How mass collaboration changes everything

The potential of the new creation of "Prosumers" and "The New Alexandrians" -The Wikinomics in this book Wikinomics Is quite simply incredible. Cocreative communities created in dormitories by Mark Zuckerberg- Founder of facebook the next 20 years are going to be exciting. The ability to interact like never before, on a global scale.

The potential for these "Prosumers" to attract tens of millions of participants overnight. Mass collaboration, cocreating goods and services. Customers are actually now the "prosumer." The web 2.0 and the b-web or the business web is creating an enterprise 2.0 or enterprise social software - a massive harvest of the business value of Wikinomics. 

Open Source Networking - this open and developing Science is is driving business like never before. Making businesss more economical, A pro the problem with the recent crisis highlighted . It should never have happened when you consider the advanced technology available to networkers globallly. 

Proctor & Gamble had a near death experience in June 2000. Its business lines were atrophying, and revenues and profits were plummeting. Stock price had tumbled, and wall street were screaming. Something had to change. Led by Larry Huston (innovation head honcho) went on a campaign by open source networking. Up to and beyond 50% of its new innovations were outside their own premises in wikinomic marketplaces. 

InnoCentive, NineSigma, and yet2.com. The combined community efforts led one of the most dramatical turnarounds in the history of commerce. Hundreds of new products on the market, some of which are still massive global hits. In the process Lafley and his managers, like Huston, transformed a lumbering consumer products company iton a limber innovation machine. 

Today P&G is THE leader among thousands of companies that participate in a global IDEAGORA, where uniquely qualified minds exchange millions of ideas and inventions in something rivaling e-bay for innovation. Companies that make these sort of moves can now leverage a global pool of talent, ideas, and innovations that vastly exceeds what they could ever hope to marshal internally.

This new world has an ethos which is applicable to a life moral. For every top notch Scientist inside the labs of P&G there are another two hundred outside in other labs who are just as good. This open source community is aiding everybody. The sharing of information is not just confined to the company intranet. We are empowering each other with knowledge like never before.

Management Accounting for Decision Makers

Strategic Management

1.  Establish mission and objectives 
2.  Undertake a position analysis (for example, a SWOT analysis)
3.  Identify and assess strategic options 
4.  Select strategic options and formulate plans 
5.  Perform, review and control
6.  The changing business landscape

Increased competition and advances in technology have changed the business landscape in UK. There have been changes in the types of businesses operating as well as changes in the ways in which businesses are structured and operate. 

A key financial objective is to enhance owners' wealth. When setting financial objectives right balance must be struck between risk return. All management accounting is useful information for decision making and this requires a clear understanding of for whom & for what purpose the information will be used. 

Management Accounting can be viewed as a form of service as it involves providing financial information required by the managers. To provide a useful service,management accounting must possess certain qualities, or characteristics. These are relevance, reliability, comparability, and understandability. In addition, management accounting information must be material. Providing a service to managers can be costly and financial information should be produced only if the cost of providing the information is less than the benefits gained. 

Management Accounting information is part of the total information system within a business.To meet managers' needs information relating to 

• Developing objectives and plans
• Performance evaluation and control
• Allocating resources
• Determining costs and benefits

Providing non financial information has become an increasingly  Important part management accountants' role. 

Changing role of the management accountant.

The main purpose of management accounting is to affect people's behavior. This effect is not always beneficial.IT has had a major affect on the ability to provide accurate, detailed & timely information. 

Developments in IT have enabled information and reports to be more widely disseminated throughout the business.

Less time is spent preparing reports. The management accountant is now a key member of the management team.This new dimension to management accountant's role should benefit the design of more relevant management accounting information systems.

Reference: Financial Accounting for Decision Makers 

A snippet from today's budget: 

We have to have a less debt burdened economy. Consumer spending - if its a debt ridden one like the recent one, then its not progressive growth for the economy. Conservatives are adamant that's the old way we have to avoid. What I mean is, if consumer spending is reckless spending, mounting serious credit card high, significant APR debt, then we will be living in a false boom economy again. That is against Conservativeness.

Forever Vitality

Forever Vitality

We have a product range to make you look good and feel great whether at home or travelling further afield.

We've received feed back and we've put together a product campaign targeted at a variety of sectors within the product range.

So, here you have it, we've done exactly that I give you Forever Vitality.

Vitality consists of four categories of carefully selected products:

Each category has a brochure, product pack and supporting literature;

 

• Sport 
• Beauty 
• Holiday  
• Wellbeing 

The packs have been created especially for you and each one contains a free gift.

Click  Forever Vitality Packs and transform your health and vitality this summer:

I'm going to go into a little more product knowledge.

I would recommend you join me in this business. You will get the most enlightening presentations from lifelong nutrition specialists:

Dorne Parker I.H.B.C. I.F.H.B. Nutrition I.T.E.C

After achieving her International Health and Beauty Council Diploma in 1977, my first position was in a hair and beauty salon where she was manager for 3 years. After that she moved to another health and beauty salon where she was Manager for 5 years. It was here that she gained experience and training on Clairns and Rene Guinot facial and body products. During this period, she also trained in laser therapy (which is a non surgical form of face lift) in Harley Street, London. She left the Industry to have two sons.

Dorne achieved a qualification in Psychology and has always been involved in the hair and beauty industry. 

She presented a health and nutrition for life plan so mesmerising, it was inspiration.

There is a report by the BBC today about the fats in biscuits and cakes. A segment of the report is quite frankly shocking. 

'Experts who worked on the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) guidelines say 40,000 of the 150,000 annual deaths are "eminently preventable".'

Dorne draw this conclusion; the western world diet leaves a lot to be desired. Put simply, it contains:

• Too much animal fat
• Too much salt
• Too much sugar and refined flour
• Not enough fibre
• Too many processed foods
• Too much tea, coffee, alcohol and so on...

It is foolish to assume that giving any species a diet different from its evolution, would not result in certain individuals within that species running into health problems.

But this is exactly what we have done in the western world over the last two centuries. We are now paying the price for this-the largest uncontrolled trial ever undertaken in human beings.

There are 3 major anti-nutrients: 

Smoking

Alcohol

Medication 

Moderation is the key to all of these items.

Management & Accounting

Costing in a Competitive Environment 

Costing and pricing products in the traditional way began at the start of the industrial revolution. Modern businesses with machines and tech at their heart, have a high level of overheads relative to direct costs.This is due to massive depreciation, servicing, & power costs.Also personnel and staff welfare costs. Scarcely envisaged in the early days of the industrial revolution. We save money on more efficient production methods, this leads to less waste and, therefore, less total material cost. A highly competitive international market is key. Production, much of it highly sophisticated, is carried out worldwide. Transport,including air-freight,is relatively cheap. Telecommunications are cheaper, but its the Internet which ensures potential customers can quickly & cheaply find prices of range of suppliers. 

In the UK, as in many developed countries,service industries dominate the economy,employing the great majority of the workforce & producing most of the value of productive output.There are many self-employed individuals supplying services,many service providers are vast businesses such as banks, insurance companies & cinema operators. For most of the large service providers, the activities very closely resemble modern manufacturing activity. They too are characterised by high capital intensity, overheads dominating direct costs and a competitive international market. 

Management accountants provide economic information to their clients the managers. The quality of the service provided would be determined, by the extent to which the managers' information needs have been met. It can be argued that, to be useful, management accounting information should possess certain key qualities or characteristics. This can be applied to management accounting user groups. Several are interested in the accounting information.A majority outside the business. there are 10 main user groups affecting most businesses. This list is not exhaustive, it refers to the most important: 

• Owners
• managers
• lenders
• suppliers
• customers
• competitors
• employees & reps
• government
• community reps
• investment analysis

A divisional manager.What might you do to access contribution the contribution performance? Controllable profit. Expenses is so vital. The cumulative impact of individual expense accounts. 

Divisional net profit. Again not exhaustive-

• marketing,
• personnel,
• accounting,
• planning,
• information technology,
• research development expenses.    

Planning for this can be extremely contentious. Divisional directors who sub-consciously shift blame, complaining about apportionment. With less scope for success.

Cost of common resources as a % of revenue: 0-5% in  44.4% of divisionalised businesses in manufacturing sector.

This is another highlight of controllable costing analysis. I saved the merged business unit 10's of thousands in wage & expenses.

The fact that a number of companies such as Wal-Mart,Zara,Dell,and Toyota managed to record extraordinary success while doing ordinary things. Just running supermarkets, selling clothes, or making computers or cars .Making managers more fully aware that what their organisations produce. This can matter a lot less than the way that they produce it. Its the WHAT they produce not the WAY. Supply chain management has been eased by management information systems. International complexities would have been more pronounced if IT systems hadn't advanced.

"Are you the weakest link in your company's supply chain"?  Said the Harvard Business Review,in Sept 2007. "The warehouses of many large companies still operate with 20-year-old technology, producing  incomplete & unintegrated information flows". Some companies have been disappointed by the failure of business-to-business exchanges to develop on the internet and provide them with supplies more efficiently than via traditional routes. 

Active Inertia

Donald Sull  an associate professor at London Business School. He is a fully established management guru. He's an author of some books which come highly recommended by the business bible, the Financial Times. 

Educated almost exclusively at the Harvard Business School (first degree, doctorate, and MBA), Sull worked in consulting and private equity before moving to an academic career. 

At the core of his idea is the observation that managers often get stuck in rut, so when an entirely new situation arises they revert to old responses. 

This was common of the managers with poor profit and loss records in my stint in management. The most common complaint was "I haven't got time to be doing anything extra". A majority of the new material we were being presented with was vital for its efficiency savings. It was something which would replace something else on most occasions. The negative responses were always from those with poor records. If you get stuck in this neagtive frame of thought process, you are stuck in the rut Sull is referring to.

Sull says, is "management's tendency to respond to the most disruptive changes by accelerating activities that succeeded in the past". 

He quotes the example, of tyre company Firestone's response to the introduction by Michelin of radical technology. Instead of embracing the new technology and all the changes that it implied, Firestone undertook more of the activities that had worked for it in the past, in the pre-radial era-extending its existing technology, making more tyres on existing equipment and keeping old factories working at full throttle. As Sull puts it, "It just dug itself an even deeper hole."

When managers are in a hole, they should stop digging. Instead, like a car stuck in the mud, they keep the engine turning as if they are on a normal road. They do this partly because they "equate inertia with inaction". But inaction does not have to mean that nothing is going on. When troops are not in battle they keep themselves in a state of active preparedness. Companies should do likewise.

Sull calls for "active waiting" a strategy he calls himself "anticipating and preparing for opportunities and threats that executives can neither fully predict nor control".

We all know the power of waiting quietly for the right moment to pounce upon an opportunity. Sull's idea is that waiting does not have to be quiet. While they are waiting there are lots of useful things that companies can do-build up a war chest, for instance, streamline operations, carry out scenario planning, and so on.

To avoid active inertia, Sull says leaders should not march "headlong toward a well-defined future". Instead, they should "articulate a fuzzy vision...a fuzzy vision works because it provides a general direction and sets aspirations without prematurely locking the company into a specific course of action". 

Reference: Management Ideas and Gurus - The Economist 

The Web Generation & Management Accounting

The Collaboration Economy






'Wikinomics' communities don't have to pass people by. Anyone can immerse themselves in co-creation.
This is a new breed of participation; the web generation, known as the"baby-boom echo."( Generation Y), I personally prefer the 'net generation'.


Americans, the younger Americans are in general-genius compared to previous generations.There is an older generation Television 24/7 culture. This is linked to the fast food generation. Young net generation americans are learning to eat junk food in moderation. Some parents are clinically obese.Junk food & TV 24/7.


Young Americans are creating global empires in their teens.Google boys.Facebook-Mark Zuckerberg
These youngsters are by design  like musical superstars.  


Net generators are influencing all workplaces, markets, and social gatherings. Their writing is providing marketing buzzwords, design visualization ideas.


These youngsters are growing up with 10 times more power than their parents before them. More knowledge than  previous generations.Look at the doors My Space has opened for artists around the world.


Since 2003 its launched hopefuls into global superstars.Danah Boyd,an ethical university based social scientist  has an "ethnographic" account. My Space was just to check-out the Los Angeles music scene.That was all it was for. To discover music solely in LA.


The b-web (business web) model where masses of consumers, employees, suppliers, business partners,and even competitors cocreate value in absence of direct managerial control. 


Why is this happening? Its all about the declining cost of collaborating.


Oddly this is a model not from the 90's but from 1937.


Ronald H. Coase published a paper titled "The Nature of the Firm." He'd just toured ford & general motors.These are the industrial 'behemoths.' They left  him puzzled. How, he wondered, could economists not act as individuals rather than tens of thousands of coworkers?




Management Accounting For Decision Makers




Management Accounting is the most important aspect of business. Its different to accounting & bookkeeping.Its anlaysis of what the numbers mean. How they will affect the business.The most informative business tool available to any business.


Over the past two decades, the environment in which businesses operate has become increasingly turbulent & competitive:


1.the increasing sophistication of customers 
2.the development of a global economy where national frontiers become less important 
3.rapid changes in technology 
4.the deregulation of domestic markets(for example,electricity,water and gas)
5.increasing pressure from owners (shareholders) for competitive economic returns;
6.the increasing volatility of financial markets.


Reference ISBN:0-273-71044-3 This affects all business.


I don't think micro fully appreciate; to stay ahead of the competition they need to be mirroring larger, maybe more advanced business.Too many SMEs failing because they're not completing management accounting. For example,  margin of safety, break even analysis in their marketing campaigns.


This is leading us into the world of strategic management.
Thank you to everyone at the Huntingdon all day seminar. I'm better presenter now. 


Strategy wasn't even discussed at uni in that depth. We designed specific strategic plans of genuine purpose. Linking internal resources of the business to our external environment. We discussed competitors, affluence of the locality, suppliers, promotional trending. Plans of skilling the workforce, how we're being exploited, without a skilled workforce.


To achieve this requires the development of strategies and plans that take account of the business strengths and weaknesses,

Gulf of Mexico & Management Ideas/Gurus

I can see the presidents point of view: Why should the US suffer supplying oil to so many other parts of the world.I don't think there is a simple solution to this,I understand the presidents anger and he must have felt at some point...dismay? A rethink on the way we think about fossil fuels. This could turn out to be the most disastrous thing on the planet and we're only just coming out of a global banking & credit/recession crisis. Why should the gulf of Mexico suffer?Are there going to be calls for people to drastically cut their use of fossil fuels?Will there be a motor vehicle ban, like a hosepipe ban? I don't think everyone appreciates just how serious this may turn out to be.The president has put other urgent matters on hold, 40,000 barrels a day was leaking out! Taking shortcuts on this matter is so inappropriate.


In retail the kind of shortcuts I would take were cost effective solutions that weren't strictly legal but nobody was sick and I achieved the best stock results: If there was a best before (not a legal use buy date) I would still sell the product at a much reduced price to its original. For example, any produce, even beer that had a best before date, I would sell it a couple of days beyond that date at a significantly reduced price.Other managers would throw vast quantities of perfectly good food and drink down the drain and report stock results of more than 8%. Use buy different kettle of fish. Beer would be the best one, due to the size of the store-way too large for what the turnover was-this was a massive issue, items would, especially if some of my team weren't rotating the items, approach their use by and best before dates. I used superior tactics in dealing with this, by reducing items early and by very little at first.They would get snapped up and I would lose very little of my stock result. Other managers would be so poor in this, its a joke really that I've been out of the senior management game for so long. I'd visit, lets say Steve (Rides)-I'd say to Steve, "what is that huge bin full of beer for Stevie?" he would say "oh I forgot to reduce it in time, my assistant missed it." That simply wouldn't wash with me, I was on top of all these matters. He'd thrown away over £1,000 of perfectly good beer. This was terminal, common sense tells you that if he was to reduce a four pack of beer from £3.99 to £3.49 a couple of days before its Best Before date you're only going to lose 13% of its total value. He was throwing away 100% if you add up the cumulative impact of this behaviour you get one very good manager who is respected by all senior management and another who is being demoted to the smallest shop in the UK with so little commission per week, he might as well become my deputy, even though he was previously my superior in the first place, when I was a party going animal at 16yrs of age.

Having said all of that he was one of the warmest friendliest guys you could ever expect to meet outside of the sharp end of management/leadership /management Accounting for decision makers/soon viral marketing Dan Synergism wizardry.


I spoke about how the workplace for a leader is different to his leadership approach on the outside of work, if you read the most successful managers book and Capello examples, the leader is both in control and supportive. Very intense. I needed assistance from Human Resource coordinators, the manager has to be able to adapt his emotions. For example, Barack Obama has expressed his anger and demanded action. This will heighten his perceived sense of control, if his body language had remained as warm and welcoming as when he's integrating foreign nationals into the US. We as a globe would have not lost respect, sub-consciously formed the opinion that he's a little soft and will accept poor performance and mistakes as the norm. A leader doesn't have mood swings, a leader focus' solely on the matter in hand and displays natural emotions in view of the public, he has to remain loyal to his/her natural instinct. He says he's thinking about this all the time, that's not necessarily a good thing. Why? Leaders should have time to switch off and spend some quality time in their free time environment ..Completely remove themselves from their leadership responsibilities, just switch off for a short period. I failed in that respect, walking the streets on a marketing campaign on my only day off-far too frequent occurrence. I would talk shop at any function I attended, I must have bored the living daylights out of people. I've since realised that there has to be two separate worlds. People need down-time to relax and refresh themselves. Even if its only a short period one day a week.

Not that the president needs any advice from me, I still wish I could help in some way. These leadership and management books are different gravy. Especially when you've been in a senior position, no matter how long ago it was. If I hadn't been in a senior position, these books would just be  words with no depth to them. None of my writing is plagiarism there are extracts which I use and word myself differently and graphs and diagrams which I use the outline of and enter my own words. If I was back at University now, I would be confident of getting a 1st. The most senior lecturer said is about your notes-how good your notes are when someone is doing a presentation. Well, I can write on the page neatly, without looking observing body language and speech. I can write this way so quickly I could be the model student. I hope to apply at Harvard Business School.

Business leaders in France:

• Average Career starting Age-31:
• Time to top-16yrs:
• Background from business owning -1/3:
• Foreign Nationals-2.5%

In the US studies found that females were subject to judgement by subordinates to be more effective leaders than males. Researchers came up with two possible explanations. First, women in the west tend to develop those values & skills that support an empowering, facilitating leadership style. Both men and women prefer this style, although, as I will show you on twitter, face book, buzz, & blogspot, not always the most effective. The 2nd possibility arises from the difficulty that women still face in achieving promotion. Those who overcome barriers may be more competent than average male colleagues. In many ways leaders are successful because they are different For instance comparing the backgrounds of soccer managers Charlton and Lippi may reveal little to someone wanting to choose another person to fill a vacancy. This suggests to me that we should concentrate less on innate or learned traits ans more on what people actually do their behaviour. Groups perform differently: Autocratically led groups worked well so long as the leader was present. Kwik Save 96-00 Members however, were unhappy with the leaders’ style and tended to express hostility. Democratically led groups did not quite so well. Members had positive feelings with no hostility .Efforts continued even when the leader was absent. Note they didn't perform as well. Others say this didn't describe or proved too inadequate in describing real managers. Tannenbaum and Schmidt produced a continuum reflecting the differing degrees of subordinate participation.

© John Naylor

Management By Walking About - MBWA

The Rule of a successful manager/entrepreneur MBWA = Management by Walking About-Mr Obama is most certainly doing that.If you wait or people to come to you,you'll only get small problems.You must go and find them.The big problems are where people don't realise they have one in the first place. W. Edwards

This type of management involves the following

• Managers consistently reserving time to walk through their departments and/or to be available for impromtu discussions. (MBWA frequently goes together with an open-door management policy.)
• Individuals forming networks of acquaintances throughout their organisations.
• Lots of opportunities for chatting over coffee or lunch, or in the corridors
• Managers getting away from their desks and starting to talk to individual employees (this is a key morale boosting exercise- You'll have unity - your team will  appreciate the consideration ) The idea is that they should learn about problems and concerns at first hand. At the same time they should teach employees new methods to manage particular problems. The communication goes both ways.

The difficulty with MBWA is that employees suspect its an excuse for managers to spy and interfere unnecessarily. This suspicion usually falls away if the walkabouts occur regularly,and if everyone can see their benefits.

MBWA has been found to be particularly helpful when an organisation is under exceptional stress for instance,after a significant corporate reorganisation has been announced or when a takeover is about to take place.

It is no good practising MBWA for the first time on such occasions,however.It has to have become a regular practice before the stress arises By the turn of the century it did not seen extraordinary that managers should manage by walking about.

The technologies of mobile communications made it so much easier for them both to walk about and stay in touch at the same time.
By the turn of the century it wasn't unusual that managers should walk about. the technologies of mobile communications made it so much easier for them to walk about and stay in touch at the same time.

It was in the 1950's that white collared managers just sat in offices barking orders out. They rarely emerged from the offices, turning them into fortresses from which they rarely emerged. Edicts were sent out to the blue-collar workforce whom they rarely met face to face. The outside world filtered through via a secretary who, traditionally, sat like a guard dog in front of their (usually closed) office door. Even in the 1980s such practices were not uncommon, as demonstrated in the film 9-5.

MBWA was popularised by becoming an important part of "The H-P Way", the open style of management pioneered by Billl Hewlett and Bill Packard, the two founders of the eponymous computer company. Many of the practices of the H-P way became widely copied by corporations throughout the United States in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

The idea received a further boost when Tom Peters and Robert Waterman
 wrote that top managers in their "excellent" companies believed in management by walking about. In his second book, A passion for excellence, Peters said that he saw "managing by wandering about" as the basis of leadership and excellence. Peters called MBWA the "technology of the obvious". As leaders and managers wander about, he said that at least three things should be going on:

1. They should be listening to what people are saying
2. They should be using the opportunity to transmit the company's values face to face
3. They should be prepared and able to give people on-the-spot help

Reference The Economist Guide to Management Ideas and Gurus ISBN  978-1-84668-108-0

I can see the presidents point of vie...

I can see the presidents point of view: Why should the US suffer supplying oil to so many other parts of the world.I don't think there is a simple solution to this,I understand the presidents anger and he must have felt at some point...dismay? A rethink on the way we think about fossil fuels.

This could turn out to be the most disastrous thing on the planet and we're only just coming out of a global banking & credit/recession crisis. Why should the gulf of Mexico suffer?Are there going to be calls for people to drastically cut their use of fossil fuels?Will there be a motor vehicle ban, like a hosepipe ban? I don't think everyone appreciates just how serious this may turn out to be.The president has put other urgent matters on hold, 40,000 barrels a day was leaking out! Taking shortcuts on this matter is so inappropriate.


In retail the kind of shortcuts I would take were cost effective solutions that weren't strictly legal but nobody was sick and I achieved the best stock results: If there was a best before (not a legal use buy date) I would still sell the product at a much reduced price to its original. For example, any produce, even beer that had a best before date, I would sell it a couple of days beyond that date at a significantly reduced price.Other managers would throw vast quantities of perfectly good food and drink down the drain and report stock results of more than 8%. Use buy different kettle of fish. Beer would be the best one, due to the size of the store-way too large for what the turnover was-this was a massive issue, items would, especially if some of my team weren't rotating the items, approach their use by and best before dates. I used superior tactics in dealing with this, by reducing items early and by very little at first.They would get snapped up and I would lose very little of my stock result. Other managers would be so poor in this, its a joke really that I've been out of the senior management game for so long. I'd visit, lets say Steve (Rides)-I'd say to Steve, "what is that huge bin full of beer for Stevie?" he would say "oh I forgot to reduce it in time, my assistant missed it." That simply wouldn't wash with me, I was on top of all these matters. He'd thrown away over £1,000 of perfectly good beer. This was terminal, common sense tells you that if he was to reduce a four pack of beer from £3.99 to £3.49 a couple of days before its Best Before date you're only going to lose 13% of its total value. He was throwing away 100% if you add up the cumulative impact of this behaviour you get one very good manager who is respected by all senior management and another who is being demoted to the smallest shop in the UK with so little commission per week, he might as well become my deputy, even though he was previously my superior in the first place, when I was a party going animal at 16yrs of age.

Having said all of that he was one of the warmest friendliest guys you could ever expect to meet outside of the sharp end of management/leadership /management Accounting for decision makers/soon viral marketing Dan Synergism wizardry.


I spoke about how the workplace for a leader is different to his leadership approach on the outside of work, if you read the most successful managers book and Capello examples, the leader is both in control and supportive. Very intense. I needed assistance from Human Resource coordinators, the manager has to be able to adapt his emotions. For example, Barack Obama has expressed his anger and demanded action. This will heighten his perceived sense of control, if his body language had remained as warm and welcoming as when he's integrating foreign nationals into the US. We as a globe would have not lost respect, sub-consciously formed the opinion that he's a little soft and will accept poor performance and mistakes as the norm. A leader doesn't have mood swings, a leader focus' solely on the matter in hand and displays natural emotions in view of the public, he has to remain loyal to his/her natural instinct. He says he's thinking about this all the time, that's not necessarily a good thing. Why? Leaders should have time to switch off and spend some quality time in their free time environment ..Completely remove themselves from their leadership responsibilities, just switch off for a short period. I failed in that respect, walking the streets on a marketing campaign on my only day off-far too frequent occurrence. I would talk shop at any function I attended, I must have bored the living daylights out of people. I've since realised that there has to be two separate worlds. People need down-time to relax and refresh themselves. Even if its only a short period one day a week.

Not that the president needs any advice from me, I still wish I could help in some way. These leadership and management books are different gravy. Especially when you've been in a senior position, no matter how long ago it was. If I hadn't been in a senior position, these books would just be  words with no depth to them. None of my writing is plagiarism there are extracts which I use and word myself differently and graphs and diagrams which I use the outline of and enter my own words. If I was back at University now, I would be confident of getting a 1st. The most senior lecturer said is about your notes-how good your notes are when someone is doing a presentation. Well, I can write on the page neatly, without looking observing body language and speech. I can write this way so quickly I could be the model student. I hope to apply at Harvard Business School.

Business leaders in France:

• Average Career starting Age-31:
• Time to top-16yrs:
• Background from business owning -1/3:
• Foreign Nationals-2.5%

 
In the US studies found that females were subject to judgement by subordinates to be more effective leaders than males. Researchers came up with two possible explanations. First, women in the west tend to develop those values & skills that support an empowering, facilitating leadership style. Both men and women prefer this style, although, as I will show you on twitter, face book, buzz, & blogspot, not always the most effective. The 2nd possibility arises from the difficulty that women still face in achieving promotion. Those who overcome barriers may be more competent than average male colleagues. In many ways leaders are successful because they are different For instance comparing the backgrounds of soccer managers Charlton and Lippi may reveal little to someone wanting to choose another person to fill a vacancy. This suggests to me that we should concentrate less on innate or learned traits ans more on what people actually do their behaviour. Groups perform differently: Autocratically led groups worked well so long as the leader was present. Kwik Save 96-00 Members however, were unhappy with the leaders’ style and tended to express hostility. Democratically led groups did not quite so well. Members had positive feelings with no hostility .Efforts continued even when the leader was absent. Note they didn't perform as well. Others say this didn't describe or proved too inadequate in describing real managers. Tannenbaum and Schmidt produced a continuum reflecting the differing degrees of subordinate participation.

© John Naylor

Management By Walking About - MBWA

The Rule of a successful manager/entrepreneur MBWA = Management by Walking About-Mr Obama is most certainly doing that.If you wait or people to come to you,you'll only get small problems.You must go and find them.The big problems are where people don't realise they have one in the first place. W. Edwards

This type of management involves the following

• Managers consistently reserving time to walk through their departments and/or to be available for impromtu discussions. (MBWA frequently goes together with an open-door management policy.)
• Individuals forming networks of acquaintances throughout their organisations.
• Lots of opportunities for chatting over coffee or lunch, or in the corridors
• Managers getting away from their desks and starting to talk to individual employees (this is a key morale boosting exercise- You'll have unity - your team will  appreciate the consideration ) The idea is that they should learn about problems and concerns at first hand. At the same time they should teach employees new methods to manage particular problems. The communication goes both ways.

The difficulty with MBWA is that employees suspect its an excuse for managers to spy and interfere unnecessarily. This suspicion usually falls away if the walkabouts occur regularly,and if everyone can see their benefits.

MBWA has been found to be particularly helpful when an organisation is under exceptional stress for instance,after a significant corporate reorganisation has been announced or when a takeover is about to take place.

It is no good practising MBWA for the first time on such occasions,however.It has to have become a regular practice before the stress arises By the turn of the century it did not seen extraordinary that managers should manage by walking about.

The technologies of mobile communications made it so much easier for them both to walk about and stay in touch at the same time.
By the turn of the century it wasn't unusual that managers should walk about. the technologies of mobile communications made it so much easier for them to walk about and stay in touch at the same time.

It was in the 1950's that white collared managers just sat in offices barking orders out. They rarely emerged from the offices, turning them into fortresses from which they rarely emerged. Edicts were sent out to the blue-collar workforce whom they rarely met face to face. The outside world filtered through via a secretary who, traditionally, sat like a guard dog in front of their (usually closed) office door. Even in the 1980s such practices were not uncommon, as demonstrated in the film 9-5.

MBWA was popularised by becoming an important part of "The H-P Way", the open style of management pioneered by Billl Hewlett and Bill Packard, the two founders of the eponymous computer company. Many of the practices of the H-P way became widely copied by corporations throughout the United States in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

The idea received a further boost when Tom Peters and Robert Waterman
 wrote that top managers in their "excellent" companies believed in management by walking about. In his second book, A passion for excellence, Peters said that he saw "managing by wandering about" as the basis of leadership and excellence. Peters called MBWA the "technology of the obvious". As leaders and managers wander about, he said that at least three things should be going on:

1. They should be listening to what people are saying
2. They should be using the opportunity to transmit the company's values face to face
3. They should be prepared and able to give people on-the-spot help

Reference The Economist Guide to Management Ideas and Gurus ISBN  978-1-84668-108-0