Just spotted a good article on global account management at marketing agency OMD Omnicom - it highlights the benefits they have seen from introducing more integrated global account management information.

They consider global account management to have been instrumental in a number of major client wins.

Read the full article on global account management here. See our other posts on global account management or more about our global account management training.

Feb 16 2009

Kevan Hall will be running an interactive workshop about faster, simpler ways to manage complex projects and teams at the Neeley School of Business TCU 2009 Global Supply Chain Conference “Managing Supply Chain Complexity – Keys for Success in Challenging Times” on 4th March.

Appropriately enough for the author of the book Speed Lead, the venue is The Speedway Club at the Texas Motor Speedway.

Feb 12 2009

There was extensive coverage in the Sunday Times this weekend on some particular individuals in the banking industry.  I am not going to name names, because I think there has been enough written about particular individuals, but one of the key behaviours that was mentioned was very high level of micro management.

One chief executive of a very large organisation held a 9.30 am meeting, every morning with his direct reports, and asked them very detailed information about what had happened in a particular branch on a particular day. The environment was quite hostile, and quite antagonistic –  the morning meetings became known as the  “Morning Beatings”

But it is the behaviours that this micro-management approach drives outside the meetings that concern me.  I worked with this particular organisation last year, and it was very clear that because that behaviour was driven from the top, it created what I call a control cascade.

If you were the very senior person invited to that meeting, you needed to know the details of everything that went on in your organisation in case you were asked a question. Because of that, the people who worked for you needed to know everything that was going on below them in order to feed your information need, because you were feeding the need of your boss.

In a large organization this creates a massive reverse cascade of work informing someone right at the top of the organisation, about information that, frankly, they don’t need to have.

This is one of the clearest indications of the scale of waste that is caused by micro management, and of course the micro management was clearly focusing on the wrong topics, because it wasn’t the sales in a particular branch in the UK that caused the subsequent problems in his industry.

In many organizations and admiring press pieces, these very smart and hardworking senior executives were lauded and rewarded (often by the same journalists who are now criticising them for the same behaviours). My view is that this kind of manager is dangerous and can easily drive a culture of micromanagement that feeds their own inappropriate control tendencies and undermines autonomy in the whole organization.

Perhaps what we need is lazier senior managers – a lazy manager is generally a good delegator.

Feb 11 2009

We have been running a series of Podcasts on our various websites over the last year, and have been quite surprised at the results of what people access in terms of downloaded files.  On our www.speedleading.com  site we offer people an option of an introduction to speed lead on MP3 or more or less the same information as a PDF.  97% of people will choose the Podcast MP3 file.

If we look on our matrix management blog again over 95% of people choose the MP3 podcast option over the PDF.

Now on this Global Integration site, we don’t have an option to download MP3s directly from that site.  The links bring you into one of the other sites where they are hosted.  Here  (relative to traffic) we find a similar number of people download resources, (so sites with similar amount of traffic are generating similar amounts of downloads) but of course without an MP3 option, everyone chooses the PDF articles.

It seems that offering MP3s doesn’t necessarily increase the volume of downloads, but it does massively change the proportion and people seem to prefer audio by a factor of 20 to 1

Maybe for the kind of people who are interested in what we do, who are regular travellers and busy people, the MP3 format is just more convenient.  Unfortunately we don’t know how many MP3s are downloaded through iTunes. We don’t get traffic information from there.

Take a listen at our podcasts or download our articles and choose for yourself.

Feb 10 2009

No-one starts their career by saying they want to a micro-manager, but micromanagement is an easy trap to fall into.

People often become inadvertent micro-managers from acting with the best possible motivations – sometimes even by being too helpful.

Managers, particularly those who come up through a technical career route, have become successful by solving problems.  As they get promoted and become people mangers, what could be more natural then to keep solving problems for people.

Unfortunately when you manage people, if all you do is ever solve problems for them, then very quickly they learn that it is just easier to escalate to you for the solution.  You may inhibit them from coming up with their own solutions by always having your own solution – especially if it is a better one!  At some point you have to let other people solve these problems for themselves.

I did some work with a very large US conglomerate this year, whose name I can’t mention for contractual reasons, focusing on this particular area of micro management and control.  We ran some sessions with managers, based around a short self evaluation of “Are you a micro-manager?” asking some basic questions around these themes.

Many people were horrified, because they had never thought of themselves as micro managers- just helpful.  On reflection, they realised that in their desire to be helpful, they were often undermining the autonomy and capability building of their own people.

In remote, virtual and matrix teams this can be even worse as team members are often physically or organizationally remote and may find it harder to “fight back” against micromanagement.

My bit of advice for today, if you want to avoid micromanagement, don’t be too helpful.

Feb 09 2009

I was in San Francisco recently for our US team meeting, and I walked passed a conference room that had been laid for a big event for the pharmaceutical industry, and there were hundreds of chairs laid out in rows.  A big stage at one end, a podium, and very little room to move around inside the room, so everything was packed in.

An impressive amount of effort had been put into branding, into pens, into posters, and the “set dressing”.  I guess about $50,000 had been spent on making the room look good, and I would estimate nothing had been spent on thinking about the “participant experience”.

The whole set up of that room said to participants, “Your job here is to shut up and listen”.  All the focus was on the front, there was no opportunity to talk to your peers, apart from the people to your immediate left and right.

It sounds crazy but we have all been to those meetings. This is probably the most common layout that you see for corporate meetings, and it carries a very strong hierarchical and passive message to the participants.

Often people are rewarded for sitting through boring PowerPoint presentations all day, by being allowed to go and do something interesting in the evening.

Our challenge is why not build fun, participation and interaction into the day, and make it relevant?  Very often the evening exercise are irrelevant to the learning points of the conference, and added in as an after thought – “let’s do some team building”, without really thinking about what we are trying to achieve.

So why not build participation in right from the start?  Get people interacting and moving?  Something as simple as the room layout sends a power message.  If instead of rows of chairs you have round tables then the message is “Here is an opportunity to interact with your colleagues”.

Build in more group work, people have an inexhaustible interest in discussing work issues with their peers, particularly people they don’t meet very often.  Give them a topic to focus on (better still let them choose one) and let people network, and learn from each other.
Particularly in large multi-site and global organisations, networking is a real challenge, it just doesn’t happen remotely, so concentrate on giving people the opportunity to do talk.

Minimise the amount of presentations.  Presentations tend to be someone telling you what they think is important – and it rarely is.  After a brief introduction, try and get group work going as quickly as possible.  Have break out rooms, white paper sessions where people can create content with experts, trade shows where people can meet in smaller groups with people they really want to talk to.  Let people opt in to topics they enjoy and not be forced to sit through topics that are not relevant to them.  Use lots of post its and networking areas where people can really talk together and get to know their colleagues.

Build in participation right from the start.  Don’t make it a by product of your meetings. Instead of spending your budget on banners and pens spend it on a great participant experience – nobody remember great meetings for the branding!

If you want further ideas on designing really participative and interactve meetings, have a look at our Podcast on the subject Dismal meetings, surprisingly useful coffee breaks , see more about our consulting and facilitation in this area or or give us a call.

Feb 05 2009

Found this interesting article on business technology trends.

“Technology alone is rarely the key to unlocking economic value: companies create real wealth when they combine technology with new ways of doing business. Through our work and research, we have identified eight technology-enabled trends that will help shape businesses and the economy in coming years. These trends fall within three broad areas of business activity: managing relationships, managing capital and assets, and leveraging information in new ways. read the rest of the article here…

Feb 04 2009

Our Speed Lead book is now available in Spanish - translated as “Gerenciar con sentido Comun” - managing with common sense.

Gerenciar con sentido comun

Enjoy

Feb 03 2009

Virtual teams are now common.  But how about completely virtual team building? is it possible to build team spirit and a sense of community without getting together?

Now let’s be clear first of all.  We don’t think that remote or virtual team building is as good as getting face to face.  There is something about that intensive face to face interaction that allows you to build relationships and trust much more quickly.

The kind of team building events I have done with my team in the past include horse whispering (fabulous), stunt days (dramatic), circus school (painful), and the intensive shared experience of these type of team building events really can make a difference to a team.  But when costs are tight and travel restricted, some form of virtual team building to get the team kicked off is better than none.

We adapted a team building task we have run for many years where three distributed sub teams have to cooperate, compete, communicate and solve problems across cultural differences using technology. We delivered this to a remote and virtual team through web and telephone interaction.

What the virtual team building exercise lost in the lack of face to face interaction was to some extent replaced by the novelty of working with the technology.  We were able to use webex, Internet search, shared documents and other tools to really embed the use of technology.

Some small group physical presence in the different locations turned out to be important for the success of the task and the learning was impressive.  So virtual team building is definitely better than no team building.

If you can’t (or even if you can) get together face to face this year and you want to inject some fun, some relationship building, some leaning and team building into your virtual remote team meeting, why not give us a call.

Feb 03 2009

In our work on global account management we come across a lot of acronyms.

• GAM is a global account manager, but there is also
• IAM - International account manager
• SAM - Strategic account manager
• KAM - Key account manager
• PAM - Partner account manager

In each of these cases the account in question may have some combination of the need to work across complex organization structures, corporate cultures, distance, cultures, timezones etc… (the areas we specialize in)

As global account management (we will call it GAM) becomes more embedded in an organization it is common for the global accounts function to become more formalized and even to be established as its own business unit operating horizontally across the organization.

Despite this the acronym for Business Unit Manager is rarely used

Any other acronyms you use?

Feb 02 2009