Marc Wilson, Author at Global Advisors | Quantified Strategy Consulting

Global Advisors’ Thoughts: Empathy and understanding – why they are the qualities that help us achieve our own happiness and success

By Marc Wilson

Our team had just finished a book review presentation on Dale Carnegie’s “Making Friends and Influencing People”. Jane (*name changed) looked troubled: “Isn’t this stuff about manipulating people?”
Therein lies a paradox in showing empathy: without empathy for others, you face less influence, friendship, love and success. But if those are your goal rather than the sincere care for others, then your empathy is not really empathy at all.

Many people might react to empathy as “soft.” But empathy is a mark of incredible strength. It dares us to care. It requires us to put ourselves to one side. It requires us to be vulnerable – otherwise all we are doing is showing sympathy. Empathy requires self-awareness and skill.

Sympathy is easy. Sympathy does not go as far as empathy – it keeps us distant from the situation someone else is experiencing. It places us in danger of being condescending. Empathy requires us to put our self into their situation as them – not us.

Empathy gets the best out of those around us – and opens us up to be a better version of ourselves.

I find it incredibly difficult to manage a balance. A balance of being sufficiently confident and willing to share my own experience in an unbiased and helpful way – while removing enough of myself to allow someone else to find their own path and live their own experience. To be an empathetic leader, I believe I need to care about my team being at their best at work and in life.

Skills such as active listening are important to remove ourselves from the coaching we give others. But I think empathy requires us to be authentically present and involved in a way that facilitating someone else’s own solution does not.

Empathetic leadership challenges me to use my own experience and position in a way that is open to the challenges and experiences of others. And most critically demonstrates that I act out of care and acknowledgement of them.

Empathy requires that we know our self well enough that we are able to remove our projections of our own biases and feelings from the situation, appreciate the other person’s view of the world and how that impacts the situation for them.

Think about how you respond to others. How often do you respond to their experience, feelings and fears based on your own fears? Do your responses contain the word “I?” Do you fear genuinely experiencing the world as them? Do you seek to affirm your own view and experience through your response? Are you scared as being seen as similar to the other person in their own “deficiencies” and “imperfections”? How many of these imperfections are merely your own biases and fears?

Global Advisors’ Thoughts: Who are you and what did you do with my team member?

By Marc Wilson

(Alternative titles could be: “Who are you and what did you do with the person I hired? “Who are you and what did you do with the boss who hired me?” “Who are you and what did you do with my client?” …)

Some years ago, a friend of many friends died tragically. I had never met Joe (not his real name) but often heard of him. He was exceptionally popular and well known. In fact, he was clearly loved by a huge group of people.

What followed Joe’s death was amazing. Hundreds of people went to a Facebook page and wrote of their sadness and memories of him. Many were personal, some merely referring to chance meetings and the incredible impression he had left on them. Some were even from people who had not met him, but were moved by his impact on people they knew.

One person wrote of meeting Joe at a party and how even though this was their first and only meeting, Joe had showed so much interest in her and interacted with her like an old friend. She had felt special – and left with an impression of how special Joe was.

Another wrote of a childhood cricket experience. He had played a blinding hook shot only to be caught by Joe at square leg in the crease of an arm. Joe had laughed and apologised repeatedly for accidentally catching him out off such good shot. Joe was secure with himself and the world and didn’t seem to need praise or undue accolades.

It was incredible. This was the type of person that most of us hope to be. Super-achiever, immensely popular, loving and loved. Years later, people still go back to that page and comment.

Joe committed suicide. It did not fit with …. Read more here: https://globaladvisors.biz/thoughts/20170601/who-are-you-and-what-did-you-do-with-my-team-member

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The use of full absorption or average costing in asset-intensive industries with under-utilisation can lead to self-defeating pricing strategies

The use of full absorption or average costing in a manufacturing environment with under-utilisation can lead to self-defeating pricing strategies
The increase in price to cover costs results in volume decreases – lowering factory utilisation and increasing unit production costs. This is the start of the utilisation-pricing “death spiral”
Costing according to factory utilisation – partial absorption costing – offers the opportunity to be more strategic about costing and utilisation
“Unabsorbed” costs can be targeted through OEE and volume improvements. At the same time, the “disadvantage” of having a large factory is normalised and pricing can compete with more fully-utilised factories
A recent manufacturing client saw 60% of unit costs arise from factory under-utilisation – sub-optimal OEE levels (non-conformance), low volumes and work-centre bottlenecks contributed to the utilisation gap
These principles can apply to any asset-intensive business – for example banking

Global Advisors’ Thoughts: Business success. Get real.

By Marc Wilson

We all want success. And as we embark on a career, most of us want to be successful. But when I probe aspirations, “being successful” is usually a proxy for “I want the rewards / power /status of success.”

If you think that business success has different rules to success in sports, less reliance on discipline, more reliance on connections and things out of your control, reconsider or stop reading.

If your job is a ticket to a pay-cheque, is so-many-hours-per-day, stop reading.

Brutally, most of us will not be successful. We will not achieve stand-out performance. We will under-achieve our childish dreams. Choose:

Continue to fantasize OR
Get real and set your targets lower OR
Confront the challenge and do what it takes to chase your dream.

Dreaming is important. It is the often the reason that we try at all. But the great achievers realise that a dream without a plan and action remains a fantasy.

“…in the words of Scripture, the time has come to set aside childish things.” — U.S. President Barack Obama

Obama was quoting “When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.”

When I was younger and starting out, I think I marked a lot of my desires for success in positions or promotions I hoped to achieve. In the first draft of this article, someone remarked that I had not mentioned promotion once. That is quite a stunning reflection. I believe my experience and growing up helped me realise that promotion and position reflect a result of success rather than success in itself.

Many of us do fantasize. As adolescents, we dream of mansions and sports cars, of power and glory, of beautiful spouses and successful children. As we begin our career journey, these dreams inevitably meet reality. We may continue to deny reasons for the gap between dreams and reality, but many reach a realisation at some point that not everybody can be excellent – by definition. And that to be excellent, we need to be doing things better than those in our defined benchmark.

We fantasize for good reason. Life is hard. As we become more experienced, we discover that achieving success typically requires far more from us than we imagined, we are not all exceptional, success is often dependent on the support of others – and people and relationships are not predictable. Life throws curve balls – illness, family needs and financial constraints to name a few.

But if we are to undertake an adult approach to success, it becomes time to replace fantasy with a deliberate approach to achieving our dreams.

What is success? At its simplest, success is achieving a goal. Being successful is therefore achieving goals regularly. But to most of us, being successful is more than this. Being successful in many people’s minds equates to excellence. Excellence – exceeding standard performance, standing-out, being the best. And pointedly, the rewards most desire for being successful equate with those for excellence.

This is an important distinction. The definition of excellence seems to be far more closely aligned with the aspirations of those with the desire to be successful. The measures of excellence are far more objective and demanding than those of success.

We tend to apply different rules to business success. It must be balanced. It must be within its 9-to-5 box. Here is my challenge to you: if you desire super-achiever business status, why would the lessons learnt from Olympian sports success be different to achieving Olympian stand-out performance in business?

Olympic sports success is not balanced. It is not confined to a part of the day. Olympian sports success is obsessive. It is unbalanced. It is single-minded. It requires brutal sacrifice and pain (see the graphic to the left showing the cost and effort required to get into the Olympics – source: Voucherbox). Why would being the best in your business field require anything less?

I think we tend to create an artificial distinction because an Olympic goal might be confined to a target by the age of 30. Thereafter an athlete can retire to a “normal” life. Similarly, an overachieving student might single-mindedly pursue “top-of the-class” performance knowing that the pain and sacrifice will end with the award of a degree. A business career is part of most of our adult lives and sacrifice for that amount of time is untenable for most people. For this reason, careers like investment banking and management consulting tend to have short lifespans before achievers move on to a second phase. I believe that for this reason they tend to attract more employees seeking super-achievement before the “second-phase” – people will accept the discomfort for a short time horizon.

I believe that there are fifteen determinants to achieving business-career excellence.

1. Get real – look outwards

It is impossible for everybody to…. To read more click here.

Global Advisors’ Thoughts: Should you be restructuring (again)?

By Marc Wilson

You don’t take a hospital visit for surgery lightly. In fact, neither do good surgeons. Most recommend conservative treatment first due to risks and trauma involved in surgical procedures. Restructuring is the orthopaedic surgery of corporate change. Yet it is often the go-to option for leaders as they seek to address a problem or spark an improvement.

Restructuring offers quick impact

It is easy to see why restructuring can be so alluring. It has the promise of a quick impact. It will certainly give you that. Yet it should be last option you take in most scenarios.

Most active people have had some nagging injury at some point. Remember that debilitating foot or knee injury? How each movement brought about pain and when things seemed better a return to action brought the injury right back to the fore? When you visited your doctor, he gave two options: a program of physiotherapy over an extended period with a good chance of success or corrective surgery that may or may not fix the problem more quickly. Which did you choose? If you’re like me, the promise of the quick pain with quick solution merited serious consideration. But at the same time, the concern over undergoing surgery with its attendant risks for potential relief without guarantee is hugely concerning.

No amount of physiotherapy will cure a crookedly-healed bone. A good orthopaedic surgeon might perform a procedure that addresses the issues even if painful and with long term recovery consequences.

That’s restructuring. It is the only option for a “crooked bone” equivalent. It may well be the right procedure to address dysfunction, but it has risks. Orthopaedic surgery would not be prescribed to address a muscular dysfunction. Neither should restructuring be executed to deal with a problem person. Surgery would not be undertaken to address a suboptimal athletic action. Neither should restructuring be undertaken to address broken processes. And no amount of surgery will turn an unfit average athlete into a race winner. Neither will restructuring address problems with strategic positioning and corporate fitness. All of that said, a broken structure that results in lack of appropriate focus and political roadblocks can be akin to a compound fracture – no amount of physiotherapy will heal it and poor treatment might well threaten the life of the patient.

What are you dealing with: a poorly performing person, broken processes or a structure that results in poor market focus and impedes optimum function?

Perennial restructuring

Many organisations I have worked with adopt a restructuring exercise every few years. This often coincides with a change in leadership or a poor financial result. It typically occurs after a consulting intervention. When I consult with leadership teams, my warning is a rule of thumb – any major restructure will take one-and-a-half years to deliver results. This is equivalent to full remuneration cycle and some implementation time. The risk of failure is high: the surgery will be painful and the side-effects might be dramatic. Why?

Restructuring involves changes in reporting lines and the relationships between people. This is political change. New ways of working will be tried in an effort to build successful working relationships and please a new boss. Teams will be reformed and require time to form, storm, norm and perform. People will take time to agree, understand and embed their new roles and responsibilities. The effect of incentives will be felt somewhere down the line.

Restructuring is often attempted to avoid the medium-to-long-term delivery of change through process change and mobilisation. As can be seen, this under-appreciates that these and other facets of change are usually required to deliver on the promise of a new structure anyway.

Restructuring creates uncertainty in anticipation

Restructuring also impacts through anticipation. Think of the athlete waiting for surgery. Exercise might stop, mental excuses for current performance might start, dread of the impending pain and recovery might set in. Similarly, personnel waiting for a structural change typically fret over the change in their roles, their reporting relationships and begin to see excuses for poor performance in the status quo. The longer the uncertainty over potential restructuring lasts, the more debilitating the effect.

Leaders feel empowered through restructuring

The role of the leader should also be considered. Leaders often feel powerless or lack capacity and time to implement fundamental change in processes and team performance. They can restructure definitively and feel empowered by doing so. This is equivalent to the athlete overruling the doctors advice and undergoing surgery, knowing that action is taking place – rather than relying on corrective therapeutic action. A great deal of introspection should be undertaken by the leader. “Am I calling for a restructure because I can, knowing that change will result?” Such action can be self-satisfying rather than remedial.

Is structure the source of the problem?

Restructuring and surgery are about people. While both may be necessary, the effects can be severe and may not fix the underlying problem. Leaders should consider the true source of underperformance and practice introspection – “Am I seeking the allure of a quick fix for a problem that require more conservative longer-term treatment?”

Photo by John Chew

Global Advisors’ Thoughts: How Daniel Rowland is relevant to your business success

Recently Global Advisors hosted multi-stage ultra-marathon runner Daniel Rowland as he gave a talk about his training and racing approach. The talk happened prior to Daniel racing in the Kalahari Augrabies Extreme Marathon 2013 – a 250km multi-stage race that takes place over 7 days through the extreme heat and difficult terrain of the Kalahari Desert. Competitors carry their own food, bedding, etc – water and sleeping tents are provided.

Daniel Rowland winning the Kalahari Augrabies Extreme Marathon 2013 (picture Hermien Webb Photography, Facebook)

Daniel won in a course record time. Earlier this year Daniel won the Atacama Crossing – another 250km multi-stage self-supported desert race across the Atacama Desert (the driest place on earth) and part of the prestigious Four Desert Series. The Four Desert Series attracts some of the finest Ultra-Marathon athletes in the world who compete only for the prestige – there is no prize money. These two races are Daniel’s first two multi-stage races in his first year as a professional runner.

Daniel Rowalnd leads the Atacama Crossing 2013 field en-route to victory (Picture Shaun Boyte in Trail Magazine Issue 7 - dwrowland.com)

Daniel Rowland leads the Atacama Crossing 2013 field en-route to victory (Picture Shaun Boyte in Trail Magazine Issue 7 – dwrowland.com)

There is no doubt that Daniel is a talented sportsman – he represented Zimbabwe as a triathlete and trained as a potential Olympian. But there are many talented athletes that fail to achieve sporting success. What makes Daniel as successful as he is?

Daniel abandoned his Olympic ambitions to study a Business Science degree at UCT. He was selected as a McKinsey intern. Following this he went on to work for Anglo American in South Africa, Alaska and Chile. Two-and-a-half years ago, Daniel entered his first ultra-marathon beyond 50km – the 100 mile Sustina race through the depths of the Alaskan winter, battling snow and night. Daniel finished fourth. Following Daniel’s blog (www.dwrowland.com) as an interested spectator and recreational runner with no real ambitions of running an ultra myself, I was struck by the regimen that Daniel adopts to life in general and running in particular. Even in his early ultra exploits, Daniel exemplified a simple approach that underlies most key management theory – Plan, Do, Review (PDR).

Plan appropriately for the execution against the goals that you aim to achieve, Do what you planned to and Review your execution against the plan.

This is not a once-off process – it can be repeated many times within a broader cycle and even within execution itself. Organisations might set five year strategies and budgets and then repeat the cycle on a yearly, quarterly or even short interval basis (for example, agreeing and reviewing plans at the beginning and end of shifts – a process typically referred to as short-interval controls). A rugby team might agree a game plan and evaluate its success during stoppages and breaks.

The PDR cycle is followed either consciously or subconsciously by outstanding performers in every field from arts to sport to business. It is a discipline. And like all disciplines it takes practice and fine-tuning to meet the needs of individuals and companies.

Daniel exemplifies the approach. He chooses a goal that is aligned to his interests and who he inherently is. He chooses a race goal and works backwards to fit in all the aspects of training, testing and recovery. He prepares a tailored program with his coach based on his knowledge, Daniel’s input and past performance. Daniel describes execution as doing what he knows he needs to do to achieve his goals.

Daniel is fastidious about all these aspects. He trains in blocks that ramp up to race distances and conditions. He tests all aspects of race conditions, including the diet he will live on in the desert, with the exact pack and equipment he will run with and in conditions on the race course or as close to these as he can find. His approach to optimizing his back pack illustrates this.

Daniel’s Augrabies pack weighed 6kgs and included 3,6kgs of food. Most of his competitors’ packs were 10kg or more. To accomplish the optimum pack weight required much more than selecting equipment against a recipe. He chose a pack that was lightweight and that he found comfortable. He trimmed excess strap lengths. He took the required equipment list (things like eating and cooking utensils, emergency equipment, etc) in their most minimally adequate form. He created a race diet that had the highest calorie to weight ratio possible. And he trained with the pack and on the diet, gradually tuning his choices and becoming utterly familiar with the diet and running with the pack for the periods and conditions matching those of the race. He blogs about all of his choices and tracks progress with data from his heart rate monitor supplemented with his logs of how he felt and his thoughts on what worked and what could be improved.

Every two weeks, Daniel runs a test on the same 12km route, in the same heart rate zone with the same pack weight and as-close-to-optimal body weight. He tracks his time on the test for improvement over the 30 week program leading up to a race.

While Daniel is clinical about the technical aspects of a race, he recognizes the critical importance of emotions – confidence and enjoyment are key to his success. He underpins what he does with a healthy and sustainable lifestyle. This includes enough sleep and recovery time and the community he surrounds himself with. Besides the general community of friends, Daniel’s core team is made up of people he trusts and who create confidence for him because they are present and contributing with a collective goal in mind. This team is comprised of his partner, coach and sponsor – a small and completely trusted core team.

It is an impressive routine and discipline for someone who not long ago, started out training in the very early hours of the morning prior to a demanding corporate job. All the discipline would mean little without stressing himself to the optimum level, and showing incredible willpower and drive. Daniel has willpower and drive in bucket-loads. What stood out to me is that while a level of willpower and drive is a product of who we are, Daniel manages this aspect carefully too. He takes care to push himself enough to develop greater levels of performance while managing the risk of illness and injury – an optimal stress level. Technical training, emotion and health all contribute to setting this optimum. Daniel recognises willpower is a limited resource and ensures he makes focused use of his reserves through routines and removing obstacles. He creates drive through seeing the excellence in others, momentary inspiration, his enduring motivation and the performance of competitors.

Daniel with some of the Global Advisors team after his presentation

When Daniel left Global Advisors after his presentation, we were in little doubt that Daniel had done everything he could to prepare for the Augrabies race. We were confident he stood every chance of winning the race. But more importantly, so did Daniel – in his quiet, unassuming way.

Pick up most management books or business textbooks and you will find the PDR elements described above. We see them in place in the best businesses and clients. They are expressed in tools such as well articulated strategies, balanced scorecards, project management approaches, management and financial reporting. What is far more difficult than the adoption of a set of tools is the institution of the accompanying processes and culture. Discipline is hard enough for an athlete – successfully inculcating the PDR disciplines in a corporate setting requires strong leadership with a soft touch. It relies as much on the belief and cooperation of the team as a well-thought out approach. Just as hard as it must be for Daniel to ensure he preserves the space around him for a community that reinforces his process, beliefs and spirit, it is unbelievably hard to do the same in a business setting. My personal experience is that successful leadership requires walking a fine line between creating and implementing an optimal PDR approach / culture and creating some space to allow those who fit within that culture to find a place within it. That won’t always work out. You will lose some good people along the way as well as those who don’t belong. It is critical to ensure your team sees the benefits of your chosen PDR approach to ease their journey. It takes time – years – for the PDR approach and culture to develop a rhythm, The role of a core supportive team at a management level or on a project is critical to reinforce the PDR disciplines and build confidence. Daniel believes in “controlling the controllables” – the role of his core team illustrates this.

Daniel Rowland meeting Bruce Fordyce after his Kalahari Augrabies Extreme Marathon win (picture from @brucefordycerun on Twitter)

Daniel’s approach is not unique in its elements. Bruce Fordyce famously kept detailed notebooks of his training and races and was meticulous en-route to nine Comrades victories, the London to Brighton Marathon three years in a row and the 50 mile and 100km world records. He too focused on a holistic approach and kept mood records along with the details of his technical performance.

What I have become convinced about is that just as a management / PDR approach is required to prepare and practice for execution, so the approach must be applied and finely tuned over time. As I watched another amazing Kenyan marathon performance, I tweeted how ridiculously easy the lead runners ran at below 3 minutes to the km. Elana Meyer responded, “Practice makes excellence in action look easy.”

Daniel Rowland, Bruce Fordyce and Elana Meyer are inspirational examples of the power of a well-executed PDR process in sport. The same process exists in a well-executed dance routine, well-written academic career and of course in winning businesses.

What is your approach to running your business? How does it incorporate Planning, Doing and Reviewing? Would your approach support the creation and maintenance of a world-class athlete? Is your PDR approach communicated and understood? Is your culture supportive of the approach? Are you practicing the approach and adapting it for your company? What is the PDR mood?

Daniel is racing the Sahara Race (part of the Four Deserts series) in February 2014. You can follow his progress on the Four Deserts website or on Daniel’s blog.

This photo essay of the Atacama Crossing 2013 by Richard Bray will give you some idea of the challenge posed by multi-stage desert running and Daniel’s accomplishments.