There are a few management case studies that because of their innate reason or their total surprise keep re-appearing in the business media. Amongst these is the Dabbawala's of Mumbai case study from Harvard, first published in April 2004. The Economist magazine ran a version of the story again this week. Their tale is indeed a remarkable one, and worth getting to understand.

The Dabbawala's are, literally, men with boxes - who deliver lunches to people all over Mumbai, India, on a daily basis. As is now well documented they do this on a remarkable scale, around 170,000 per day - and the surprising managerial element is that they deliver them with a six sigma level of accuracy. That is only one mistake per six million deliveries. The six sigma level of defect toleration would be impressive in any manufacturing/management process, but the dabbawalas achieve it with no technology or formal management education. It all comes down to teamwork - and one suspects a lack of western ego.

Not surprisingly the dabbawalas are now sought out by management researchers from across the world who are intent on dissecting their prodigious accuracy and discovering how to transfer it to organisations that, by all normal measures, ought to be more efficient than a seemingly loose arrangement of poorly educated and under resourced individuals.

I was commissioned to write a book for a UK daily newspaper on family finance a few years ago. I knew a fair amount about personal finance but these projects always require one to do further research. So for the six months before I actually started to write the book I pored over all the personal finance supplements of the national newspapers gathering together the current thinking and issues. It became clear after about six or seven weeks that there were only  six topics involved and that to create these weekly supplements it was necessary to rehash  one of the topics on a six-weekly cycle to fill the space.  (For those of you interested they were pensions; mortgages; debt & credit cards; savings accounts; investing and personal tax - read next weekend's personal finance columns and see if anything falls outside those categories!)

Summer is a time for doing some calm reflection and it has occurred to me that all disciplines are probably founded on about six core topics - and executive development is certainly no different. This thought was sparked by an article in Booz Allen's quarterly journal strategy + business that once again was beating the drum about the lack of HR expertise in company boardrooms. You will find few CEO's standing-up to proclaim that the core strength of their business is the robustness of their Treasury, or their warehouse stock or their marketing collateral - no, to a man (or woman) they say their core strength is their people. And they are all right. So why do we repeatedly have to read that people development is an area that gets plenty of talk but no walk?

A second recurring theme is closely related - development programs, as a rule, do not succeed unless they are supported (championed even) from the top down. If the CEO or Chairman is on board with the program corporate cultures will change, re-organisations will work, everyone will see that it is in their interests to make the effort to make the programs succeed. If it is just being driven by Joe from HR it will most likely die a quiet, unannounced death some six months down the line.

Over the next few weeks I am going to complete the list of exec-ed recurring themes - any assistance from other summertime thinkers will be gratefully received.

We are in the process of expanding the depth and scope of the executive education program data we publish on the IEDP.info database. For the last few years we have focused very much on the top business school providers. This in itself is a difficult group to identify. The core constitutents are easily identifiable - the likes of Harvard, IMD, Chicago GSB, London Business School, INSEAD, Michigan/Ross etc but as you move out from these towards the margins of the inner core it becomes more complicated to say with any certainty who is "in" and who should be "out".

As such the obvious solution is to push the boundaries of those we include wider. Those only interested in the very top schools will still be able to search their open programs quickly as we have decided that we shall use the FT Executive Education Rankings published each year in May as the basis for the "global premier league" of business school providers - although this has its weaknesses as well. We shall then start to add the best European and N American regional business schools to the database - so that those who are not looking for the global reach (or expense) or for something more domestically focused and applicable will have relevant results too.

But this is only part of the problem of categorising Executive Education. Working out whether a program is targeted at junior, middle or senior management is often not clear. What may be appropriate for the Managing director of an SME will probably not be appropriate for the CEO of a quoted company. What may be good for someone new to a middle management role may actually be provided by an organisation better known for its staff or sales training. And as this last example indicates business schools are not the "be all and end all" of executive edcuation provision. There is a huge - and growing - supply of commercial training providers competing for the same market.

Add in to this mix the army of consultants who have leadership and development training services as part of their offerings and the burgeoning sector of executive coaches  and the picture starts to get more complex yet again.

Over-arching all this is the fact that the whole sector is very fragmented: there are many thousands of providers ranging from international organisations with hundreds of millions of dollars of turnover to single-person specialist consultants who can lead their field in specific niches. At IEDP we are determined to try and pull all this information together into a manageable form - where senior management and HR professionals can access the data and leave and share feedback.

If you have any views or comments please leave them below. Also I would be delighted if any of our interested readers would be happy to complete an online survey on this topic - it will only take 5 minutes (all the questions are multiple choice) and if you leave your contact details we will enter you for a draw for an iPod Touch. To take the survey please click here.

An occasional series of articles from IMD professors from their series "Tomorrow's Challenges". For more info on IMD visit their website.

Leadership is a tricky concept. We each understand the word differently and have different views on what a "true leader" is. Academic research on and around leadership has been equally heterogeneous. Leaders have been studied along multiple dimensions (traits, behaviors, personal backgrounds, etc.), but this effort has yielded relatively few findings that stand the test of time and prove robust in different situations and across national and organizational cultures.

In this context, an intelligent assessment of the advantages, disadvantages and future prospects of "big ego" leadership would first require a clear definition of the term. What do we mean by big ego leadership? And what is its opposite? We read about the contrast between “big ego” leaders and humble, soft leaders referred to as “nice guys”. But does the world really need more nice leaders?

I am tempted to answer "yes" and "no". All things equal, most of us would like to work for leaders who empower their staff, welcome and even solicit their staff’s opinions, care about them as employees and as individuals and help them to develop. A touch of humility, a positive attitude towards life and people, and a good sense of humour would also be welcome.

Empirically, however, I am not aware of any evidence suggesting that such nice leaders are systematically more effective, or even more appreciated by their staff. Indeed, imagine this wonderful "nice person" also has a pathological problem with keeping track of priorities, or of listening to so many people that he or she ends up being indecisive. Or imagine this nice leader lacks business judgement, industry expertise, or any credit with his/her own bosses and hence is incapable of providing you with the support and resources you need. Do you still want this nice leader for a boss?

Leaders, especially senior leaders, have multiple roles and responsibilities. First, they have responsibilities in the realm of strategy definition: they need to understand the evolving competitive landscape (including potential new entrants), keep track of changes in technology and in customer expectations, understand the business and the dynamics of the industry and maintain a strategic perspective on things, including what kinds of alliances, expansions or divestitures might be relevant.

Second is the leader as organizational architect, designing and using the organization’s structure, systems, processes and technology to translate strategy into action and to shape the organization’s culture over time.

Last and obviously not least, leaders must mobilize the energy of several constituencies often presenting different expectations and mindsets: downward (direct reports and the larger unit), upward (one’s immediate boss, all the way to the board for CEOs) and outward (e.g., shareholders, analysts, journalists, customers, suppliers and competitors, regulatory authorities and the general public).

In real life, successful fulfilment of these roles often requires making difficult decisions that involve uncertainty and/or are bound to create winners and losers. Whether it’s shifting the organization’s strategy to de-emphasize some products/regions at the profit of others, changing the structure of the organization or the criteria that govern executive compensation, or postponing a salary rise to local employees in order to invest resources abroad, the leader faces uncertainty and potential resistance. Making these tough calls requires leaders to have the ability to filter out the noise around them in order not to be paralyzed. It requires self-confidence, sometimes boldness.

Leadership also sometimes involves believing something is possible when all around you believe it is not. Take the example of Lakshmi Mittal, who now controls the largest steel producing company in the world. In 1994, his company was number 32 in the world. Imagine how his managers felt when he encouraged them to set a stretch goal for themselves and shoot for the number one position in their industry!

Of course, only the most senior leaders get to make the more radical strategic calls. (And by the way, these leaders are rarely humble, contented, happy-go-lucky individuals. As Général de Gaulle once put it, “glory only offers itself to those who have always yearned for it”.) But all bosses face decisions that are difficult because they involve some degree of uncertainty (and hence one cannot be sure one is making the right decision) and/or entail negative consequences for some individuals, hence requiring some degree of self-confidence, independence and personal drive.

The danger, of course, is the fine line that separates hard-of-hearing from deaf, self-confident from arrogant, and performance driven from insensitive and heartless. As time passes, as leaders accumulate successes (some of which necessarily involved them being right against the advice of others), leaders tend to become increasingly insensitive to disconfirming evidence and push back from others, thus crossing the fine line.

Some individuals are, of course, more prone to crossing this line than others. I remember a senior executive who explained: “My mother repeated to me many times over the years to be nice to people on the way up because, she said, you’ll meet them again on the way down.” Also, he added: “I’ve had enough 'close shaves’ in my life, occasions where I almost made a mistake, or made a mistake but was rescued by others from its consequences, so I remember I’m not infallible.”

But even the most balanced individuals must remain mindful of the danger they face as success starts dulling their edge and lowers their sensitivity to weak, disconfirming signals. Some managers guard against this danger by surrounding themselves with a few strong individuals. For example, a senior executive explained to me that he always chooses one or two of his functional executives among managers who have had general management experience before, typically in a smaller structure. His experience was that such individuals would be more prone to identify, and then not be afraid to bring forward, potentially threatening but relevant information.

Leaders must also make sure they maintain and protect their ‘bandwidth’: i.e., their cognitive and emotional ability to process complex issues. Too many managers are so swamped and overwhelmed that, despite their good intentions to remain open, listen, learn and support, they end up becoming inflexible, emotionally detached and unreasonable in their expectations.

Loving one’s children helps one to be an effective parent, but effective parenting requires more than love. Similarly, being humble and nice helps one to relate to others and can be an asset for a leader, but being a manager/leader requires so much more than this. Leaders, especially senior leaders, must have solid egos. They must have the ability to face uncertainty and resistance, to choose courses of action that may be unpopular and sometimes to inflict pain on individuals and groups. They must also make sure they keep learning, adapting and developing, in order to remain on the right side of the fine line.

This continuous, never-ending process was exemplified by Mahatma Gandhi, who throughout his life systematically made time to review his day’s actions. His secretary, Pyarelal, reported that well into his seventies, Gandhi daily “held a silent court with himself and called himself to account for the littlest of his little acts. Nothing escaped his scrutiny. He gave himself no quarter”. This relentless drive for betterment is what learning is all about.

Intriguingly for this previously very US-immersed organisation, Colorado Springs and san Diego are soon to get Managing Directors to drive their regional businesses, in the same way that Brussels and Singapore have had for some time. My dealings with Rudi Plettinx - a regular contributor to this blog - and MD of CCL Europe in Brussels, has indicated that the Brussels campus enjoys a great deal of autonomy in how it builds its European operations. There was certainly some concern earlier in the year that this might have been reined in while the new plans were in formulation, but it appears that Ryan has understood the benefits that local approaches can bring. This is especially true of course in terms of the marketing and sales operations - and not in terms of the actual program content that must retain a coherent approach across the organisation.

France, for instance, has been pretty resistant to CCL's charms - this no doubt was partly a reflection over the last 8 years of the Bush effect, which was never a great selling proposition for any US organisation in France. It goes deeper than that, there are cultural barriers that go beyond a dislike of the current resident of the White House that prevent French organisations and managers from embracing star-spangled education programs. CCL Europe has been chipping away at this perception and the recognition from Greensboro that they could do no better (only much worse, in fact) by dictating from the other side of the Atlantic is to be applauded.

Rudi Plettinx, Managing Director of the European operations of the Center for Creative Leadership, offers his personal view on a current aspect of business leadership.

I had a call from my old friend Charlotte the other day. She’s one of those corporate trouble-shooters who get sent to problem parts of an organisation when the going gets too hot for everyone else. Is she a leader ? You bet. But talking to her about her last challenge made me think just how poorly prepared many of us are when we take on one of those tricky assignments.

Here’s what Charlotte told me about her recent experiences. “Often the problem for me is that I’m only called in when others have failed to do their job. So the number one issue, especially if you are sent to clear up a mess, is to be certain that the firm has given you all the tools you need to turn things around.”

She went on to say, “If you aren’t sure just how far you can go (and don’t have it in writing) then you’ll never achieve anything. My belief – based on a great deal of “combat” missions - is that you need maximum autonomy (and authority) to get a job like that done well. You can’t build respect and develop and engage employees if you – as the leader - are unsure of what you can and cannot do. Hesitation and prevarication aren’t options out there on the battle front.”

Charlotte’s belief is that the biggest trap any manager moving into a new job can fall into is letting the initial euphoria (of their so-called promotion) stop them from getting some very basic rules agreed between them and their boss.

As she explains, “time and again I hear of newly appointed managers who were so excited by their new promotion they forgot all the basics – that’s a recipe for disaster.” She continues, “sure, have that bottle of celebratory champagne, but next morning sit down with your boss and get the rules agreed. AND get them in writing. If they aren’t carved in stone they aren’t rules at all.” She adds, “without that you can’t do the job you are being asked to do.”

So what are Charlotte’s rules ?

“Any manager heading into a new assignment needs to have at least these clear from day one,” she stresses. “Not just clear, but agreed in writing before they begin.”

• What are my short-term goals ?
• What are my long-term goals ?
• What is the time frame for reviewing, correcting and revising these goals ?
• What is the report-back relationship and how and when does this happen (weekly, monthly etc) ?
• If my personal compensation is related to performance, what are the parameters ?
• Is the budget for my group agreed and what autonomy do I have in using it?
• What is my expense approval threshold ?
• What are my limits on hiring new personnel ?
• What are my limits on dismissing existing personnel ?

She concludes, “There are more than this, but get these basic ground rules agreed and you will at least know where your limitations are. This saves a lot of grief and hand-wringing later on.”

Charlotte tells me that she is consistently successful because she and her boss both know the rules. “This way there are no ambiguities, no surprises. I know where I stand and the company knows what it has asked me to do and the parameters that have been set.”

My question : is that how the rest of us work ?

Do you have ground rules for your team leaders; are they clear and unambiguous; are there other key pieces of advice I missed ? Let us know, we’d like to hear from you.

The root of the problems appears to be bureaucracy (all programs must be approved by the Chinese government), language skills and cost. The cultural issues also are a barrier with plenty of executives still sending juniors to classes in place of them. This is largely as they understand the classroom as a note-taking experience whereas western management development programs are now much more discussion based. The "stand-in note-taker" clearly cannot bring the same experiences to the discussions as the executives themselves. This cultural  problem is fairly simple to overcome, through cultural "learning skills" programs, the bureaucracy, language and cost issues may take longer to solve.

In the same vein Vanity Fair in its green issue has published an extensive examination of architect William McDonough's Cradle to Cradle manifesto. McDonough leads the way in rethinking how the world should design the things we make.

“One of the points we make in Cradle to Cradle is that being less bad is not being good—it’s being bad, just less so. To be efficient is the same as being less bad. If I left here and went north to Canada and found myself going 120 miles an hour toward Mexico, it is not going to help me to slow down to 20. I’m going the wrong way. We need a change in direction. What we really need is an eco-effective strategy, to go along with our eco-efficient one, where we look at the idea of actually inventing new things that will take us all the way up to our desired goals.”

‘The industrial revolution of 150 years ago was not designed...if you look at the first industrial revolution as a retroactive design assignment, it would be to design a system that puts billions of pounds of toxic waste into the air and the water, depletes our soils and washes toxins into the ocean or into the air, produces endocrine disrupters to affect our hormonal systems, creates and distributes carcinogens, causes climate change, and dumps plastics in the oceans. If this was the design assignment, we’re doing great. If it’s not the design assignment, then what is? And so instead of seeing what goes on today as inevitable, what we have to recognize is that it’s not possible any longer to say that it’s not part of our plan, because it’s part of our de facto plan. It’s the thing that’s happening because we have no other design. We need a new industrial revolution.” 

McDonough is leading ahead with this vision - but as yet it is not mainstream, and certainly not part of business school programs for leaders. 

The RSA, the venerable British organisation that draws together thought leaders from the arts, manufatures and commerce (and has been doing so for over 250 years) puts forward in its journal a critique of the current passion for biofuels and their inefficiency in global terms - even if they are more profitable per acre than food crops - and the consequences for food supply generally. Tim Lang, Professor of Food Policy at City University, London notes:

"It has been calculated that the EU’s then 15 countries would need to use more than 70% of land currently down to cereals, oilseeds and sugar to produce biofuels equivalent to just 10% of those countries’ transport fuel. With the possible exception of Brazil’s use of sugar cane (arguably a much better use of its prodigious growth capacity than eating it), biofuels add to rather than resolve policy problems. They distort prices and land use, confounding rather than promoting a shift to sustainable lifestyles."

All these stories suggest that while business is clearly involving itself in clean-technologies, new design and alternative fuels there is at this early stage in the process a mess of ideas and processes that allows for great opportunities to appear but also indicates a lack of "joined-up thinking" - surely this is an area that management thinkers should be clarifying and developing frameworks for, so that leaders can be better educated on how they can proceed.

Report from a Leadership Dinner of the European Leadership Platform held in Amsterdam in the first week of May 2008, and addressed by IMD Professor of Organisational Behaviour Robert Hooijberg, leader of the Orchestrating Winning Performance and Low Cost Competition executive education programs at IMD.

How does a CEO based at a company headquarters influence an organization in which its offices are spread across the world? A CEO can put in countless 120-hour weeks, but it is simply impossible that he/she will be able to have direct contact with thousands of employees located in numerous different time zones.

This question and dilemma was posed by Professor of Organizational Behavior Robert Hooijberg during a Leadership Dinner of the European Leadership Platform held last week in Amsterdam, The Netherlands and attended by some 20 business leaders from companies like Shell, Bain & Co and Unibail-Rodamco. Hooijberg emphasized the importance of structural procedures in creating this influence.

“In order to engage people to deliver results beyond expectations, leaders at the top of organizations need to seriously consider how they exercise both their leadership IN organizations as well as their leadership OF organizations,” said Hooijberg. “While most understand the importance of the interpersonal side of leadership, we encourage them to pay equal if not more attention to their leadership OF organizations. The focus on the leadership OF organizations forces executives to ask themselves how they can ensure that their leadership philosophy about engagement of employees, clients, suppliers, distributors and other stakeholders truly takes hold in all parts of their organization. This means that executives need to start asking themselves two basic questions: 1) What do our strategies, systems and structures motivate people to do? and 2) What should our strategies, systems and structures motivate people to do?”

Hooijberg talked about areas such as gender diversity in the company, a culturally diverse vs. a homogenous organization and promotion procedures as a way of impacting the organizational culture, among other topics. For example, Hooijberg described how when an organization includes significant female representation on the management team, it will influence the motivation and interest level of all females throughout the entire organization. Meanwhile, culturally diverse teams are more prone to conflict yet have the potential for greater opportunities than a homogenous organization which is more stable and comfortable. Communication patterns, such as a CEO’s weekly state of the organization e-mail to the entire company, also play a role in the mix.

Participant views varied, but it is safe to say that there is no clear recipe on how leading is accomplished when the leader can’t be physically present.

Herman H.J. Bol, Executive Board, University Medical Center Utrecht, probably best summarized the overall view by stating: “I don’t think there is a 100 percent answer to the question of how to lead when you are not there. If there was, there would be many more successful companies. I understand the importance and need for Professor Hooijberg’s book Being There Even When You Are Not.”

"Companies are complex social systems that require clarity of purpose, guidance, and direction. Companies that fine-tune these systems by creating what we call people advantage—the ability to gain competitive advantage
through people strategies—will race ahead of their competitors."

 They identify four elements of the new talent workforce paradigm, none are particularly inspirational or new, but together they sum up the talent challenge neatly:

• high value-added businesses are predominantly "knowledge businesses" these days - and that means people are not just the core asset but THE asset. As "people businesses" grow they are competing for a limited pool of talent.
• demographics of developed economies, where knowledge businesses tend to be located, are such that people are having fewer children and those children are coming to the workforce later in life than before - this means that the potential employee pool is smaller than ever before. What is more, when the baby-boomers retire over the next 10 years there is not an equal bulge in the population to replace them.
• globalisation offers opportunities - but integrating different cultures and talents into the workforce is complex
• career paths are much more chaotic than 30 years ago - people expect to not only change jobs several times through their careers but also to have flexible working hours, sabbaticals and a renewed focus on their work-life balance.

"Senior executives need to make sure that HR and people strategy is the cornerstone of their corporate strategy. One of the most effective ways to integrate HR and strategy is through the creation of a strategic work force plan. To formulate and execute such a plan, executives should take two major steps. First, they should understand how their company’s overall strategy drives the demand for people....Second, companies should also understand the four “bridges” that connect strategy and HR: sourcing strategy, performance strategy, development strategy, and affi liation strategy....Companies need to be able to measure each of these four linkages so that top executives understand the quantitative dimensions of people issues in the same way that they grasp the fi nancial impact of their strategic decision"

This seems like a useful theory on which to develop an HR strategy - and crucially integrate it into the mindsets and existing behaviour of senior management. The problem is in identifying what metrics the HR department can usefully present. The authors' suggestion of "employee attrition, recruiting success and value-added per person" will be difficult to excite the CEO with, I imagine. The first two are more gauges of the HR department's success rather than the company's performance - and the latter is going to be hard to substantiate. The qualitative measures are no more compelling either "scores from employee surveys, assessing leadership and employee engagement".

At root, however, the principle is good - the hard work is coming up with stats that are compelling. This will take some clear-headed blue-sky thinking but I am convinced it can be done.

Read the whole executive summary at :  http://www.bcg.com/impact_expertise/publications/files/Creating_People_Advantage_ES_April_2008.pdf