Oliver Thylmann’s Thoughts

A man in slovakia cam of the road and was burried under 3 meters of snow. All he had to save himself were 60 bottles of beer. He drank and peed himself to freedom. Not sure if I have to believe this but it’s a fun story Source: The Sun Newspaper Online.

Update: It was a joke. See here.

My knowledge management tutor gave us a great article from changeX, a site about the change in economy and society that is currently going on. The article looks at the problem that current MBA schools don’t teach managers what they need to learn in our new economy. Tom Peters would be proud Are we building up a management elite that does:

- focus on excellent leadership instead middle of the read success?
- work by living cooperation instead of simple control?
- rely on inspiration instead of administrative instruction?
- work on knowledge creation instead of fixing routines?
- focus on understanding and looking at the context instead of simple requirements?
- are fixed on sense and meaning instead of money?

New leaders need to find the people to do something, look reality in the eye, make the focus of the company clear, create a culture of discipline and leverage technology as acceleration. This is just a list they mention and there are likely lots of different things to look at it, but the really important thing is, that you need to be different. We are moving into a knowledge economy, and from there into a values economy if a friend of mine is right. You don’t get the most knowledge or the best values through control. You need understand the values bottom up and find out how to nurture them in the right way. You need to let people free under make sure they are motivated and know the rough direction to get most of their knowledge. And you need to interlink them and let them share based on the SECI Model for example. We know more than we can tell, as Polanyi said. This is important, first because specifications don’t tell everything, and second because that means that all the outsourcing might be wrong or we need a different kind of outsourcing.

The thing is that you need to build a base of common understanding, shared beliefs, and you need to be able to move them beyond your corporate boundaries. Talk to the world. Our mental models aren’t really equipped for it at the moment but we need to adapt. We need to learn, unlearn, relearn. Use teams small enough to have amazing cohesion and give them a guiding light, then let them run free. Suddenly we need less managers and more doers, thinkers, players, motivators. Tom Peters idea of a manager as a barrier removal consultant is a very good term. Break mental barriers, get people to understand. Don’t just sell. Sell the right stuff.

Where will the good people work in the future? Where they belong. Now go make people belong and boy can you have some power.

Good day everyone. I finally managed to move the URL of the blog and update all my feeds. Please update your links and subscriptions:

The Blog is now at blog.thylmann.net
The Feed for that blog is at feeds.feedburner.com/owt

The Moblog is now at moblog.thylmann.net
The Feed for the MoBlog is at feeds.feedburner.com/owtMoBlog

If you want to subscribe to my blog and furl posts you can do that via feeds.feedburner.com/owtnfurl

The Homepage has moved from oliver.thylmann.com to thylmann.net and now just includes some links.

He held a speech in front of lots of CEOs which he called idiots it seems. He compiled a list why or when the are idiots which he put in a powerpoint slide at a presentation:

[…]

1. Fail to spend Hyper-aggressively on IS/IT; fail to follow “Gamechanger” IS/IT Strategies; fail to put their CIO on the Board; fail to exploit fully [Revolution Now!] the Web.
2. Believe in [BIG] mergers as The Key to Offense & Defense.
3. Hire MBAs in large #s.
4. Recruit mostly from conventional sources; have a low tolerance for risktakers-freaks.
5. Are less than 24/7 “Talent Fanatics.”
6. Do too much Imitation/Benchmarking/ConstantImprovement, not enough “Breathtaking”/Disruptive Innovation; favor “marketshare” over MarketCreation.
7. Believe that “process” beats “passion,” “analysis” beats “action.”
8. Spend too much time in the Office, not enough time in the Field; fail to ColdCall at least One Customer per Week; are surrounded by sycophants; have low Tolerance for Contention.
9. ARE NOT LOVED BY FRONTLINE STAFF!
10. Do too much MicroSegmentation I: Grotesquely underestimate the Women’s Market—and if they do more or less “get it,” fail to understand the Strategic Transformation required to master it.
11. Do too much MicroSegmentation II: Grotesquely underestimate the Boomer-Geezer Market.
12. Have too few Women on the Executive Team, too few Women on the Board.
13. Who’s … Board = OWMs.
14. Balk at Technicolor actions and language—e.g., WOW!, Lovemarks, DreamMarketing, InsanelyGreat.
15. Think Design is a frill, nicety—not the Fundamental Basis for Value Added.
16. Tolerate less than Excellence, do not insist upon “Experiences that make me ‘Gasp.’”
17. Deliver more on Short-term Earnings rather than Long-term Yearnings.
18. FAIL TO INSPIRE ME BY THE AUDACITY OF THEIR DREAMS. (Too much: “Dream” = “Buy MarketShare, Get BIGGER, Cut Costs.”)

The full post is here.

Ok, so P&G bought Gillette, probably for similar reasons that Gillette bought Duracel. Dave Taylor has a great post looking at how much the $57 Billion really is. I can add one thing here, which is something a consultant from Accenture asked me once when thinking about big numbers. How many homes could you buy from that? Let’s presume that you can buy a small house for $250.000. That’s 4 houses for a million, meaning that it would buy you 228.000 houses! Even if you want a bit nicer houses it would still be a nice little town. The thing is that this number is a lot easier to understand than the money value.