employee money, and opinions about the stocks expressed in an online discussion board. When an IPO gains momentum and breaks into the company’s Top 20, the initiative is funded with seed money; more is awarded depending on the ability to meet various stage gate milestones. What’s more, when ideas help Rite-Solutions make or save money, those who have invested intellectual capital and contributed to the idea’s realization receive a share of the benefits through bonuses or real stock options.

The internal market for ideas has bolstered the company’s pipeline of new products, and the 15 ideas the company has thus far launched as a result now account for one-fifth of Rite-Solutions’ revenues. Some of the blockbusters were generated in unexpected places—including Win/Play/Learn, a Web-based educational tool licensed by toy maker Hasbro. The source of the idea: an administrative assistant.

Improving market analysis at 3M
In April 2009, 3M decided to reinvigorate its Markets of the Future process—a critical input to the company’s strategic planning. Previously, says Barry Dayton, the company’s knowledge-management strategist, this process had “consisted of a small group of analysts doing research [about] megatrends and resulting markets of the future.” The company invited all of its sales, marketing, and R&D employees to a Web-based forum called InnovationLive, which over a two-week period attracted more than 1,200 participants from over 40 countries and generated more than 700 ideas. The end result was the identification of nine new future markets with an aggregate revenue potential in the tens of billions of dollars. Since then, 3M has held several additional InnovationLive events, and more are on the way.

The alignment advantage
Spend a few minutes talking with the senior executives involved in any of the initiatives described earlier, and it’s immediately apparent how powerful it is when thousands of people are deeply engaged with a company’s strategy. Those employees not only understand the strategy better but are also more motivated to help execute it effectively and more likely to spot emerging opportunities or threats that require quick adjustments.

Reviewing the data
Research we’ve conducted using McKinsey’s organizational-health index database suggests that none of this should be surprising. That database, which contains the results of surveys collected over more than a decade from upward of 765,000 employees at some 600 companies, facilitates analysis of the nature of organizational health, the factors contributing to it, and its relationship with financial performance. One thing we and our colleagues have seen over and over again through our work is that many organizations struggle with strategic alignment: even at the healthiest companies, about 25 percent of employees are unclear about their company’s direction. That figure rises to nearly 60 percent for companies with poor organizational-health scores.

Similarly, we’ve found that the actions companies can take that are most helpful in aligning individuals with the organization’s direction are moves like “making the vision meaningful to employees at a personal level” and “soliciting employee involvement in setting the company’s direction.” If that’s right, it suggests that making more employees part of the strategy process should be a powerful means of aligning them more closely with the company’s overall direction. The payoff for such cohesion is significant: companies with a top-quartile score in directional alignment are twice as likely as others to have above-median financial performance.

Mobilizing middle management
Of course, adopting social-strategy tools doesn’t automatically create alignment. Companies must create it actively, particularly among middle managers, who as the guardians of everyday operations bear the brunt of making any company’s strategy work.

One airline saw its efforts to mobilize the workforce impaired by the silent noncooperation of middle management in several departments. Closer inspection revealed that middle managers didn’t disagree with the discussion that was under way but felt they deserved a bigger voice in it—and should have been included earlier. They also felt uneasy with the level of transparency in a dialogue involving some 2,000 people, accustomed as they were to managing on a need-to-know basis.

The Dutch insurer AEGON sidestepped problems such as these by breaking its strategy discussion into manageable topics related to everyday operational practices. That allowed middle managers to assume responsibility for the discussion and contribute their expertise. In the words of Marco Keim, CEO of AEGON The Netherlands, “We started a digital-networking platform called AEGON Square and got the conversation going. People gathered in communities of practice and started sharing ideas on how to make the new strategy work. Dialogue really helped in fostering organization-wide alignment.”

Ultimately, middle managers were among the effort’s most enthusiastic supporters—both as contributors themselves and as active recruiters of participants. (In the end, 3,000 employees, 85 percent of the total, participated over 12 months.) Keim acknowledged, though, that building this alignment required a significant cultural change toward more openness, which took time to take hold and required regular reaffirmation by senior executives.

The evolution of strategic leadership
It takes courage to bring more people and ideas into strategic direction setting. Senior executives who launch such initiatives are essentially using their positional authority to distribute power. They’re also embracing the underlying principles—transparency, radical inclusion, egalitarianism, and peer review—of the Web-based social technologies that make it possible to open up direction setting.

Taking these principles to their logical conclusion suggests a shift in the strategic-leadership role of the CEO and other members of the C-suite: from “all-knowing decision makers,” who are expected to know everything and tell others what to do, to “social architects,” who spend a lot of time thinking about how to create the processes and incentives that unearth the best thinking and unleash the full potential of all who work at a company. Making this shift doesn’t imply an abdication of strategic leadership. The CEO and other top executives still have the right—indeed, the responsibility—to step in if things go awry, and of course they continue to be responsible for making the difficult trade-offs that are the essence of good strategy.

But it also may be increasingly important for strategists to lead in different ways. For example, to convey the message that the contribution of employees is of vital importance, top executives should constantly confirm that it is and set the example themselves. This approach requires a more direct, personal, and empathetic exchange than a traditional town hall meeting allows. For a mass digital dialogue to succeed, people need to express themselves openly, which may leave some participants feeling exposed. Leaders can help by demonstrating vulnerability as well—peeling off the layers of formal composure.

Another important element of social-strategy leadership is honestly assessing the readiness of the organization to open up and, in light of that, determining the best way to stimulate engagement. This sounds simple, but overlooking it can be costly. As part of a new strategy dialogue, the leaders of one mutual insurance company enthusiastically called upon its workforce to share reflections on an innovative, soon-to-be-launched life insurance product. Despite the leaders’ expectation that the open call would generate a torrent of endorsements, it was met with a deafening silence. Closer inspection revealed that people were acutely aware of the strategic importance that senior management attached to this innovation. And nobody wanted to wreck the party by openly sharing the prevailing doubts, which were widespread. The doubts proved well founded: within a few months of being launched, the new product was declared a failure and shelved.

This cautionary tale points to a final element of strategic leadership: figuring out ways to encourage dissenting voices. Enabling employees to communicate through ambient signals instead of relying on words and elaborated opinions is an effective way to lower the threshold and still catch the prevailing mood. Familiar examples of ambient dialogue include polls, “liking,”8 and voting—simple functions that allow participants to express an opinion without being exposed. More powerful and sophisticated forms of ambient dialogue include prediction markets (small-scale electronic markets that tie payoffs to measurable future events) and swarming (the visually aggregated representation of the emergent mood or motion within an organization).

Consider how a prediction market might have helped the mutual insurer. The opening market quotation for the new life insurance product would probably have taken a steep dive, revealing the negative assessment of the internal market. This would have immediately alerted managers to potential weaknesses, without exposing the employees who had the courage to reveal the problems.

While these are still early days for social strategy, its potential to enhance the quality of dialogue, improve decision making, and boost organizational alignment is alluring. Realizing that potential will require strategic leaders to flex new muscles and display real courage.

Source: McKinsey Quaterly,
Authors: Arne Gast and Michele Zanini (Arne Gast is a principal in McKinsey’s Amsterdam office; Michele Zanini is a consultant in the Boston office and cofounder of the Management Innovation eXchange (MIX), a Web-based open-innovation project dedicated to reinventing management. McKinsey is a knowledge partner of the MIX)
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Sommar och semester börjar närma sig och i många företag tar man hjälp av semestervikarier. Och just i dessa tider dykeroseriösa säljare upp så var observant på vad du är på väg att betala för. I länken finns information om hur du kan förhindra att bli lurad eller vad du kan göra om du drabbats.

Klicka här för varningslistan!

Med referens till mitt tidigare blogginlägg under rubriken “Cherna ger ädre nobben” (läs gärna här) kan jag rekommendera följande artikel på samma huvudtema i dagens DN:

Regeringen vill införa ett förbud mot åldersdiskriminering på områden där det saknas i dag. Förbudet finns i dag bara inom arbetsliv och utbildning.
Det ska dock finnas vissa undantag. Nedre åldersgränser på barer och restauranger och pensionärsrabatter är sådana exempel, enligt ett pressmeddelande från arbetsmarknadsdepartementet.
– Vi har en märklig syn på ålder i Sverige där vi alldeles för ofta slarvar bort äldres kompetens , säger integrationsminister Erik Ullenhag (FP).

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Within the framework of executive coaching, I often discuss work priorities with my clients. Here is an article on this subject:

The roots of depletion
Because Johanna’s international travels are relentless, she and I often conduct our coaching sessions via her company’s high-definition video conferencing. Recently, I watched as she dropped into frame with a grunt and smiled at me wanly. Her look prompted me to ask, with sincere concern, “How’re you doing?”

Her shoulders fell. Her eyes welled up. Her chin sunk to her chest. Then her hands covered her face. She was quiet a long time, then whispered, “Oh, Tom, I’m so tired.”
Johanna is not fragile. She loves working at the senior level of one of the world’s largest technology companies. But this day, she was worn out and beaten down.

She told me how, during a meeting in India with a dozen department heads, she was unable to come up with a solution to a simple problem. “My mind was like a mush ball, Tom. I just couldn’t pull my thoughts together.”
I asked what was contributing to her depletion. She recited a litany I’d heard before: unending organizational changes and strategic realignments; the departure of her boss who’d been a close friend; the rigors of her international schedule; the demands of her division president to be connected 24/7, even on vacation.

When she finished, I asked, “And what about you, Johanna? How are you contributing to your exhaustion?”
She stared at me as if I’d spoken gibberish. Then she began to turn her thoughts inwards. After a pause, she said, “I’m a perfectionist.” I said nothing. After another pause she said, “I can’t say ‘no’.”

I still said nothing.
Then she said, “I haven’t taken care of myself at all.”

Savoring silence
Johanna’s case is extreme but not unfamiliar.
Twenty years ago when I first began coaching, one moment often repeated itself with many of my clients. After I’d taken my seat at their meeting table, they would close their door, then stop, savoring the silence. Often they’d exhale deeply, relaxing and preparing themselves for a conversation radically different from the rest of their day.

These days, I rarely see that moment of savoring. This is not because my current clients are less engaged or less introspective. Not at all.

Nowadays, the outside pressure that mounts while they’re in the coaching conversation is heavier than it used to be; they incur a real cost by carving out time for coaching. So clients these days often attack their conversations with me using the same energetic commitment they devote to all their other tasks.

The coaching is no less powerful than it was. But often it takes longer for executives to loosen their layers of analytical, logical and objective thinking in order to access their more thoughtful, intuitive and subjective selves.

I believe companies are less rich when their leaders feel compelled to stay in “doing” mode at the expense of exercising their “being” mode.

Before I go further with my ideas about this, I’d like to pose a riddle to you. Ready?

Two girls, Marjorie and Margaret, were born at the same time, on the same day, in the same month, of the same year, to the same mother and father. Yet they are not twins. How is this possible? Can you figure this out?

Two conditions for insight
Jonah Lehrer, in his new book, “Imagine: How Creativity Works,” says that moments of insight most often occur when two conditions are present. First, the person seeking “an answer” stops pursuing the answer, and second, the person is relaxed.

As an example he cites one particular practice at 3M, consistently one of the most innovative companies on the planet.

Their designers have one hour a day to work on anything they’d like, the only stipulation being that they must share their results with their colleagues.

Over and over, when 3M’s people turn their attention away from their work projects and focus on whatever strikes their fancy—whether it’s a hobby or taking a nap!—answers to problems bubble up effortlessly and unbidden.

A simpler example, Lehrer says, is the wealth of ideas that come to us while we’re in the shower. Our minds are untethered and relaxed. And answers present themselves.

Sounds reasonable, doesn’t it? But if you saw one of your direct reports taking a nap in the sun, would your first thought be, “Good choice! I bet some real value will come from that”?

I told Johanna I wasn’t surprised that she was unable to find a simple solution to the situation in India: she hadn’t been able to disconnect and relax for a long time, so her batteries were drained.

Johanna and I discussed many ways she could begin to replenish herself. She ended up adopting four of the ideas we discussed. Here they are:

1 Resist firefighting
Constant connectivity pulls all of us in many different directions these days. Dozens of opportunities for distraction pop up in front of us every hour. Resisting all those bright, shiny objects requires clear vision and strong purpose.

One strategy Johanna used to help her define clear vision and strong purpose was to begin every day with planning—even before she checked her email!

She became rigorous about tying small actions to larger goals. If an activity didn’t tie in, she moved it down the list to wait for later.

Another strategy was to create an email folder she called “Tier Two” for non-urgent messages. She found she could put over half her inbox in that folder.

2 Engage without worry
“The Hurt Locker” won six Academy Awards in 2008, including Best Picture, for its gritty depiction of a bomb squad defusing explosive devices on the streets of Baghdad. The movie’s tension is built-in: what could be more tense than watching professionals try to achieve extreme calm while doing work that has life-or-death consequences? We understand that the bomb technicians can only survive if they learn to shut out the implications of their actions and single-mindedly focus on the task in the immediate present.

That’s not so different from what is required from executives in this era of overwork and too few resources.

There’s always more work than can be completed. Worrying about tasks piling up behind you doesn’t help you chip away at the task at hand. As with the bomb technicians, thinking about anything other than what you’re doing reduces your effectiveness in the moment.

Focus on the task in front of you without worry. The future will arrive soon enough!

3 Good enough is good enough
Johanna’s high standards are a core part of her self-image. She believes they’re a major factor in her success. Anything less than excellence is painful to her.

She began to ease up on herself and accept that there was a new norm in the world. For example, she began to accept that having more work than she could finish was not a character flaw. She began to accept that not everything had to be finely polished—sometimes good enough really was good enough. She began setting priorities more quickly and delegating more often, which allowed her to move faster through her work.

Sometimes good enough really is good enough.

4 Trust “down time” to be productive
Johanna used to love reading poetry and fiction. But with work piling up like flights waiting to land in bad weather, she felt too guilty to give herself the gift of reading for pleasure.

After we discussed the concepts in “Imagine, How Creativity Works,” she let go of that guilt and bought “What the Living Do” by Marie Howe, a favorite poet. To her surprise, while reading one of the first poems in the slim volume, she got an idea for an activity at an upcoming off-site. She was so amazed that her very next action was to call me to crow about it. She felt unleashed.

She began to encourage her direct reports to schedule personal time for themselves. And she began to follow her own orders.

On a related topic, do you know why I asked you that riddle about Marjorie and Margaret?

Because, if you didn’t know the answer, and if you wanted to try to figure it out, you had to stop reading and activate a completely different part of your brain. If you pondered the riddle for more than a few seconds, you probably felt the shift. (Or perhaps you felt too pressured to allow the shift to happen, so you just kept reading without getting engaged in the riddle. I certainly do that sometimes.)

Being conscious of when those mental shifts happen is a wonderful awareness.

If you’re stuck in “doing” mode and not experiencing shifts into “being” mode, or if, like last month’s The Distracted Executive, you are in constant delivery mode and not enough in receiving mode, you may benefit by consciously creating more daily mental shifts. All too often my clients tell me they don’t feel the shift into relaxation mode until the fourth day of a seven-day vacation!

And, if you have not seen that riddle before, the answer is: “Because they’re two of three triplets.”

Can you take an elevator ride without checking your phone? Can you concentrate on one task for a sustained period? Can you play and enjoy yourself, guilt-free? If so, you’ve collapsed many of the hurdles that our current world places between us and The Look & Sound of Leadership™.

Source: Essentialcomm.com, May 2012
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Politikerna pratar om höjd pensionsålder medan arbetsgivarna nobbar de äldre på arbetsmarknaden – samtidigt som många unga har svårt att komma in på arbetsmarknaden. Det går inte ihop.

Men faktum kvarstår att många 40-talister försvinner från arbetsmarknaden och måste ersättas framöver. Det skulle kunna vara ett bra tillfälle också för folk över 50- eller 55-strecket, som fortfarande har många år kvar till pension, att byta jobb. Men många rekryterare och arbetssökande kan vittna om att arbetsgivarna går efter födelseår och nobbar arbetssökande ibland redan efter 40-årsstrecket.

Analysföretaget IC-Potential ställde vid den senaste mätningen till Personalchefsindex (SvD Näringsliv 23 april) också en öppen fråga till alla deltagande personalchefer om vad som skulle få företaget att anställa fler över 50.
Hälften av de deltagande svarar att rätt kompetens är viktigare än ålder.
– De duckar lite för frågan. Frågan är känslig och genom att svara ”rätt kompetens” ger man inga tydliga förklaringar. Eftersom många efterlyser erfarenhet och kompetens borde 50-plussare vara bättre att anställa, säger Marcos Jorge, vd för IC-Potential.

Landstinget har olika lösningar för äldre som ett sätt att orka jobba några år till utan att förlora pension, medan Umeå kommun och landstinget har ett koncept där äldre medarbetare ska använda 25 procent av sin heltidstjänst till mentorskap och kompetensförmedling till de yngre.

Att arbetsgivarna nobbar äldre är klarlagt sedan länge och ofta, senast i den statliga pensionsåldersutredningen, som presenterade ett delbetänkande för några veckor sedan. Enligt utredningen finns en åldersdiskriminering i Sverige och den visar att arbetsgivarna är största hindret till ett förlängt arbetsliv och därmed hindras också de äldres rörlighet på arbetsmarknaden.
– Nu måste frågan om ett längre arbetsliv och ökad rörlighet också högre upp i åldrarna diskuteras och man måste prata om lösningar. Kanske måste man lagstifta tydligare och sätta mer press på arbetsgivarna, säger Marcos Jorge.

Han lägger en del ansvar på rekryteringsföretagen, även om långt ifrån står för all rekrytering:
– De måste titta bredare än uppdragsgivarens krav och föreslå äldre kandidater, även om arbetsgivarna tänker i gamla banor och ser en 35-åring framför sig.

Vad fördomarna mot äldre arbetskraft bottnar i är svårt att säga. Är det skräck och avsmak för grånande hår och rynkor?
Den förklaringen vågar Marcos Jorge inte svära på är riktig.
– Många personalchefer är själva 50-plussare och borde veta att datorvana, kompetens och tankeförmåga inte försvinner i den åldern. Effektiva företag byggs på mångfald i ålder, kön och annan bakgrund.

Åldersgränsen 65 lever kvar i tjänstepensionsreglerna och reglerna är utformade så att det är dyrt att anställa och behålla äldre arbetskraft, konstaterade pensionsåldersutredningen.

Många personalchefer i IC-Potentials index pekar på pensionspremierna som ett hinder att anställa äldre. Men svaren skiftar en del och många företag uppger att de gärna anställer 50-plussare. Andra pekar på hög medelålder i företaget som gör att man vill ha in yngre.

Källa: Svd:se, Ylva Edenhall, 10 maj 2012
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