Posts filed under ‘Henley’
Green reflections from the Greenlands (Henley-on-Thames, Oxfordshire)
One of the best sensations of studying at Henley are the procrastinating moments at the Greenlands. You only have to find some stairs to sit on, and then just look around and stare at the Thames.
If you are lucky you’ll see rowers practising for the Henley Regatta, due in June. But they are just a few spots on a landslide made up of greens and blues coming in all tones.
Being a Spanish born in Catalonia, I can’t help losing myself into the amazing greens that England has to offer. Yes, I’ve seen so many blues in my life, as well as reds and yellows, and some greens too… but not this variety, from light to dark, a chromatic variety that depends on the time of the day, the temperature, humidity… If it is dark and foggy, as it has been these mornings, they even turn into greenish greys.
I know that my mobile phone is not the best camera to capture them, and then the computer screen doesn’t help either. In fact the colours look slightly different in each of my two screens. And although I’ve tried to correct that with my Mac OS, I’ve never experimented success yet. It’s so difficult to get something as incorporeal as a colour right.
One might wonder how this piece of landscape in a highly priced zone may have survived. It wouldn’t if it had been only subject to the forces of the market, but this part of land facing the Thames is thoroughly protected. Construction has been restricted, old buildings must be respected. Time has ceased to pass here.
I like this feeling of isolation, of being apart of the world. It’s like a retreat, an emotional escape.
Yesterday morning I couldn’t help staring with awe both the cow and the bull that enjoyed licking the entrance barrier and didn’t let me make it on time for class. I could have complained or horn them… but that would have been pointless. They were so happy that the barrier was so tasty. And I was so happy to see them that close… and to share their mouth-watering feeling.
But this kind of feelings are increasingly scarce in a mass-marketed world. And small schools will become bigger with time, to survive the ruthless competition. That includes Henley: it must grow to keep up with a fiercer competition.
Henley Management College won’t be able to grow much more here, though. Future Henley MBAs will probably be studying in other modern and expensive buildings, away from here (who knows, maybe in Reading). It’s a sign of the times.
In the meanwhile I just try to savour the moment. Moments by themselves are just an unintended consequence of the flow of time, of the increase of entropy in the universe. But we can make them special… as this one.
Nine months later… why my MBA?
These days we’ve been having a collective reflection with Stephen, Andrew, Kimball and Christian. They were thinking about their reasons to be in the Henley MBA program. I realised we had a nice thread going here, so I couldn’t help adding my own.
I’ve thought of why an MBA several times, but the first one I have recorded is the one that I wrote when I was filling in the application on the 23rd of April last year. I had everything: referee’s letters, an updated resume, my academic qualifications translated… but I still needed the why. And before writing it into the application I wrote it to myself.
Reading it now gives me a funny feeling. It hasn’t been a full year but it sounds like if it was from another person. I was really trying to convince myself that I wasn’t doing it for the sake of having the three must-have magical letters. In my writings I read somebody far more worried for the future than I am now, somebody awaiting the unexpected and at the same time trying to give a false sense of security.
But now I feel the past months have changed me. They made me think, reflect and grow. I have created an additional place for Henley in my life (and Henley means its people) and I’m quite fond of it. I feel an emotional attachment that makes me think that, after those sensible but cold words I wrote about change, focus, roles, support, perspectives, aptitudes and abilities there were far more psychological needs.
Don’t ask me to detail them, not yet. I still can’t. I know it’s something about experimenting, feeling and growing.
I studied engineering and economy before, but they always looked outwards, not inwards. I shaped external objects or analysed external realities. It was me getting closer to some facts and data, understanding and applying, but there were no reflections in me. Now I’m not worried about developing analytical abilities any more. Now I am part of what I learn. Somehow, I experiment and shape myself, the subject and the object collide and fuse. Even now, writing these words.
I don’t want to bore you with my mental ramblings. It’s only that the whys and wherefores have melded and the goals are no longer that important. The way is rewarding enough. Let’s go on…
Education as a cause for increased productivity or simply an evidence of something that already existed
It is not hard to accept that higher education is correlated to higher wages. Many studies have analysed this relationship. That means that if you pursue higher education you are going to have your returns.
Just try to evaluate them: take into account what you’re spending today in your studies, take into account opportunity costs (what you could be earning of you diverted all the energies and time you’re spending into earning money), think of the possible future income surpluses that you can achieve, and actualise the inflow with reasonable rates. (higher than your mortgage, try to be realistic!)
Even if that leads to a positive figure, the causality question remains. Are you going to have that extra value because of what you’re learning, or is the value actually inside you and you are only making it visible?
Let’s ask it in another way: is a MBA (a PhD, second career, a personal blog, whatever means of learning) a cause to be more productive or simply a mark that can only be achieved by the most productive people? That’s not so simple to answer.
If it was a mark, then certain ways to achieving an MBA would signal the most productive people: for example those that go for an executive MBA thus assuming a considerable extra effort in their lives and thus minimising the opportunity cost of studying.
Is it true that higher productive individuals choose higher education to identify themselves from the rest? Maybe it’s not only that they choose it, but that being them more productive, then the whole cost of studying would be lower for them, enabling them to obtain results easier. The higher the individual productivity, the lower the marginal cost of every meme (as a whole item of additional information) is.
The opposite of signalling is enhancing. Maybe the differences were not preordained but they were simply created by the learning processes.
There’s controversy between both approaches. Some studies point to the first cause, others disagree. Whatever your view there’s (rather ambiguous) data to support it.
If I had to choose I’d go for the hybrid approach. From a pragmatic point of view the hybrid approaches always work better when the demonstrations of the pros and the cons are simply too feeble, especially in a world that’s no longer black and white. But that’s not my reason to choose this approach.
I believe in the difference between having potential and realising that potential. For example I believe that, as a race, the humans have a huge potential that we’ve just only begun to grasp. There’s more to humans than what we see today. But one of our assets is learning: that marks us as privileged individuals between all species. But having the potential to learn is not enough if we don’t make the effort.
So, if you have actually decided to embark in your personal learning project (whatever that is) it means that you have already been marked as a higher productivity individual. But now you must tackle the challenge of realising your potential. Making it a reality is what makes the difference.
When a MBA in a top-tier school is utterly useless…
Fortunately I’m not talking about mine (or at least that’s what I hope)
I recently had the chance to attend a speech from a MBA (earned in a top-tier school, if you want to know) and I reassured my assumption that those three letters in your curricula don’t guarantee anything. As Mintzberg said, there’s much more to managing than getting analytical abilities, and, as somebody also said, a butcher will always be a butcher, even if you give him a scalpel.
There’s another idea that I like a lot: the “kiss up and kick down”concept. Of course I’m not recommending its practice but just pointing a finger to a way of behaviour that many people knowingly exercise.
Why is it so difficult to appreciate principles? Isn’t it strange that so many people just don’t care about anything but their goals even putting them in front of family, friendships, humanity or whatever comes into play? I couldn’t live that way.
Even when times are harsh, when you have to make difficult choices, you can’t let go off your principles. What’s right or wrong will still be right or wrong. Brilliant people can become bloody sharks if they don’t learn to tame themselves. If you fall for the hunting game you’ll end up seeing others as prey, worthless prey.
a monkey after all
This week I was thinking and reflecting about personal development… why is that I end up seeing so many people, bright people, that I don’t want to be like?
Learning in a context of growing (mental ramblings of a saturday morning)
Finally I’ve come to the end of the Managing People and Performance and Managing Processes, Systems and Projects modules. There’s still a lot to do to finish my assignment and to prepare the exam but I’ve reviewed more than a thousand pages, commented them and grown through them.
I can’t help beckoning here one of my favourite ideas: Ackoff’s spectrum of learning.
This time in a different form that I found at the end of my MPSP module:
Seen in a personal development context, the transition to the upper levels is what really matters. In fact, being able to study and work at the same time and being privileged to be in a post surrounded with so many different people and that much visibility, has given me the chance to see in practice what I was learning from theory.
It wasn’t the first time, for instance, that I was studying human resources. Yet this time I have understood so many things that, at first, I didn’t even knew I needed to know. That’s the key.
There are the things you know that you know, some of them you think you know and you really don’t know, and then there are the things you know you don’t know. Whilst some of those things you may already know, at least not formally but in a tacit way, the most dangerous things are those that you don’t know you don’t know.
And reviewing my learning journey I see that this time I have opened my mind to many new things, sometimes with sound difficulty and effort, but those things had previously crossed in front of me inadvertently, without my eye catching them. This time I did take a sneak peek at them and understood the motives behind so many theories. Then the pieces started to match.
Because sometimes even bad examples can make you learn more than good ones. But it’s essential that you have the chance to witness and experiment. And I’m so lucky to do so. I really feel I’ve grown a lot during the last months and I’ve got so many people to thank for it (some of them wouldn’t even suspect). Mr. Mintzberg would be proud.
And let’s not forget Henley too 
Who would have thought I’d be MBAing myself to exhaustion and then having fun too? That I’d really enjoy reading even those papers that I could easily have dismissed as too academic or simply impractical?
An engineer’s mind is so dangerous despising things too complicated or trying to simplify things when there’s so much to learn from details, from subtle changes.
When you overcome those limitations, when you’re worked through so many data and information, understood all that knowledge, you’re ready for a further step, no longer bounded as an engineer or an economist, but in your way to fulfil yourself, on road to achieve you full potential as a person.
Livin’ in the MBA
I don’t know when it started. I was immersed into the sea of data and, at some point, I started breathing the fresh air of theory. It felt good, there were so different smells and tastes. But that wasn’t enough. I had to give up swimming in the information sea to start walking into the knowledge land. The first steps were hard, but I got used to it. It was through understanding that I had the first glimpses of the wisdom peaks, still too afar for me to reach.
This morning, before driving to work, I stopped for a coffee at the usual place. A couple of project managers were sitting next to me. They develop information systems for a company. But today they were not alone. They were sitting with a couple more managers that I hadn’t seen before. And I overheard in amusement how people with different objectives were trying to convince each other. Execution versus selling. Trying to understand each other but at the same time deeply divided and with conflicting incentives. Unsurprisingly they didn’t reach any consensus but they simply got louder and louder. They didn’t really listen to each other, they didn’t really want to change anything, to redesign anything. They only wanted to win. Meanwhile a lot of HRM practices were popping in my head.
But it was getting late, and that wasn’t my business (I suspect I wouldn’t have been welcomed into that conversation) so I didn’t witness the end of the quarrel. Instead, while I was driving to the airport, I saw a lot of new signs: the speed will soon be limited to 80km/h in Barcelona’s metropolitan area. A new practice to worship the god of sustainability. In the meantime we light hundred of thousands of lights for Christmas and we consume the more the better. No warnings about don’t spend on what you don’t need, or try not to heat your home too much along the road. I guess the system needs that conspicuous consumption in order for it to work. Thornstein Veblen would be happy to see us Spaniards so enlightened. Isn’t coherency one of the values that we think about most -almost in every field- in the MBA?
While I’m writing this in my hackintosh I’m also thinking of Microsoft’s monopoly and Apple’s scarcity rent. Now that PCs and Macs have almost identical hardware, why can’t I choose to install whichever operating system I like into my PC? Why can’t I be a registered and licensed Mac OS X user and buy my hardware from Dell? Another imperfection of the market that reminds me that, in January, we’ll be starting a new module and I’ll still be livin’ in the MBA.
A few questions to ask yourself (from strategy to reality, purpose and accountability)
As you probably know, lately I’ve been thinking a lot about organising people. That’s great because in fact I am studying Human Resource Management (again) and the content without the reflection is just data. And there’s much more than data to learning. (Remember my old post Ackoff’s spectrum of learning?)
There’s so much philosophy on purpose. Ok, let’s change the word from purpose to strategy. Which is the strategy of your (my) company? The obvious answer is…
Let’s stop for a moment. I need your attention here. I’m going to ask again in bold:
*What’s the strategy of YOUR company?*
Do you really know? Think again.
Don’t cheat. It’s not a valid answer to say that the board does know. That’s not enough. For any strategy to be effective it must permeate the whole of the company. Not just to be in the board’s minds. No way.
Usually the use of the word strategy makes us defensive. True, this is nothing that affects us. Or maybe it does affect us but it’s nothing that we have a say on.
Wrong answer for an effective organisation. If the strategy is not only top-down but bottom-up, we should have a say. In fact I really think we should.
Let’s swap words again. Let’s talk about purpose. Purpose is not a scary word but, at the same time, has a lot in common with strategy. And ask yourself another question.
*What is the purpose of your job, of your post?*
That is easier to answer, but not quite. Is that really what you are doing? Don’t you think that’s the first thing that you should be clarifying with your boss? Along with a complementary question: what’s the purpose of her/his job? How do both purposes match?
This kind of questions should be asked periodically. Let’s not fall into the management trap. Let’s not end up being increasingly efficient with something that, at the end of the day, we shouldn’t be doing.
Let’s ask again.
*Are you being held accountable for the things you should be doing in your post or simply by the things you’re doing, for a few of them or, even worse, for things you are not doing and neither related to?*
Or in a more positive (and extrinsic) fashion:
*Are you being rewarded coherently with the purpose of your post?*
Why is that question important? Well, first there must be a clear purpose to our job, although probably one that will change quite often, but then all the metrics should match. And when I’m talking about metrics I’m not only thinking of “hard” financial metrics, but also the soft, and often much more important ones, from customer satisfaction to employee turnover rates, and the cause of these rates.
But these reflections wouldn’t be complete if we didn’t close the circle.
*Do this purpose match the strategy of the company? Is the accountability matching that purpose and strategy?*
Because if we could answer this question, we would be effectively knowing, and working for and along the strategy of the company. The strategy wouldn’t be tongue-in-cheek or lip service. It would be a common tool, a shared vision, something that would help the whole company move in phase and amplify its efforts. It would be part of a glue that would tie the parts tighter to the whole.
The wide gap between theory and practice in human resource management
I’m not really sure if I am becoming cynical, but the more that I study about HRM the more I come to realise that there’s a huge difference between what companies say they do and what they actually do. It’s something like corporate social responsibility: many talk about it, but, in the end, they all worry about their shareholders.
Sometimes it’s the impact of change, the difficulty to see what is coming in turbulent times. Strategy focus on change, and that sometimes means more changing people than helping them overcome and adapt to change. Sometimes the strategical part of HRM just loses its meaning and it all becomes too tactical. Or at least tactical enough for the HR department to become “personnel” again.
And it’s not only strategy that changes in organisations. Strategy could focus on the external situation while taking into account internal resources. But there’s more that might change. Inside the companies, different policies overlap each other and priorities shift continuously. HR should adapt itself to the resulting change. But, how can they adapt when the situation simply doesn’t settle up?
Could it be that HR is the last step of the chain? Then it would be the one that moves faster, the one that takes more to settle depending on what happens to the rest of the company. That way, is it really possible for it to establish long term HR policies? Is it possible to assure temporal consistency in a set of practices that heavily rely on credibility?
Another approach is the practical approach. Many people deeply dismiss the possibility that HR is actually useful. They see it as something that is there, more a nuisance than a tool. And maybe there’s a reason for that.
For one part, there’s a lack of evidence of the connections between HR and productivity. There’s a real problem to be able to translate “soft issues” into “hard issues”. Apparently the scientific method doesn’t apply here, and measuring is difficult.
I said apparently because I do believe HR policies make a difference. At least in most of the possible strategies, if not all. But, don’t we all focus into things easy to measure?
We tend to define the utility of a given parameter given its ability to be measured. That way our occidental minds can sail into the sea of safety. But there’s a point where this sea ends, where unknown monsters and mighty mists arise. There lay the unmeasurable variables, the soft issues. What if they happen to be the relevant ones?
When I read that some company measures and optimises the dosage for the HR policies given the point where marginal returns start to decrease and decides to stop there I wonder if they really believe what they are saying, if they have really made an innovative system to probe into their employees’ minds, or, as I began with, if I’m simply becoming cynical.
Being too busy (when some things are not working as they should)
I know it sounds like an excuse, but I’ve been too busy lately. Work has drained my energy to exhaustion, even disturbing my usual studying pace. But, what’s funny, it’s not work in itself but dysfunctions at work.
I think I already told you we had a new group of engineers assisting us. They are 20 people (and they will be 25 so if you want to send your curricula you still have time).
But then the problem with management arose. They are not aligned with our objectives. Mainly because their managers simply spend too few of their time and energy here, and there are a series of symptoms of that dysfunction. Let’s see some of them.
Continuous shifts of priorities. They are moved as a whole towards any priority that simply arises. That is not practical at all because they simply loose focus.
A possible solution: plan, plan and plan. Don’t lose the big picture. Don’t swerve. Keep an straight direction and people will be able to follow.
Diluted responsibility. Mid-level managers are not enforced but overrun by the team’s director. That way they simply abhor of their due responsibility and blame it all on the manager, at least subconsciously. In the end they prefer not to decide anything and simply demoralise.
A possible solution: enforce them. If someone holds responsibility for something, it’s for real. His boss shouldn’t come and change it all but listen to him, and maybe learn from him. He should, if he can, defend his position in the organisation.
Visible internal cracks. I have been in several meetings where documents have been presented that didn’t satisfy some of them. There was discussion amongst them about things that should have been already deemed.
A necessary solutions: grow consensus before presenting anything to the customer (that’s us). Their differences need to be cleared beforehand. It’s very important to show unity to the customer, not indecision or doubt. And that only means giving it some extra thought.
Lack of dedication. This symptom relates to the previous ones. To offer a good product, specially in consulting, you need to spend a lot of hours thinking and rethinking documents and ideas. That’s what is expected from you. It’s not acceptable to be in front of the customer and reopen subjects that have already been closed or read your notes on a paper towel from a restaurant.
A possible solution: effectively dedicate the people to the project, not try to have them in several projects at the same time with the result that they cannot focus on any of them. People need to focus to be effective.
Lack of knowledge of the customer. Not knowing how we are, what we want and how we work. That means that sometimes we don’t understand each other or they simply propose alternatives that have already been discarded. In a project that is quickly reaching its critical phase that may lead to confusion and trouble.
A necessary solution: you must know who are you working for, how they work, how they share responsibilities and not focus uniquely on the front man or the director who awarded the contract. The director always has people that he trusts to do things and with responsibilities (us) and that’s the ones you’re really working for (the ones that need the resources and the ones that will report about completion and effectiveness of tasks).
The final result is that, when we don’t understand each other, the problems escalate and derive into confrontations that, in time, become harsher and harder. Anger appears and people start not to listen to each other. And the rest of the team simply don’t know what to do. They feel confused, and lost.
I could go on adding more basic ideas, and make this entry long and boring. But my final message is that you’d be surprised on how many companies simply forget these basic rules.
Rules that should be understood by any manager providing consulting services to a client.
The final consequence of not following them is that people suffer. The team is not enabled but alienated. People don’t identify with and push for for the project but instead lose initiative and retrace to defensive and reactive positions. You end up burning up your team. People are so valuable yet so sensible to uncertainty. Even consultants.
Roles of product/project managers in organisations (a matter of power)
Organisations are all about power. And it’s the share of power the most important element that defines their structural form. Some might say that it’s strategy, and that’s true also, or used to be true, but the shape that an organisation takes it’s all about control, flexibility and who says what.
One of the most classical forms, as Mintzberg would say, is the functional structure. If we focus on a certain product (or project) within the organisation, it can be seen how it spreads throughout the diverse functions but, at the same time, has to surpass many walls: those that separate the different functions.
Those are the walls that the Matrix Structure that I commented some days ago wanted to tear down. The fact is that our product or project will have to cope with different areas, different styles, and different line managers. Could that even be enough to make the project fail?
Following with the discussion that arose in the referred post, while studying operations I diverged and ended up with and old article from the McKinsey Quarterly from 1991. In there Kim B. Clark (Harvard Business School) and Takahiro Fujimoto (Tokyo University) focused on the role of the product manager in the car-design industry.
Guess what? It’s the same situation than the need for the matrix organisation. The only difference is that they think of the horizontal levels as product managers that need to access a spread of resources throughout the organisation. They are the ones that need the keys to the corporate walls to make their project advance. They are the ones accountable for it too.
Clark & Fujimoto defined three different ways of product managers. The first one would be the lightweight product manager:
As you can see, this one has a limited area of strong influence. Probably he only controls some parts of the process, maybe coordinating engineers or activities. But the weight still relies on the functions.
They won’t have direct access to people. Instead they will use liaisons (drawn as Ls). The people still belong to the functions so they are only able to ask for things. And it’s the task of the functions to assign priorities. They will, nonetheless, help the several groups to resolve their conflicts. They will be able to broker the information, but they can’t be held responsible for the whole product because that responsibility will be widely distributed. And… do you know what might happen when responsibility is so distributed?
The answer of that question leads us to the third form: the heavyweight product manager structure:
A reinforced product/project manager comes to the aid of the completion of the project. Now she has a broader responsibility, being the organisation still functional. It’s not the liaisons that she will be talking to, as before, but also she will have access to the whole team when necessary, and thus will be able to go down to detail with engineers.
So what if we reinforce them further? That’s when the project execution team structure comes into play.
This structure is also known as tiger team. Now people do work on the project, not just their liaisons. They have been somehow extracted of the functional structure and they belong to a new structure as a team. Some people will still work on several projects at the same time but some will be solely in this team.
What do functional managers still do in this case? They provide the people needed. So the product manager won’t have to worry about sourcing her team. She will have the maximum possible influence. And from her position she will be able to establish direct links to additional external sourcing if necessary.
It seems clear that this structure has some things in common with the matrix structure. But yet it’s still functional. As many organisations are.
Teaching about project management I can always sense how people are worried on how to match project’s needs within their organisational structures, usually not supportive at all: They have to cope with their functional/divisional requirements and the extra interdepartmental tasks. These models provide a useful framework for discussing all that. It seems clear that if you give a project manager a responsibility you have to enable her to be able to carry it along. Otherwise good intentions won’t endure and the project manager will simply become demotivated after beating a dead horse.
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