Shamrock Organisations

Ten years ago Charles Handy in his seminal book, The Age of Unreason declared that we humans were entering an era of rapid and highly discontinuous change.

In such a world - of unreasonable, discontinuous change, all the established rules are vulnerable. We need to respond with discontinuous, upside-down thinking. We need new kinds of organizations, new approaches to work, new types of schools, and new ideas about being in the world.

Alongside a number of interesting paradigms including 'inverted doughnuts' and 'portfolio lives' he talked extensively about 'Shamrock Organisations'. Essentially the idea is that each business should only do the things that represented core capabilities, everything else should be shared out to specialists. It's an incredible concept and 6 years on is evan more valid

Many companies use these principles today through partner alliances bound by Non Disclosure Agreements (NDA's) and inter-company service level agreements. My personal view is that this is akin to signing a pre-nuptial agreement and a contract for services prior to getting married. It doesn't bode too well if you have to plan for failure at the start!

MINX is a rapidly growing business with a reputation for delivering great service at incredibly high levels of quality. I'm really proud of our achievements and we constantly strive to improve and broaden our capabilities.

Frequently our customers ask us to help them with things that are simply outside our core field of expertise. It's a fantastic compliment and shows real trust in our business. We have to make sure that we can fully support their requirements and deliver a result that both the client and MINX can be proud of.

We have been truly fortunate over the years in finding great businesses partners where the management teams have similar values to MINX. We don't need to worry that they will look after our customers and we fully reciprocate this when they ask for our help. This close working partnership has to be seen as a long game, not project by project. At times we will forward an opportunity where we know a partner has a real good chance of securing some business evan where our company has been ruled out, it's what friends do and it pays dividends for our relationship and the consideration is often reciprocated.

A key part of a great relationship is monogomy, if we have several partners in any one area it's going to create tensions as we choose who to work with on a particular project. We can also fully expect the same treatment back! It's much more effective to have one close partnership than several weak relationships.

It's also important to accept that, occasionally, things go wrong and this is where a good partnership can make all the difference. We can be open, honest and focus on making good rather than pulling out the T&C's. We had one example recently where client, partner and MINX all under-estimated the amount of training required post-implementation. The project had been signed-off but the client was experiencing a degree of pain. We arranged a three way call, route-caused the symptoms and immediately planned out additional on-site support from MINX and top-up training from our partner. The client was not asked to pay any additional costs and we didn't get into a game of contract trumps with the partner which would probably have worked out far more expensive!

Delivering Great Projects

Over the years an awful lot of literature and technology has sprung up to help us manage work more effectively but it's important to remember that all we're trying to do here is deliver a great end result to a client. The most elaborate project schedule and comprehensive project methodology is pointless if the end result fails to delight the client!

In one of my previous roles I used to look after an awful lot of concurrent projects, the last time I counted they numbered 816! Each followed a rigorous internal set of standards intended to assure success. I also had a large team (around 100 Project Manager's) to look after these projects, each had been accredited and was reasonable experienced. Despite this many went off the rails and only a few could really be deemed a real success by the client. Perhaps interestingly, some of the most successful ones were those that had not only left the tracks but had demolished several buildings en route! In each case I set up a 'War Room' with all the key stakeholders to understand what had happened and what we needed to do to re-track.

The key characteristic of these sessions was the breaking down of organisational boundaries and an honest appraisal of not just the stated requirements but the business drivers. Essentially we sat down with the client to work out what we all wanted to achieve to be successful. It didn't just feel good to us, our clients were initially cautious but soon loved being this close to a real project. No more sanitised project reports or filtered issues and risks, we all saw the full picture and worked as a team to deliver the end result.

I won't try to kid anyone here, working for an outsourcing business does put up a number of boundaries, this approach only worked where we could wheel in some senior people and the client was prepared to meet us half way. However, it did open my eyes to how a project delivery organisation could work!

It should come as no surprise then that we apply a very unique aproach to running projects at MINX. We don't try to nail our clients into a set of T&C's that will protect us in the event of a dispute. Instead we try to build a deep understanding of requirements, business drivers and add our own input in terms of deeply skilled and experienced consultants to help define the best end result we can. We accept that things change but rather than just protect ourselves with a change process we help our clients to factor in room for those changes.

The result has been consistent Cisco Excellence achievement from the Customer Satisfaction programme. We also measure our own performance via a comprehensive questionnaire. Across the past quarter we have averaged 97% across all categories. We use these scores to help us target performance improvements. Its also a great way to measure people as its a measure that they can directly relate to and affect.

Nice to meet you!

I had a great meeting recently with some business colleagues from India. It was the first time we had met but, after a few coffee's and travel stories we all quickly built a lot of empathy and a lot of interest in each other that will help us work together more effectively.

It never ceases to amaze me how much we can communicate through non-verbal mechanisms. I guess in this respect my 5 year old daughter is probably streets ahead of me. By the time I have managed to get past the initial introductions with someone she will be off with their kids to find out where all the toys are!

There is some interesting science here, Dr Albert Mehrabian, a professor at University College of Los Angeles, provided us with the much cited 55:38:7 ratio. That translates to 55% of our message impact is visual, 38% vocal (e.g. tone, rhythm and inflection) and just 7% verbal (i.e. the actual words we use). That means in any meeting 93% of your message is non-verbal! It also suggests that my dog is probably a better communicator than me, he certainly makes it very clear what he wants by a simple glance at the remains of our dinner on the table that casually moves to his food bowl.

Seriously though it underlines the importance of effective communications, particularly where we're meeting someone for the first time or with audiences from different cultures. This will become increasingly more important as we all enter a phase of corporate travelling restrictions and rely on lower cost mechanisms to keep in contact. The key is to effectively use the various mechanisms available to us.

I learnt a good lesson here at a previous company I worked for. My team were scattered across Europe and in some cases I had to work with some very difficult end clients. One particular client was based over in Paris and for many weeks we had communicated by e mail and the occasional phone call. To put it mildly we had a tense relationship underpinned by mutual distrust. It didn't take long for this to spread across his team which made our job difficult.

I eventually took a flight over and arranged a meeting in an attempt to sort out our problems. I had envisaged a cathartic exchange of viewpoints followed by an agreed way to move forward. On meeting up he warmly greeted me, made a fresh coffee, and took a genuine interest in how my trip over had been and where I was staying. I then received a personal tour of his offices, was introduced to his colleagues and invited out to a meal in the evening.

It was a great evening and we didn't discuss work once. I got to know about his family, friends and interests. The next day we had a series of meetings and not one issue appeared. We shook hands and I flew back to London. Over the months post that meeting we had numerous e mail exchanges, conference calls and video conferences. All were friendly and constructive. I occasionally flew back across for a face to face and each time ended up in a fantastic restaurant with a great bunch of guys and no talk about work!

I guess I had failed to appreciate the need to understand other people's requirements. The social customs and requirements vary per country and person but we all need to understand the need to engage with people on a number of levels to build trust and an effective working relationship. Getting the balance right now means using face to face sessions selectively along with the best possible collaborative technologies to improve the effectiveness of our messages.

Get big and collaborate with your customers

Over the past few years there has been massive investment in networking technologies across the world and we're rapidly getting to the point where every part of the planet can plug into some form of broadband connection.

Alongside this computers have become cheaper and more dispersed with an explosion of associated software - e mail, search engines and workflow engines that can slice and dice packets of work across multiple geographies and then re-assemble them into a product for a particular customer base. These changes have been revolutionising the way we live our lives and do business. We are coming to terms with a very different competitive environment that is knowledge-based and geographically distributed across the globe. Our great big round world has become very flat!

Businesses take advantage of all this through their ability to leverage all the new tools for collaboration to reach further, faster, wider and deeper. A few years ago most sceptics discounted companies like Amazon ($10.7Bn in 2006) and Google ($16.6Bn in 2006) from ever becoming major players in their industry. They lacked physical premises and a few thousend employees, they would never compete with the more established corporations. What they lacked in bricks and mortar they certainly made up in vision and and ability to exploit the internet to reach each and every one of us with some exciting new products and services.

These changes are continuing to gather pace. The current credit crunch and backdrop of a carbon sensitive world will only serve to further accelerate events. We're moving into an era where the small can act big through both evolving technologies and by exploiting collaborations with other businesses to extend products and services beyond their core competencies and become global businesses.

Some businesses take this one more step by collaborating with their customers. A prime example here is Starbucks. Howard Schulz, the founder and chairman, reckons that it is possible to make 19 thousend variations of coffee based on the standard menu. Their branch staff are encouraged to act like it was their business and when many customers started to bring in Soya milk from their coffee they soon rolled this out as a new menu option. Starbucks understand that no matter how big they get their customers want them to listen and give them what they want.

I suspect that many people will argue that this is ok for a business like Starbucks but what else? I used to work in banking and one of the biggest assets was the local branch where the bank met its customers. The local branch manager had a comprehensive view of his customer and flexibility to advise and shape products to fit their requirements. When the financial markets started to look a bit less bullish many banks looked to reduce costs by offshoring services and closing local branches. I don't need to spell out what a huge mistake this was, you just look at how they all now market their services as being highly personalised and promise a long term relationship for their customers.

It's an interesting time to grow a successful business by exploiting technologies that increase your operational efficiencies and help you to reach out further, faster, wider and deeper into your global customer base, while your completitors are 'battening down the hatches'!

Black Swans

These are hard to predict, large impact events that are rare beyond the realms of normal expectation. Some people believe that all significant consequential events in history originated as Black Swans!

Who would have expected a series of what appeared to be unrelated events such as the Sub-Prime mortgage lending exposures, Northern Rock and concerns re long-term oil availability would give rise to such far reaching economic issues. It does remind us all that financial markets are based largely on a foundation of faith rather than something a bit more substantial.

It is, however, a bit encouraging that we appear to have avoided the degree of panic that devastated the markets in 1987. Whatever we feel about the current state of UK politics, the government and Bank Of England didn't just stare into the headlights of the car crash heading their way and were able to take some measures to take some of the initial sting out of this large market correction.

However, many businesses that built on the back of a long bull market came crashing down. Silverjet became the latest airline to collapse when oil prices hit $130, levels that simply wouldn't have been factored into it's business plan and banking arrangements. It joins six other airlines that have gone into receivership in the past 6 months. The only remaining dedicated business-class airline is France's L'Avion.

I used the term correction earlier rather than recession. If you believe that global marketplaces are self-correcting this is a much more logical term to apply. It also lets you look a bit deeper into the opportunities rather than just getting depressed about the state of the economy and possibly taking a course of events that just make things worse.

Before we feel real sorry for all those highly paid derivatives dealers who built careers around Sub-Prime loans and oil prices it's worth noting that they are already generating a lot of new wealth by changing the nature of those instruments to bet on the direction the market is now moving. Perhaps we need to look at things a bit differently.

We have had many years of very cheap airflights. I seem to remember that you could get a flight into Europe for as little as £10 if you booked at the right time. All of us enjoy travelling, seeing new places and burning a bit of business expenses but it is hard to reconcile the sense when we look at the real costs, efficiencies and inevitable contribution to global warming. I was really encouraged when Heather McGregor, principle shareholder of head hunter Taylor Bennet, who had booked a £1,000 seat on Silverjet, was interviewed. She commented to the journalist that "video-conferencing is looking good".

I remember early in my career with IBM having to go into a large video conferencing room for a global meeting. The camera was sound activated and slowly swung round on a turret when it detected a sound. The image quality was truly awful and out of sync. Aside from the huge amounts of fun to be had by the occasional clearing of ones throat it was a pretty useless communications tool.

Since then the quality and ease of use of video solutions has been getting really good. It's never going to replace the benefits of a firm handshake or 1to1 lunch but it is pretty damn effective for most business meetings and significantly reduces operational costs. Many companies now have the networking infrastructure to support these technologies but have still not taken that first step. I'm guessing that with cheap air travel and low key environmental drivers we all lacked enough motivation to embrace these opportunities.

Perhaps the Black Swan has helped us all to now see a bit of sense here.....