2018: A Year In Perspective

Describing a year in perspective is a tricky challenge: the lacking brevity of a week or a month offers greater chance of missing key information, yet its shorter length in comparison to, for argument’s sake, a decade means it is harder to pick out an overarching theme in the way one might think of ‘80s shoulder pads or ‘90s Britpop. I suppose it is to this end that people often look to personal highlights when describing an individual year and it is in this vein in which I will I proceed.

My favourite moments of any year are always those in which I feel I have learned the most. For 2018, my highlights were learning about the benefits of different leadership styles, different methods of motivation and the ways in which external competition can actually be extremely beneficial to one’s own organisation; all of these I have covered in my previous articles of:

• Every Company Needs a Servant Leader?
• If CEO Knowledge is Power. Coopetition Between CEOs Has to be More Powerful?
• As an Executive, Do You Use a Carrot, Stick, or Something Else?
• As an Executive You Should Embrace the Competition. It Really is a Blessing in Disguise.

With the new year over the threshold, it feels appropriate to recap these concepts to make sure this knowledge, the ideas that will drive the business strategies of tomorrow, have been fully taken on board. My review of each idea will be brief as I’m sure, at least for those in New Zealand, we all want to get back to enjoying the sun and the last of exciting plans with friends and family before work starts again; for those that might be more interested in more detailed discussion however, I will provide links to past material which looked at the minutiae of each proposal.

Leadership Styles

(Link: https://bit.ly/2FuFDY2)

The specific type of leadership I looked at in Every Company Needs a Servant Leader? was, as the title gives away, ‘Servant leadership’[1]: an idea propounded by ex AT&T executive Robert K Greenleaf. Mr Greenleaf’s general principle was that big corporates did not require tyrannical leaders in order to produce goods or provide services on an efficient and profitable basis; in fact, he espoused that the opposite was true. Warren G Bennis would later further this idea in his paper On Becoming A Leader (1989) by listing ‘Empathy’[2] as one of the four crucial requisites for being an ‘Inspiration[al]’[3] and effective leader.

My conclusion on servant leadership was that it was a good idea in theory as a step away from transcendent C-Suite teams which only served to whip the drones to order, but that there needed to be a check to the implied system in order to prevent leaders with too soft a touch. As with all things, balance is key so I can appreciate Mr Greenleaf’s proposals as a step towards such balance, but, with every new idea, I would always argue caution and thought prior to implementing a new system into an organisation.

Motivation

(Links: https://bit.ly/2Hd0CkV and https://bit.ly/2M8NMmm)

Although it may be true that tyrannical leaders aren’t the way forward in terms of inspiring the workforce, it is interesting to see that modern research papers still seem to support the age old teachings of Niccolò Machiavelli, ‘It is better to be feared than loved if you can not be both’, when it comes to individual scenarios concerning motivating staff. That’s not to say that one needs to overhaul one’s organisation to mirror the advice for governing 16th century Florence, but that there still might be some merit in the old ideas that can be taken forward to the globalised marketplace.

My research into motivational strategies also threw up another interesting perspective, away from the traditional carrot and stick approach: self-motivation. Whilst it was still deemed important to find an optimal balance for these factors, the idea of switching focus from external motivations to self-determination seemed to rapidly improve productivity where self-motivation awareness was previously a bottlenecking effect. To this end, one might consider options in workforce training and promotion of self-motivating techniques as a cost effective and self-actualising way of improving both productivity and employee welfare.

External Competition

(Link: https://bit.ly/2so51XO)

This notion is a broad concept and one I may struggle to summarise in such short paragraphs. I shall, therefore, break down this broad theme into the following subsections:

• Coopetition
• Internal culture
• Behavioural economics

The idea of coopetition, as I referenced in my previous article, is to ‘Move the market from a zero-sum game, where a single winner takes all, to an environment in which the end result benefits the whole and makes everyone more profitable’[1]. In laymen’s terms: competing forces come together in order to find a mutually beneficial solution to business challenges. I have personally found this an excellent tool for both networking and building my business repertoire as I have often reached out to competitors to offer a free exchange of ideas which has led to exciting opportunities for both parties.

In terms of the benefits of competition on internal culture, one must look at the way executives can shift the focus from competition in house towards competing against businesses from around the world. Competition within a company can result in employee fatigue as well as bitterness from those struggling to recognise the impact of their own contributions in the face of figures more in the limelight. To this end, focus on external sources of competition, the ‘Old enemy’ if you will, provides a holistic company identity which more staff can relate to which combats cultures of negative energy and, in turn, increases productivity through a greater sense of the team.

Behavioural economics also play an interesting role in the way companies can seemingly become more profitable in the face of competition – contrary to the traditional thinking of a one business monopoly. Dan Ariely, in his thought provoking book on the weird and wonderful world of behavioural economics Predictably Irrational, suggests that ‘Most people don’t know what they want unless they see it in context’[5]. Due to this, the general public is more likely to make a decision to purchase goods or services if they can see viable comparison for what you offer. This is not the only behavioural economic benefit of a crowded market, but I shall leave things here, having discussed many more exciting concepts in my previous article (see link above).

Summary

These are just a few of the lessons I have learned over 2018, but I hope, if you’ve been keeping up to date with my research so far, that my articles have been helpful as you’ve developed your business strategies over the year. I think I have been able to achieve a lot in terms of personal learning as well as promoting new research and ideas over the course of 2018, but that’s not to say the lessons stop there: I believe 2019 will really be a year for great personal growth and I hope to share such learning with you, as I develop along the way.

For now, I’d like to wish all of you reading, new and old, my warmest wishes as you take your next steps through 2019 and I’d like to welcome you if you have any ideas you would like to share or discuss with me to not hesitate in getting in contact; after all, I believe one is most recipient to discovering new avenues of thinking when one keeps an open mind and allows themselves to the opportunity to learn from any new sources of information. To those that I have been privileged enough to work with during 2018 too, I would like to offer a heartfelt thanks for your hard work and dedication and I look forward to working with you again in the near future. Here’s hoping 2019 will be the best year yet for all of our endeavours and we’ll have a lot to talk about when I write a 2019 reflection in a year’s time.

Should you wish to contact me please email me at [email protected] or call me on 021853301.

[1] Robert K Greenleaf, The Power of Servant Leadership, Forbes, (Oakland: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 1998).

[2] Warren G Bennis, On Becoming a Leader, (Boston: Addison-Wesley, 1989).

[3] Ibid.

[4] No author, Coopetition, Investopedia.com, (New York: Investopedia, n.d.).

[5] Dan Ariely, Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions, (New York: HarperCollins, 2009), 3.