Political leadership: an example of effective support for economic regeneration...

... or not?

Sheffield Lib Dem Council leader Paul Scriven sings in hotel chain promo video

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6OoZbDBaiwc

Just stumbled across this via Twitter.

What do you think? 

(Happy New Year!)

Humour in a cold climate

In these austere times, despite moments of relief and joy for many, it is very hard to remain positive and act progressively. It is all too easy to retreat into a reactive bubble and just live from day to day, doing only that which is absolutely necessary to keep your head above water. Creativity flounders, working relationships are put under huge strain and leadership can descend into the emaciated hell of just following procedures. 

One thing that remains though, despite all this gloom, is humour. Our ability to take a wry slant on the world and grimly laugh at the situation can be majestic. Humour is the warmth that keeps our home fires burning - or at least the embers glowing, ready to spark into flame when more fuel is found. Humour can make even the coldest places seem warmer and more hopeful. 

Some years ago, I made a point of collecting a few examples of workplace humour which I share below. I do this for several reasons. Firstly I hope the statements below make you laugh and even if it is only through gritted teeth, I hope the small shot of endorphins helps. Secondly, if you come across any other examples that you would like to share please do so - you can add a comment below or email me. And thirdly, I hope this small smattering of humour helps you stay in touch with your ambitions and assists you in keeping on keeping on in these difficult times. 

In one senior police managers office, I came across this simple statement, pinned up on his notice board: 

The only difference between this place and the Titanic is that they, at least, had a band.

Pinned up on a general notice board of a financial services company I once worked with, I saw: 

The Management regrets that due to the current economic climate, it has been necessary to make certain economies. Therefore the light at the end of the tunnel has been switched off until further notice.

In a well known consumer campaigning organisation that I once did some work with, the following posters sprang up overnight like a blanket of bluebells:

Meetings: the practical alternative to work

• Are you lonely...?
• Do you work on your own...?
• Do you hate having to make decisions...?

Then hold a meeting!

• You can get to see other people, sleep in peace, off-load decisions, feel important and impress your colleagues.

And then in another organisation, I saw this: 

The Curse of the Pyramid

I will never forget the time when we entered the final chamber of the biggest pyramid. The endless variety of furnishings, the sense of absolute stillness... of action long ago abandoned, the incomprehensible symbols written for no living person to read...

And I turned to my companion and said "it's just like head office really, isn't it?" But he disagreed as he couldn't see a coffee machine.

(For 'head office' insert your own suitable place, of course!)

And finally, I would offer you this to indicate that I can laugh at myself as well:

The Consultants Promise

• We may not succeed in answering all of your questions.
• Indeed you may feel that we have not answered any of them.
• Nonetheless, you can be assured that the answers we do give will only serve to raise a whole new set of questions
• And so, in some ways, you may feel as confused as ever.
• However, we promise, that you will be confused on a much higher level about far more important things.

Naturally, I would like to thank all the people who penned or posted these pieces of humour. I don't know their names, I am afraid, but I am most grateful to them.

And like I say, if you know of any more items that made you laugh, do please share them. Thanks.

Original blog post: http://jonharveyassociates.blogspot.com/2010/12/humour-in-cold-climate.html

Is your leadership compatible with coalition government policy?

Here is a link to a Guardian Public article of mine - just published today:

http://www.guardianpublic.co.uk/free-and-fair-responsible-society

It is a check list of 20 questions to prompt reflection on whether you are a free, fair and responsible leader. 

Heathrow: a breathtaking failure of leadership?

There is an old saying (and some dispute about who coined it first): Life is not measured by the number of breaths we take, but by the moments that take our breath away. 

This got me to wondering about leadership. Should leadership be breathtaking or breathless? It seems to me that many managers spend their time trying to be everywhere, support everyone, monitor everything and so forth. This is breathless leadership. Whilst this may give the leader a warm feeling that they are a ‘hands on’ influential leader, the chances are that others will not be as impressed. 

I suspect that London Heathrow, which is currently wrapped for Christmas in very sticky snow, is full of breathless leaders right now, all seeking to make something (anything, dammit!) happen and get passengers moving again. This is commendable and necessary given the circumstances. But what were these breathless leaders doing in the Summer? Were they still running around in a similar fashion? (Latest news as I write here)

Perhaps what London Heathrow needs is a lot more breathtaking leadership. This is the kind of leadership that listens, that empowers, that connects, that plans, that waits, that assembles, that includes, that challenges, that invests, that innovates, that focuses... that inspires. 

Breathtaking leadership is easy to spot. It is the kind of leadership that we have all felt once in a while when someone says or does something that makes us do a mental or real double take. We hold our breath as we think about what the person has just done. If it’s an exceptional moment of leadership, we may even forget to breathe until our body kicks in and we take short intake of breath. 

My challenge for 2011: how can you make your leadership less breathless and more breathtaking?

Original blogpost: http://jonharveyassociates.blogspot.com/2010/12/heathrow-breathtaking-failure-of.html

Seasonal Greetings: Prosperity for all!

At this is a time of year, a good many people take a moment to remember the riches they have. 

These are not the riches that can ever be measured in £ or $ signs. These riches are far, far more valuable than that. These are the riches in the smiles from neighbours, the gleams in the eyes of our children, the kind words of old friends, the courtesies of strangers or the laughs of our family members. These are the riches that make us feel truly warm, solid and human. 

Although sadly, not everyone has these riches in abundance, happily we can all take action to spread more of this wealth around. Whilst I do try to do this wealth creation as much as I can, I will admit that during these austere and recessionary times, I have sometimes become just a tad too focused on the lesser (financial) riches. My resolution for 2011 is to remain resolutely focused on building true prosperity. 

With this in mind, I have adopted the word 'prosperity' for the next 12 months. (The 'I CAN' charity in association with Collins Dictionaries allows you to adopt words in exchange for funding action to ensure that no child who struggles to communicate is left out or left behind. You can adopt a word yourself by visiting here: http://new.adoptaword.co.uk/index.php And you can see a copy of my adoption certificate attached  

So I am sending you my seasonal greetings: I sincerely wish that 2011 will be a truly rich and prosperous year for you, your families, friends and communities. 

Jon

Followers do not a leader make: relationships count

On twitter, at the time of writing, I have 1452 followers. Does this make me a leader? True, many of those people have actively clicked on my follow button and will (until they choose otherwise) see my 140 character pearls of wisdom and comment. But I don't think this makes me any kind of leader. Just having followers does not make anyone a leader. 

Certainly, if you claim to be a leader and no one is following you, then your claim may not stand up to much scrutiny. But just because you can look around and see people following you does not necessarily make you a leader either. You have to wonder, why are these people following me? Are they doing so because they are contractually obliged to, or it is just in their interest to do so, or because someone they do respect has told them to follow you?. Even if they have chosen to follow you - are they doing anything different as a result? And so forth...

The relationships between leaders and their followers are ultimately what count. Do the followers respect and trust the leader, do they want to emulate the leader's actions or beliefs? Does the relationship have an impact at all on how the followers conduct their lives - professionally or personally? 

Moreover, do you, as a leader, do things differently because you know that your followers will observe what you do? Does that responsibility inspire or restrict you? 

So the next time, you hear someone talk about leaders having followers (I saw a presentation recently which featured this insight just recently), I would urge you to ask them a question or two about the relationship between leaders and their followers. 

As a leader or follower: how are your relationships?  

 

 

Original blog post: http://jonharveyassociates.blogspot.com/2010/12/followers-do-not-leader-make.html

Is there a shortage of commercial leadership? (Update)

I am struck that in several, perhaps many, parts of the UK public services there has been a shortage of commercial leadership. This is no surprise of course - government is not about commerce - despite some people's efforts to make it so. Government cannot pick and choose who it serves, it must be transparent, open and accountable, and it is about producing social outcomes not just financial ones. So for all these reasons, in my view, public services are not the same as commercial ones.

 

That said, the public services do enter into commercial arrangements where they have  to negotiate value for money contracts with suppliers. I do worry that sometimes this has not been done as well as it might. In short, I fear that our local and national government have been stuffed by some rather canny operators in the commercial world.

 

It seems to me that some public service leaders have treated transparent procurement as a proxy to commercial negotiations. But they are not the same. Negotiating a contract with a supplier after they have won the procurement competition is not the same as negotiating with them before...

 

I know - I am painting things in black and white here - and being deliberately provocative. But I came across a story the other morning which left me sad and fed up. I attended a seminar hosted by Civil Service World and sponsored by Hewlett Packard on the 'Digital Dividend'. (It was a very good event - so thanks to the organisers.) In the networking time I spoke to a young chap from a large government department who explained to me he had recently developed a macro for a commonly used spreadsheet in his organisation that would save a lot of people a lot of time. But then he found out that if his department were to use this - they would have to pay the outsourced IT contractor about £15k every time they used it. You see - there was a clause in the contract... So this small innovation (and you know how much I like small creative ideas) was squashed from the outset.

 

So this got me thinking - how much commercial leadership is there in the public services. Given the current austerity measures - I would propose that we need a lot more of this kind of leadership.

 

What do you think?

What does commercial leadership mean for you - what skills (apart from negotiating skills of course) need to be well honed?

 

-----------------

Just spotted this interesting and related article:

 

http://www.supplymanagement.com/news/2009/nao-slams-government-purchasing-capability/

9 November 2009 | Jake Kanter

"Significant weaknesses" in procurement skills are jeopardising value for money on major projects, according to the UK's National Audit Office (NAO).

The spending watchdog's latest report, Commercial skills for complex government projects, said the public sector lacked commercial capability in areas including contract management, commissioning and risk management....

Achieving excellent procurement (Update)

How do you know if your procurement / purchasing function is doing a better job than (say) this time last year – how do you measure success? How do you know if the service is VFM? 

I ask the question because:

• most procurement processes frustrate me to bits – in recent days, I have even had a friend in the same business tell me that she is losing the will to live after having written x bids over recent weeks. (You may have already read my – hopefully humorous – rant about the excesses of procurement in my field  - click here if you haven’t)
• I have been offered a complementary place at a forthcoming conference on public sector procurement (see here) for which I am most grateful. The least I thought I could do was do some further thinking about the subject – hence this blog post
• the influence, scope and size of procurement in the public services is set to grow even further – especially of Sir Philip Green has his way (see here for the main story). Government services must practice excellent: efficient, effective & economic procurement as a consequence.
• it isn’t just suppliers who lose sleep and hair over procurement so do the clients want to source a particular service. I know of several instances of where a client wants Z but because of the procurement process enforced upon them, they get Y. And from the work I did years ago supporting a firm which developed systems for the Ministry of Defence – I know that the end user (be it frontline member of the armed forces in that case or a citizen / customer in many other cases) just does not get a look in, usually.

So what is to be done? I offer this checklist below as my ‘starter for ten’ attempt at what I would expect to see evidence of in an excellent procurement function. Please feel free to add more points or make the case to tweak or even delete some of my suggestions. I have written this without any reference to any published standards (of which their might be legion!) 

For me, an ideal procurement function would: 

1. Have systems in place to understand and respond to trends in client satisfaction with its services
2. Have established a productive way of listening to feedback from suppliers / bidders (successful and unsuccessful) involved in the procurement processes they manage
3. Benchmark their processes with other procurement functions, both inside and outside their industry or sector, to look for ways to improve what they do
4. Collect the information and be transparent about all the resources spent on procurement processes: by the function themselves, the client who wishes to source a supplier and (radical idea perhaps) all the bidders. (It is a standard clause that clients do not pay for the effort that goes into writing bids. Fair enough. But that resource has to be paid for some how.) This overall data would also be a crude measure of how ‘elegant’ a procurement process is.
5. Have developed an easy to grasp method for measuring whether the cost benefit analysis of the procurement processes are improving or worsening.
6. Have practices in place to ensure that the ‘voice of the customer’ – the end user, citizen or frontline person who will be the final recipient of the new service / product being sourced – is evident at every stage of the procurement process and is heard loudly & clearly.
7. Make efforts to connect people together across the supply chain so that the procurement function does not attain disproportionate power by being the sole knowledge holder and (more crucially) that procurement is done ‘whole system aware’ (see here for further information about this).
8. Although it is harder, always look for ways to procure on outcomes or overall objectives rather than outputs or processes. (All too often, I see tender documents that specify what I know to be a less than satisfactory ‘going through the motion’ type process which will be lucky to achieve any lasting outcomes. Magic can happen if suppliers are given the scope to propose a process that may be outside the prescribed ‘usual’ way of doing things but which will still achieve the desired for outcomes.)
9. Run procurement processes in ways that inspire potential suppliers to be innovative and think of ways to achieve the desired outcomes with more efficiency and effectiveness.
10. Have accrediting procedures which do not involve the uploading of numerous policies and strategies but merely state that the winning bidder will be expected (then) to show that they have these in place.
11. Have established shrewd ways of sorting the bidders into ‘wheat and chaff’ involving (perhaps radically) asking the bidders to state what questions or measures they would pose to the other bidders to help achieve this result.
12. Led strategically, mindful of the key purpose of procurement within the overall strategy of the host organisation.  

I probably could go on!  

But what do you think? Do you agree with the points above? Would you add any more? Would you subtract some of the points above?

-----------------

Just spotted this interesting and related article: 

http://www.supplymanagement.com/news/2009/nao-slams-government-purchasing-capability/

9 November 2009 | Jake Kanter

"Significant weaknesses" in procurement skills are jeopardising value for money on major projects, according to the UK's National Audit Office (NAO).

The spending watchdog's latest report, Commercial skills for complex government projects, said the public sector lacked commercial capability in areas including contract management, commissioning and risk management....