The book is Corporate Canaries: Avoid Business Disasters with a Coal Miner’s Secrets, by Gary Sutton. The premise is that just like coalminers used to bring canaries into their coalmines as a form of early detection system for poisonous gas, there are corporate canaries that can serve as a similar form of early detection system for corporate death or failure.

So, on my ride home inspired by The Police, I began to capture some project canaries, or project level warning signs that can indicate a toxic environment within your project, programs, or portfolios. Here they are in no particular order:

• The business should make business decisions and technology should make technology decisions.
• If you don’t have the business defined, you don’t know your destination.
• If you don’t have a schedule, you don’t know when you will arrive at your destination.
• If you don’t have “one throat to choke”, you don’t have any accountability.
• If you don’t have organizational roles & responsibilities understood, you can’t make decisions.
• The project can only move as fast as decisions are made, and kept.
• If you don’t communicate, others will define their perception as your reality.
• If you don’t manage your budget, you don’t have control.

Think of these bullets as canaries in your project. Find the shelf for them to prop them up and watch to see if they keel over. Keep your eye on them as you traverse your project environment, organizational culture, and hallway passages.

“In the future, the real core competence of companies will be the ability to continuously and creatively destroy and remake themselves to meet customer demands.”

-Noel Tichy, Author of The Leadership Engine

The concept of re-inventing ourselves is not new. There are countless examples of this mantra in history (think about the U.S.S.R, Germany, or China) and our contemporary culture (think of the TV show The Biggest Loser or the movie The Pursuit of Happyness). The concept rarely lacks lustre. The real challenge surrounds your willingness and ability to reinvent  yourself. How do you reinvent yourself? Your team? Your company? Your community?

From a transformation perspective, the challenge is to create an engine that will drive your change agenda to produce your desired results. To make this happen, a couple of key questions should to be answered to set you off in the right direction, including but not limited to:

• Do you know where you are going? What are your desired financial results? What are your desired non-financial results? How do these two sets of results relate to each other?
• How will you drive the transformation? Who serves as the gas pedal? Who serves as the brakes? How do you minimize stepping on the gas and the brake simultaneously?
• Who are the brains of your transformation? Do you have enough? Do you have the right ones? Are they performing to your needs?
• Where is the heart of your change agenda? Is your team engaged? Have you won the hearts and minds of the team?
• Would you describe your transformation engine as “command, control, & authority”, “collaborative innovation”, or “priority driven teamwork”?
• Are you unleashing the professional, personal, and emotional capacity of the team to maximize your opportunity for success? If not, why not? What can you do differently to make this happen?
• As with any engine, what is  your fuel? Are you maintaining your engine? Is it working in concert with the other moving parts or are they out of sync components?

Behind every result, good or bad, there are a series of events. And behind those events are people making decisions, or not, that impact the future. If you know your desired results, you are one step ahead of most. With the benefit of understanding the desired results, your challenge is to identify the transformation engine and associated capabilities that will propel you to deliver your desired financial and non-financial results.

Related articles

• The Pursuit of Happyness (crossfitovercome.com)
• Organizational Capability for Transformation (businesstransformation.wordpress.com)

In the United States, the NFL season is upon us, or not. I hope the owners and players come to a settlement, but that is not what I want to share today.

In preparation for the upcoming NFL season, the league held its rookie seminar to welcome the newest players into the league, a fantastic ritual to incorporate into any organization. At this year’s session (and apparently others), ex-NFL player and coach,, Herm Edwards addressed the players. The video is linked above. Herm Edwards happened to play for my hometown team, the Philadelphia Eagles. While I recognize, I might be biased in my appreciation for him, he hits the nail on the head with this excerpted speech above. I hope the NFL / ESPN posts more of this comments.

Paraphrasing…”You were born with talent. You didn’t learn it. You didn’t go to the store to get it. It was given to you.” Very true words, in my humble opinion. While I am big believer in effort, and hard work, talent is hard to overcome, particularly at the NFL level of sports. Don’t misunderstand me, effort can make up for some lack of talent. I personally believe the harder you work, the luckier you get. However, this is not the point of this discussion.

Herm hits the nail on the head by differentiating talent from production. In the NFL, this is very apparent. There are many players who were drafted in the first round including even Heisman trophy winners who never lived up to their talent. They failed to produce. In the business world, you might say “they didn’t deliver” or “they failed to execute.”

Inspired by Herm’s comments towards the end of this video, don’t let your talent under-perform. If you consider yourself talented, make sure that you are delivering results. No one ever wants these things to happen, and as leaders it your challenge to make sure this doesn’t happen. At the same time, on the flip side, don’t let talent replace performance. Talent is important. We all want to surround ourselves with talented people, but managing a highly talented team, leading them to victory takes a different leadership style than managing a team with minimal talent.

Finally, as an individual, if you find yourself “basking in the glow” of your talent, but cannot explain your results, check yourself. As a leader of teams, hire for talent and pay for results. And remember, “you play to win the game”.

Great People Are Overrated – Bill Taylor – Harvard Business Review.

How many times have you worked in a team where, there was one or two outstanding performers who always had the answer and were the “go to” people in the team? What 5 adjectives would you use to describe the culture / character of that team?

Heroes are everywhere. The are most noticeable in professional sports. The article linked above refers to some recent examples, most notably, LeBron James of the Miami Heat. We need heroes, the kind of people who step up in crucibles of crisis to make the great play, close the difficult deal, turn around the troubled project, or deliver on the unreachable milestone.  They are very much a part of our society, and they bring limitations as well as benefits.

Are  you staffing your team with heroes? Are you picking up the highest paid free agents in an effort to boost your team? Are you building an all-star roster, or are you amassing a multi-faceted team capable of taking on just about any challenge thrown their way? The key is assembling the right balance within your team to give people a chance to be a hero, even an unsung hero. Every hero is made. This is validated by the fact that they are presented with an opportunity to shine, and they step up to make it happen. Having heroes on your team is important, but an over-reliance on them is risk. Heroes without a supporting cast, can lead to under-achievement.

Taking a lesson from the article attached, I would agree that great people, heroes, are overrated, much like betting $1M at the roulette table is overrated. For every millionaire who has won big at gambling there are hundreds of thousands who have lost. For every Mark Zuckerberg, there are millions of technical entrepreneurs who never made it. In business and in life, an over-emphasis on heroes or heroic behavior can create issues like bad team dynamics, increased costs, and an unsustainable model for success. So, how do you create a balanced team in the work place?

The triple constraint of repeatable success in the work environment is:

1. The right balance of structure (e.g. processes and standards that enable not inhibit),
2. The right individual people who can be, but don’t need to be a hero (e.g. individual skills and self-confidence), and
3. The right team dynamic (e.g. a mixture of complimentary skills with individual self-awareness)

No matter what line of business you work in, your will be a better leader by establishing an environment that periodically gives people opportunities to be heroes while creating a management system that reduces the dependency on “betting it all on the roulette table.”

Image via Wikipedia

“You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.” – Admiral John Stockdale, USN.

How do you align the business with IT? How do you confront the reality of a business strategy when it represents a threat to the status quo? How do you align that direction with a portfolio of projects that incrementally deliver on the desired change? In order to transformation a business, company, division, or team, you need to assemble many disciplines and techniques including but not limited to: business strategy, enterprise architecture, project management, personal development, communication, and training.

There are many books, white papers, and commentary on business strategy, project management, change management, IT governance, and organizational design. However, I rarely see any transformational thought leadership that describes these concepts as organizational capabilities, or services that work together in unison. When teams have raised their capability to deliver multiple skills like this, they position themselves better for success.

In order to transform an organization, the organization needs to position itself for success by building the capability to change, or transform. Too frequently, leaders assemble only one or maybe two of the disciplines listed above to deliver significant change. Calling on Admiral Stockdale’s profound leadership, transformational leaders should have confidence in the 1 or 2 skills they have brought together to drive change, but they should also confront the reality that most transformations fail. Have you assembled all the skills and capabilities you need to be successful with your change? What additional capabilities does your team need to better position you for success? Confront your reality and adjust  your team to bring more transformational capabilities to the table.

Related articles

• Do you have white nuckles? (businesstransformation.wordpress.com)
• How Transformational Leaders Influence Organizational Development (brighthub.com)
• A Look at Succession Planning: Organizational Strengths and Weaknesses (brighthub.com)
• 10 Methods to Improve Organizational Effectiveness (brighthub.com)

In a recent exchange with colleagues, we discussed this phenomenon. Enterprise transformations have pros and cons and tendency to cause white knuckles more often than not. One of the pros is the once in a lifetime journey that these endeavors provide, and one of the cons is the once in a lifetime journey that these endeavors provide!

Enterprise transformations are launched with the goal of rebuilding companies through significant change. You might think having the right goals, organizational structure, products, feasibility to meet financial commitments, partners, go to market strategy, etc. are the key to your transformation. While all these are vitally important to the end result of the transformation, I would suggest that to truly thrive in these environments, you look inside yourself and embrace your own personal change on the following 4 levels:

1. Intellectual – What is your capacity to deal with complexity, unexpected challenges, first of a kind problems, thinking on your feet, etc.?
2. Physical – Quite simply, how healthy are you?
3. Emotional – How do you deal with adversity, ambiguity, self-confidence, self-doubt, self-awareness, conflict?
4. Spiritual – What do you believe? Who do you believe in? What are your life philosophies? From where do you draw energy?

Do you know if you are holding on too tight? How? Do you know when you are squeezing the life out of your project, program, teammates, friends, family? Enterprise transformations will undoubtedly challenge your capacity across these 4 personal levels. What investments will you make to change your intellectual, physical, emotional, and spiritual capacity?

If this resonates with you, you may want to check out Noel Tichy‘s famous book “The Leadership Engine”. In this book he describes that each of us lead based on three concepts: Ideas, Values, and E3 (emotional energy, & edge). Noel’s model is very useful, and put into practice can help you understand your personal leadership model, which in turn will help you navigate the intellectual, physical, emotional, and spiritual growth offered via enterprise transformations.

No matter what leadership model, or personalization you inject into your enterprise transformation, recall that it is unacceptable for any one person in a transformation to acknowledge that the enterprise is undergoing drastic change, but not them personally.

Related articles

• It’s Time to Get in the Game (businesstransformation.wordpress.com)

Are you in the game or on the sidelines? In a recent article on CIO.com, it is suggested that its time for CIO’s to get in the game. while I couldn’t agree more, I would encourage you to take this article one step further.

If you find yourself wanting to get in the game now, I suggest that you are significantly behind the curve. For how many years has the concept of transformation via the CIO role been around? This is not a new concept, rather a concept that is rising in importance and possibility due to the level of disruption enabled by technology…think “commercialization of IT” as an example.

So, lets presume you are behind the curve. Where do you start? How do you start? I recently fielded questions like this at the PhillyETE conference. Some food for thought:

• Follow the pain – What are the top 3-5 problems in the business? Find a sponsor to partner with and go solve for one of them, then make it a poster child for the business value you can drive as a CIO. to help identify the pain points, think of the following areas of your enterprise: revenue, operations, client perspective, and competitive position. Surely, there are some low hanging fruit to address in these contexts.
• Attack the white space – To avoid turf battles and resistance to your delivery of business value, find areas of the company where there is no business model, or little risk. In Adam Hartung’s book Create Marketplace Disruption: How to Stay Ahead of the Competition, he discusses this concept in detail. My simple interpretation is “white space = unexplored opportunities” in your enterprise. For example, find areas of the business where there is no risk to the existing revenue streams and drive value.
• Innovate, Transform, Lights-On – Chances are you have projects that are transforming your company, and you are undoubtedly running systems to keep the lights on. However, what are you doing to innovate? Framing your activities within these constructs can help you focus on the innovation part. What innovations could be valued by your company? How is your budget allocated across these three areas? Can you find ways to reduce your “lights-on” spend to fund some innovation?

CIO.com presents a great topic that is timely given the current state of the CIO. Take the discussion a step further, get off the sidelines, and get in the game!

Related articles

• Not What, but How – Connecting IT and the Business (ericbrown.com)
• CIO: Challenges of New Business Models (bjconquest.com)
• The shifting role of the CIO (ericbrown.com)

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“Building Competencies for Integrating Change Management and Project Management”

A half-day workshop prior to the Inaugural 2011 Association of Change Management  Professionals Global Conference co-hosted by Prosci

2011 ACMP Global Conference

Rosen Shingle Creek Resort, Orlando, Florida

Sunday May 1, 2011

(8:30 am for 9.00 am start & finishes 12 noon)

The challenge of successfully integrating change management with project management is now a very significant priority for organizations.

• Are you aware of how to optimize performance in this area?
• Do you know how this could benefit your organization?

Workshop participants will be exposed to practical approaches on how to best build competencies to blend change management with project management.

This interactive workshop will:

1.       define the basic concepts behind change management and project management, ie

change management is more of an art and less of a science than project management.

2.       explore the areas of commonality and differences in change management and project management, ie

how change management supports contemporary project management

3.       improve your competencies in change management and project management, ie

change management is a core competency in project management

4.       uncover ways to leverage agile methods within business transformation, ie

integrating agile concepts within enterprise change management

After an explanation on how to use a series of proven techniques, participants will then apply these techniques to their particular challenges, issues, etc. The workshop will facilitate your development of strategies and action plans that can be implemented immediately.

Some of the techniques available including network mapping, discuss-ability of issues, stakeholder analysis, identifying driving forces, scenario planning, understanding and handling resistance, ways to look at an organization’s culture/sub-cultures, etc

5.       provide an opportunity to learn from peer’s experiences

we learn from each other

The workshop will provide a chance to compare notes/experiences/stories with other practitioners/experts/consultants in relevant disciplines/fields who will be attending the workshop. Also, it will provide an opportunity to network.

About the Facilitators…

This workshop will be facilitated by 2 highly experienced practitioners/consultants (Bill Synnot and Joe Rafter)

• who have world-wide working and living experience (USA, Europe, Middle East, Pacific, Asia, Indian sub-continent, etc);
• covering industries in all sectors (private, public, not-for-profit, co-operative, professional, educational, etc);
• to date 500+ organizations (global, national, corporate, local, regional, family, government, etc) are benefiting from these techniques.

As Bill and Joe come from different backgrounds, they will bring a refreshingly provocative and challenging approach to the topic.

Each participant will receive a complimentary copy of “The Toolbox of Change: a practical approach”. This book explores 60 user-friendly tools. Based on their relevance to participants’ individual needs, these and other techniques will be selected for use in the workshop.

Free Book

Each participant will receive a complimentary copy of “The Toolbox of Change: a practical approach”. This book explores 60 user-friendly tools. Based on their relevance to participants’ individual needs, these and other techniques will be selected for use in the workshop.

Who should attend?

• Executives and senior leaders involved with change
• HR and training professionals
• Project leaders and team members
• Change management team leaders and team members
• Organizational development professionals
• IT managers involved with change initiatives
• Anybody from practitioners to academics working to integrate change management and project management.

Bill Synnot is a leading change management practitioner/ consultant/trainer based in Australia. His firm has hundreds of worldwide clients. His approach is very practical as it is based on his experience as a change catalyst in management positions. He has been conducting public workshops on change management for over 10 years; he has written extensively on change issues  (including co-authoring a book and CD on change management) and regularly presents at conferences.

Joe Rafter is a pioneering business & technology executive, having led global business integration teams in the United States, Europe, Japan, Australia, and Asia across a broad range of industries to improve organizational capability and transform business models. With a business focused approach, he leads corporate enterprises by aligning the business and technology organizations though entrepreneurial thinking, business model innovation, technology delivery, and influential leadership. He currently leads the corporate transformation program for a 360-degree marketing company offering direct one-to-one consulting and marketing solutions customized for businesses.

To Register

Cost  – $US 600.00 with discount of $US 100 for

• each attendee to 2011 ACMP Global Conference, or
• more than one person from the same organization, or
• early bird – register before March 1, 2011

Leave a comment, sign my guestbook, or email me at joe.rafter@businesschangeleader.com

Related Articles

• Core Concepts Related to Project Change Control Management (brighthub.com)
• Best Practices of Project Management: Dealing with Change (brighthub.com)
• 10 Leadership Principles Every Project Manager Should Master (brighthub.com)
• What NASA’s CIO Has Learned About Managing Change (itexpertvoice.com)
• Job Description for a Change Management Position (brighthub.com)

Image by lumaxart via Flickr

As of this afternoon, a new website is up and running at www.businesschangeleader.com that represents all the best of a collection of Business Change Leaders. This new site represents a new firm, Business Change Leadership, that will offer business transformation, change management, leadership development, and additional services for companies that are looking for more from their business and technology teams. To learn more, please visit the site.

Most importantly, to kick-off our new company, we invite you to attend our workshop on Integrating Change and Project Management, scheduled for May 1, 2011 in Orlando, Florida in conjunction with the Association for Change Management Global Conference, as advertised in a previous post. This workshop will be co-hosted by a colleague of mine, Bill Synnot of Synnot & Associates. Bill has amassed a tremendous background of global experience over 30 years in the change management space. You can find the latest information on the workshop at www.businesschangeleader.com as well as the ability to register for the workshop using your Paypal account or credit cards.

We will continue to post blog entries here, but please be sure to visit the new website for updates and to stay in touch.