King Cody, Kilkenny hurling manager’s road to greatness

Learning from winners

Malachy Clerkin talks to Billy Linehan and a number of top managers to find out what makes this serial winner so special

Excerpt from the Sunday Tribune, 29 August 2010

“Billy Linehan of Celtar business consultants is a board member of the Institute of Management Consultants and Advisers. He compares managing a county team to being in charge of a small or medium-sized business and sees in Cody a natural leader more so than a manager. “A leader challenges the status quo,” he says, quoting another management guru, “a manager accepts it”. I think if you are going to be successful on a continuous basis, you need to be challenging it.

“There’s an honesty and a consistency in the way he treats people and that’s the key to keeping people involved and motivated over a long period of time. You rarely hear about tensions between clubs in Kilkenny or hear people complaining that their man didn’t get a fair shot at making the team or even the panel. All you can take from that is that there’s a general acceptance across the board that the man at the top is a man of integrity. That he’s prepared to treat everyone with consistency. I think his personal style is a huge factor. There’s very little mouthing off or bringing attention to himself. You never hear him telling the rest of the world how good he is and all the different ways he’s affected the team.”

For full article see http://www.tribune.ie/sport/hurling/article/2010/aug/29/king-cody/

For more on Celtar business and management consultants see www.Celtar.ie . Celtar provides management advice to leaders of organisations, assisting them to reach their goals.

For more on the Institute of Management Consultants and Advisers see

www.IMCA.ie

 How maverick companies have passed up the growth treadmill – and focused on greatness instead, full list below

Small Giants by Bo Burlingham poses big challenges to those who assume that by definition growth is a good thing.

Accountants, bankers, commentators and business schools all tell us that thriving companies have to grow their profits and revenues year-on-year.

The only way is up they say.

Burlingham looks at businesses that choose ‘the road less travelled’… they reject the pressures of endless growth and instead they focus on being the best at what they do, creating a great workplace, legendary customer service, and a sense of community (both locally and in the workplace).

 In the book “Small Giants”, journalist Bo Burlingham takes us deep inside fourteen remarkable privately held companies, in widely varying industries across the USA, that have chosen to march to their own drummer. He searches for the magic ingredients that give these companies their unique “mojo” and the lessons we can learn from them.

 Attributes of these ‘businesses with mojo’ are:

 1. The founders/leaders recognised the full range of choices they had about the type of company they could create. They hadn’t accepted the standard menu of options or business model as a given.
 

2. They had allowed themselves to question the usual definitions of success in business, resisted pressures to follow conventional paths and to imagine possibilities other than the ones all of us are familiar with.
 

3. The leaders had overcome the enormous pressures on successful companies to take the paths they had not chosen and did not necessarily want to follow. They remained in control rather than accommodating themselves to a business shaped by outside forces.
 

4. Each company had an extraordinarily intimate relationship with the local city, town, or county in which it did business – a relationship that went well beyond the usual concept of `giving back.’” 
 

5. All companies cultivated exceptionally intimate relationships with customers and suppliers, based on personal contact, one-on-one interaction, and mutual commitment to delivering on promises.”

 6. Because they were privately owned, they had the freedom to develop their own management systems and practices. In fact the companies have developed for themselves a wide variety of corporate structures and modes of governance.

 
7. The companies also had what struck Bo as “unusually intimate workplaces.”

8. The leaders had unbridled, limitless passion for their business and about their service or product. Bo comments “I noticed the passion that the leaders brought to what the company did. They loved the subject matter, whether it is music, safety lighting, food, special effects, constant torque hinges, beer, records storage, construction, dining, or fashion.”

 
The 14 companies mentioned in the book Small Giants are

Anchor Brewing, in San Francisco: the original American microbrewery, see www.anchorbrewing.com

CitiStorage Inc., in Brooklyn: the premier independent records-storage business in the United States, see www.citistorage.com

Clif Bar & Co., in Berkeley: a leading maker of natural and organic energy bars and other nutrition foods, see www.clifbar.com

ECCO, in Boise: the leading manufacturer of backup alarms and amber warning lights for commercial vehicles see www.eccogroup.com

Hammerhead Productions, in Studio City, California: a supplier of computer-generated special effects to the motion picture industry, see www.hammerhead.com

Reell Precision Manufacturing designs custom hinges, wrap spring clutches, precision springs and wire forms, see  www.reell.com

Righteous Babe Records, in Buffalo: the celebrated record company founded by singer-songwriter Ani DiFranco, see www.righteousbabe.com

Union Square Hospitality Group, in New York City: the company of restaurateur Danny Meyer, see www.unionsquarehospitalitygroup.com

Zingerman’s Community of Businesses, in Ann Arbor: including the famous Zingerman’s Deli, see www.zingermanscommunity.com

OC Tanner Co. company with 1,600 hundred employees and annual sales of $300 million, see www.octanner.com

 
Rhythm & Hues Studios character animation and visual effects studio, see www.rhythm.com

 
Selima Inc a two-person fashion design and dressmaking firm

 
The Goltz Group parent company of celebrated Chicago retail stores Jayson Home & Garden, Chicago Art Source Gallery and Artists Frame Service, see  www.goltzgroup.com

 
WL Butler Construction Inc full-service general building contractor, see  www.wlbutler.com

Size and growth rates aside, these small giants share some very interesting characteristics. They are all utterly determined to be the best at what they do.

Closer to home in Ireland there are examples of small giants, many Celtar clients aspire to becoming “small giants”, and several are well on the path.

For more on the author and book see www.smallgiantsbook.com , Bo Burlingham is an editor at www.Inc.com

For more on us see  www.Celtar.ie

 The India way of doing business

(from Incite ezine 71)

A recent review of the book “The Indian Way” caught my eye. India is one of the BRIC nations, and is fulfilling its role as one of the economic powerhouses of this century. The book by four professors of management promotes the way Indian business are applying fresh practices of their own in running successful companies. So instead of adopting management practices that dominate Western businesses, Indian business leaders are applying fresh approaches in strategy, leadership, talent, and organisational culture.

The authors claim that their story holds lessons for those who do business in the U.S., and no doubt in Ireland also.

Exploding growth. Soaring investment. Incoming talent waves. India’s top companies are scoring remarkable successes on these fronts and more.

In The India Way, the Wharton School India Team claim to unveil these companies’ secrets. Drawing on interviews with leaders of India’s largest firms, including Mukesh Ambani of Reliance Industries, Narayana Murthy of Infosys Technologies, and Vineet Nayar of HCL Technologies, the authors identify what Indian managers do differently, including: 1) Looking beyond stockholders’ interests to public mission and national purpose; 2) Drawing on improvisation, adaptation, and resilience to overcome endless hurdles; 3) Identifying products and services of compelling value to customers; and 4) Investing in talent and building a stirring culture.

Business leadership 

India has a way of doing business that brings together business leadership with national leadership and societal leadership. Many heads of business are deeply involved in matters from climate change to child nutrition, and they find it entirely appropriate and even necessary to make their views on such matters public.

Some of this has to do with a need for development. The heads of many Indian businesses believe that national growth is essential for their own profitable expansion. Also, India has a long-standing tradition of business largesse, with many companies committed to social betterment through philanthropic giving and investment in infrastructure near their facilities. But the melding goes well beyond private profit and public charity. Indian leaders care as much about national purpose as about financial results.

Thus the co-chairman and former chief executive of Infosys Technologies, Nandan Nilekani, has accepted a call to direct India’s mammoth effort to provide a unique digital identification number for every one of its 1.1 billion citizens, which will make possible more effective delivery of social services across the country. And thus Hindustan Unilever has launched Project Shakti, which has used the principles of microfinance to create a sales force in some of the subcontinent’s most remote regions. And big-name businesses have built community hospitals, grade schools and virtual universities across the country.

 The research

This India way of doing business has fuelled an economy that even in perilous global times remains a dynamo, driven by big companies that are bent on growing at prodigious rates. India’s gross domestic product has been expanding more than twice as fast as the U.S.’s. Infosys Technologies employed 10,700 in 2002, but more than 100,000 just seven years later.

They have conducted a study of some of the country’s largest firms, of businesses that have played a leading role in India’s rapid development and have come to serve as models of business enterprise for entrepreneurs and managers throughout the nation. Their aim is to understand the qualities of the India way that have made it so vital to the nation’s growth.

They interviewed the people at the top of the pyramid, the leaders of these largest firms, because they make the critical decisions at the most important companies, including the strategic choices that have helped define India’s distinctive approach to business. They went to 150 of the largest publicly listed companies by market capitalization, and secured time with more than 100 of their executives.

 Act in Indian

The essence of the India Way is best expressed by those business leaders themselves. We “think in English and act in Indian,” observed R. Gopalakrishnan, the executive director of Tata Sons, the holding company of the Tata Group. The Tata Group comprises some 98 enterprises that employ 290,000 and book annual revenue equal to 3.2% of the nation’s.

For the Indian manager,” Gopalakrishnan explained, “his intellectual tradition, his y-axis, is Anglo-American, and his action vector, his x-axis, is in the Indian ethos. Many foreigners come to India, they talk to Indian managers and they find them very articulate, very analytical, very smart, very intelligent – and then they can’t for the life of them figure out why the Indian manager can’t do what is prescribed by the analysis.”

They reveal from the two-year study of Indian business leaders that their “x-axis” is defined by four distinctive elements of managing:

1.  Holistic engagement with employees. Indian business leaders see their firms as organic enterprises, where sustaining employee morale and building company culture are critical obligations and the very foundations of their success. People are viewed as assets to be developed, not costs to be reduced.

2. Improvisation and adaptability. Improvisation and adaptability are also at the heart of the India way. In a complex, often volatile environment with few resources and maddening red tape, business leaders learn to rely on their wits to circumvent the innumerable hurdles they recurrently confront. Anyone who has seen outdated equipment nursed along a generation after its expected lifetime with retrofitted spare parts and jerry-rigged solutions has witnessed this in action.

3. Creative value propositions. Given the enormous and intensely competitive domestic market and the country’s discerning customers, most of them of modest means, Indian business leaders have of necessity learned to be highly creative in developing their value propositions, delivering entirely new products and services with extreme efficiency. A case in point: Tata Motors now produces the Nano automobile at a sticker price of just $2,500.

4. Broad mission and purpose. Indian business leaders place special emphasis on personal values and on having a vision of growth and strategic thinking. In addition to serving the needs of their stockholders, like CEOs everywhere, they also stress broader purpose. They take pride in enterprise success but also in family prosperity, regional advancement and national renaissance.

Bundled together, these principles constitute a distinctly Indian way of conducting business, one very different from other countries, especially the U.S., where the blend centres more on delivering shareholder value.

Company managers in the West, they conclude, can usefully learn from India’s example. Whether this is a good moment to invest in the subcontinent they leave to those more versed in the ways (and caprices) of the financial markets. But they believe the time is right to better understand what is driving the Indian economic powerhouse, the company practices they call the India Way.

 A different opinion

An alternative, less academic and leader centric perspective on the Indian way is provided by Gautam Chikermane of the Hindustan Times is his article ‘The Indian way is littered with inefficiency management & culture”  see link

www.hindustantimes.com/The-Indian-way-is-littered-with-inefficiency-management-amp-culture/Article1-541438.aspx

The authors (Peter Cappelli, Harbir Singh, Jitendra Singh and Michael Useem), are professors of management at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and are the co-authors of The India Way: How India’s Top Business Leaders Are Revolutionizing Management (Harvard Business Press, 2010).

The article on the book is from Forbes.com, and was originally shared in Incite 71

 Managing the making of Avatar,  from Incite 70

Avatar is the biggest grossing movie ever, it may have only won 3 Oscars – one of them by our own Richard Baneham, an animation supervisor . This was a massively complex project costing over $310 million for production, and $150 million for promotion. The film was released for traditional two-dimensional projectors, as well as in 3-D. The stereoscopic filmmaking was touted as a likely breakthrough in cinematic technology.

If you sat through the endless list of credits for Avatar, you saw that Richard had about   3,000 colleagues working on the CGI epic, which has now grossed more than $2.5 billion worldwide, shattering box office records and reinventing cinema for the digital age. The boss of all those people was director James Cameron.

Rebecca Keegan sat in on sets while researching her book, The Futurist: The Life and Films of James Cameron, and comments

“I watched the director’s often controversial management style up close. One of Hollywood’s most innovative filmmakers, Cameron is also one of its toughest taskmasters, a man who ran notoriously grueling sets for movies like The Terminator, Aliens and Titanic. After Titanic, Cameron spent years away from the movie business indulging a lifelong passion, deep ocean exploration. The experiences he had leading groups on the open sea tempered the director’s management style. But working for Cameron is still roughing it by Hollywood standards.”

From a seat on the Avatar set, she observes the rules that James Cameron manages by:

Break New Ground
“It’s Avatar, dude, nothing works the first time,” read a whiteboard in the spare Los Angeles warehouse that served as the sci fi film’s motion capture soundstage. Breaking new ground is Cameron’s raison d’être – nothing interests this man unless it’s hard to do. But innovation has also become a way of bonding his teams, both on Avatar and on his deep sea expeditions. “We’re out in the wilderness working far beyond the borders of the known,” Cameron says, comparing his CG and undersea projects. “We’re doing extraordinary things that outsiders would not even understand.” For Cameron, a sense of exploration isn’t just personally enriching, it’s a crucial tool for motivating and uniting his teams.

Firing Is Too Merciful
Everyone who has been part of Cameron’s cast and crew has bitter war stories about working for him, and yet they all seem to forget them when they’re clutching Oscars and cashing cheques. Many Cameron alumni will share a story from their first film with him, a day they were sure they were going to be fired, almost hoped for it. But Cameron rarely fires people. “Firing is too merciful,” he says. Instead he tests their endurance for long hours, hard tasks, and harsh criticism. Survivors tend to surprise themselves by turning in the best work of their careers, and signing on for Cameron’s next project.

Lead from the Front
Cameron is almost comically hands-on. He does things elite directors don’t do – hold the camera, man the editing console, sketch the creatures, apply the makeup. The truth is, he would do nearly every job on a movie himself if he could. But any film, much less one as ambitious as Avatar, relies on collaboration. Forced to lean on others, Cameron sets the pace. Among his 3,000 strong stable of artists and engineers, he’s the first to try a new challenge, the last to quit at the end of the day, and the hardest to please.

Good Enough Isn’t
Avatar took more than twice as long to make as an average film. Much of that added time was due to the film’s Herculean design demands and its reliance on untested technologies, but some of it was thanks to Cameron’s perfectionism. Hours were spent on the smallest details, like getting alien sap to drip precisely right. A column in one special effects shot annoyed Cameron. After 15 minutes debating its placement while teleconferencing with weary Weta Digital artists in New Zealand, he declared, “That column is worth $50 million of the domestic gross!” shaking his head at his own obsessiveness. It’s hard to argue with Cameron’s nitpicky style, however, when audiences thrill to immerse themselves in the richly detailed worlds he creates.

Hire People People
Aware that he can be a hard man to work for, Cameron wisely surrounds himself with amiable deputies. “I have my bad days, and on my best days I’m no Ron Howard,” he admits. Cameron’s closest associates, his producer, Jon Landau, and the head of his production company, Rae Sanchini, are management savants. They know when an exhausted crew needs a pep talk, when a wounded artist’s ego needs soothing, when an anxious studio executive needs reassurance. And — a talent never to be underestimated — they know when to order the pizza, and tell the boss to quit for dinner.

Trench warfare

What can we learn from Cameron’s management style?  Possibly to surround yourself with managers who can manage people better than you? Apparently his approach has been likened to that of Gordon Ramsey, he has been described also as  “a wildly successful, hard-driving perfectionist.” Cameron admits that he’s not the best leader himself. “I think I’m a good filmmaker, but I’m not a natural leader. I’ve had to teach myself that as I go along.”

Whilst working for two years on pre-production Cameron explained that phase of making the movie, “We finished with the actors…. We’re just in this kind of CG hell – trying to create a world from scratch,” he explains. “It’s like trench warfare. We’re working with computer-generated characters that we want to be photorealistic. It’s been tough. We’ve set the bar high. We’re just now getting the confidence that it’s really going to work.”

And it has. I am off to see the movie on Friday, enjoy!

Billy Linehan, Celtar business and management consultants

References

Rebecca Keegan author of The Futurist: The Life and Films of James Cameron

Harvard Business Review blog http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2010/03/how_james_cameron_leads.html#comments

Firstshowing.net

http://www.firstshowing.net/2008/10/15/james-cameron-compares-avatar-work-to-trench-warfare/

Wikipedia.org

For more on us see www.Celtar.ie