Birds, Flocks & Business

In this Issue:

1. Birds, Flocks and Business
2. The?“Zamboni”?Revolution
3. Ozempic?for the C-Suite
4. An?Exodus Avoidance?Primer
5. The Drucker Method
6. Econ Recon

What a Flock of Birds can Tell us about Business

People & organizations are complex. Just as you don’t study the behavior of a flock by looking at individual birds, you can think of your business as a system that functions like a flock. Flocks of birds exhibit properties that no individual bird can. Individual birds actually can achieve very little; yet as a flock they have a competitive advantage.

An interesting read and podcast from Northwestern University brings a system view to business. This more holistic approach can help solve complex problems.

Offering insight to questions like:

• Is an R&D team like a string quartet or is it more like the copilots in the cockpit of a plane?
• What are the boundaries of your organization?? When you think of them as being fuzzier, you open up new ideas for collaboration and innovation.

Business challenges have gotten bigger and more complex and global in nature. And the only way to make it work is to put people back together in a proper network or system. An intro to systems thinking.

A quick skimming of the article, Organizations Are Complex. Complexity Science Can Help Us Understand Them, will get you thinking differently about your organization.?

And BTW, the answer is that R&D teams look a lot like string quartets, not like pilots.

The “Zamboni” Revolution

Productivity stories show up in the strangest places,?and if you’re a hockey fan, here’s one for you.

Some innovations save labor, others increase revenue. Truly great ones do both. For example, the Zamboni. This is the machine that resurfaces an entire ice rink in just a few minutes. Rink ice is only a few inches thick and easily damaged. Without frequent resurfacing the ice can become rough and difficult as well as unsafe to skate.??

Before the Zamboni, resurfacing a typical rink would require five people an hour and a half to resurface during which no paying customers could use the rink; “and when they finished, you had five employees standing around with nothing to do until the next resurfacing.”

One frustrated rink owner, Frank Zamboni, decided there had to be a better way and focused his mechanical aptitude on the problem. The Zamboni was the result. This invention had a powerful effect on ice sports by dramatically reducing the cost of rink maintenance and increasing the amount of time ice time available to skaters.

Take a few minutes for a story about innovation applied to sports by a man who was forced in to the? business of selling ice time when new technology make his old business of making ice obsolete. Find out how the Zamboni revolutionized fun on the ice and why “in the world of ice sports, it was...on par with that of the Wright Brothers at Kitty Hawk.”

An Exodus Avoidance Primer

We’ve read about many large companies executing layoffs in recent months as many over hired during Covid. Even so, the strong employment market required continued recognition that it’s still a seller’s market for labor and talent. It’s bad enough in this market when an employee leaves; it can be fatal if too many go at once.

Large companies can more easily afford large reductions in workforce size even if involuntary. Small to mid-size firms, however, are much more vulnerable to even a small desertion.

A recent INC. article by “The Evil HR Lady,” Suzanne Lucas offers some cautionary advice as to How You Can Avoid an Employee Mass Exodus. The first step, she suggests, is to recognize that “employees are more important than customers.” And realize that your employees may want a career, not a job. Read on.

Ozempic for the C-Suite

In his “No Mercy, No Malice” blog,?entrepreneur and NYU Professor Scott Galloway looks?at two innovations of the post-Covid era that promise to have profound effects on how we live:? Ozempic and Artificial Intelligence. Galloway ingeniously uses the impact of Ozempic (aka GLP-1 drugs) to explain?how AI is already impacting how CEOs are thinking about, and managing, their work forces.

He writes:

?“If you want to understand how AI is reshaping business, picture it as the?other?massive innovation of our time: GLP-1 drugs. Both shed weight by suppressing cravings; both exacerbate existing inequities (aka the rich get richer) before generating wider prosperity; and both are having a greater impact than projected as early adopters are hesitant to admit they’re using.”?

To be specific, he suggests that recent tech and non-tech?“layoffs are no longer a signal of economic conditions, but innovation.”

You will be well served by spending a few minutes digesting Dr. Galloways thoughts, and warnings, about Corporate Ozempic.

You will not look at layoffs and hiring in the same way again, especially if you’re responsible for both.

The Drucker Memo

Everyone in your company has someone to manage them, except CEOs and many at the C-Level.?You don’t get to and stay at this level unless you can manage yourself.

Daniel Pink (author of “To Sell is Human” and “The Power of Regret”) reminds us of a powerful method suggested by the late, great management writer Peter Drucker that is simple, takes little time and will help you?identify your blind spots, understand your strengths, and perhaps help you take a little more risk, intelligently.

If you’ve got three minutes to improve your personal performance, check out Pink’s video which summarizes Peter Drucker’s simple method for improving your performance.

Econ Recon

The Winter of our Stagflation:? The government’s intervention in the economy introduced a lot of unusual noise into the data economists use to forecast. “But underneath it all,” writes economist Brian Wesbury, “we still believe Milton Friedman had it right. A decline in money will lead to recession, and then a decline in inflation.” Check out his thoughts in his short blog post, “January Stagflation.”?

FedWatch: ?Brian Beaulieu of ITR Economics offers great insights on the Fed and the economy in his latest “FedWatch” podcast and some new thoughts on interest rates and 2025. ?

Great Depression Strategies: ?ITR Economics has long forecasted another Great Depression starting in 2030. They recently offer a webinar on how to manage through what they think will be a challenging six-year downturn. You can access this 9 min excerpt Building a Strategy to Prosper Now and Through the 2030s. For more on their thoughts about this, check out their 2030s Great Depression section of the ITR Website.

Have a productive week!

Sue Tinnish, PhD,?Vistage Chair, Facilitator, & Executive Coach

Find me easily at: 847.404.7325, [email protected], LinkedIn: www.dhirubhai.net/in/suetinnish, Website: https://vistage.com/chairs/sue.tinnish