Ichak Kalderon Adizes's Blog: Insights Blog, page 22

Message for St. Valentine’s Day

Each year on the 14th of February, the ritual (developed by commercial institutions) is to tell the people in your life that you love them.

I believe this tradition was started for commercial reasons to stimulate purchasing, but it had a beautiful side effect: People show love to each other. In this stressful world where we rush from one responsibility to another, it is good to stop for a few minutes, take a breath, and tell someone, “I love you”.

I have been thinking about how we show love — truly, not just with a bouquet of flowers, or even an expensive diamond ring. Is it enough?

To me, love must be experiential. Do not talk about it; show love in your actions. This is the (P) way of loving. It is very masculine: Take care of your woman, protect her, give her what she needs and wants. Happy wife, happy life.

But there is a feminine way of expressing love, too. It is subtle. It might look like it is nothing, but it is everything. It is expressed by dedicating to our loved ones the most important, scarcest asset we humans have: time.

To express your love in this feminine way, take a day off on St. Valentine’s Day and spend it with each other. No phones. No appointments. Nothing but being together. Go hiking. Go to a park, a botanical garden, a museum. Go visit art galleries. Go to the best restaurant in town. Just the two of you, no one else.

What does the partner who prefers (P) expressions of love get out of showing love this way? That his partner is happy. That is love: to feel the reward in making others happy.

Life is give and take. Love is when the taking is in the giving. In giving, we get the reward. It is instantaneous.

Think of your children: When you give them something, and they are so happy, how do you feel? It fills your heart to see them giggle and jump with joy, to see them laugh and clap their hands in appreciation.

To love is to do loving things. And what should you do? Give your undivided attention. Give that which is increasingly becoming extremely scarce and thus extremely valuable: time.

In writing this blog, I just did that: I gave you my time.

With love,

Ichak

Stop Trying and Just Be

This blog post was featured in the Huffington Post on February 02, 2017.

Have you ever seen someone try to dance ballet who is not a ballet dancer, or heard someone trying to sing opera without any training? It would make you laugh, no?

Have you ever experienced an uncomfortable discussion with someone who is trying very hard to be nice? You can tell that this person is working hard to be polite but you can tell that it is not genuine. It is as if the person has a mask on their face and is hiding their true nature.

It is similarly awkward when a person you are speaking with tries to impress you with how important he is. You feel doubtful and wonder if they are trying to sell you something that may not be true. Are they merely exaggerating, or are they lying to you?

These examples came to my mind as I noticed someone trying to be loving to me. It made me feel tense rather than being loved: Did this person have a hidden agenda? Where did this “love” come from and what for?

What is going on?

“Trying to be” means you are working on doing something that does not come naturally to you. It is not you.

Please do not try. If you are angry, be angry. Do not try to be angry. If you are depressed, let yourself be depressed. Do not try to look depressed to get attention. Just be, whatever it is.

When I find people who are genuine, I cannot be offended by them. They are what they are, and I find it refreshing to be with someone who does not try to be but is.

You know where you stand with this kind of person. What you see is what you get. You do not have to have multiple thoughts in your mind as you interact with a genuine person. One of the most difficult parts of interacting with someone who seems disingenuous is that one part of your mind is listening to what they say while another part of your mind is screening the information because you do not trust what you hear or see. It is exhausting if it is prolonged.

I suspect that what helped Donald Trump win the presidency is that he did not try to be nice. He was genuine — foul language, aggressiveness and all. Those who voted for him, I suggest, trusted him because of his personality, although his facts were often way off the mark. Clinton, on the other hand, had her information well vetted but appeared to be trying very hard to be nice. People did not trust her a bit.

It is not always easy to be genuine. In certain situations, it is easier to cover our faces and souls with a mask and pretend to be what we are not.

To be genuine means to have no fear. To be confident enough in one’s own identity to withstand criticism. Not easy.

Just thinking,

Ichak Kalderon Adizes

Suppressing Freedom of Speech

I lived under a communist regime. I remember the fear of speaking out. What enchanted me about America was the freedom to speak. The freedom to live and let live. I feel this freedom is under threat.

This freedom is not suppressed by the authority of the state, but by something that may be more powerful: social pressure for political correctness.

There is social pressure to be politically correct. If you are not “politically correct”, which is what we call the socially dominant consensus, you are called derogatory names and ostracized. You may not even be considered employable.

A friend of mine who has a chaired position at a leading law school would like to relocate, but he cannot find another university of stature that will employ him. It is not because of his academic credentials, which are impressive — he has a chaired professorship — but because he is right-wing, and the law schools to which he would like to transfer are left-wing in their political orientation.

It is not only political correctness that rules the day. It is also the market’s profit orientation that governs the choices media makes. Watch the media clearly taking political sides and making choices about what to publish or broadcast, not purely based on journalistic ethics, but on how it will impact advertising revenues.

Social pressure and market economic considerations are as suffocating as the military power of a police state — maybe even more so. I, for one, would prefer to sit in jail for what I believe in or be poor rather than be ostracized, rejected, and criticized.

I feel intimidated to write what I think in spite of my bold promise “with no fear and no pretention.” I’ve stopped writing on matters relating to women, although sometimes a topic on the subject burns a hole in my soul as I suppress expressing what I think. I had to. Readers were dropping from my list of recipients. The same is true with political subjects, whether it is Ukraine or Russia or the Palestinians. Or religion. All are dangerous areas. Quicksand.

Social pressure is incredibly potent.

I recall the case of the Stanford professor, a Nobel Prize winner, who expressed a politically incorrect opinion about African Americans. He was doomed in academic circles and in the media. He was probably shunned by his neighbors, if not by his friends.

There is a growing tendency that politically incorrect speeches are not allowed to be delivered in universities. They are not barred by decree, but by the fact that the audience is allowed to scream and shout the speaker down. The audience has the right to speak, and in doing so they prohibit someone else from having the same right.

Speakers supporting the Israeli point of view have failed to speak at universities. The audience would not let them speak…

What happened to the American motto “Live and let live”?

Social pressure to be politically correct, market pressure to be economically worthy, and an education system that promotes “scientific proof” as the only legitimate way to express oneself, gag free thinking. They are all impediments to the freedom to speak.

Just thinking,

Ichak Kalderon Adizes

Trump’s, and the Country’s, Forthcoming Pain

I have seen this happening in Israel.

The Israeli military has a practice, or a rule, that its military brass has to retire early. This means that generals and colonels are out of the service at age fifty, but are still too young to fully retire. They look for work to do and usually join the business community or go into politics. That is where the pain comes.

These are people who have been responsible for thousands of lives, making life or death decisions. They have taken numerous courses on military leadership. Theoretically it should be a non-event for them to manage a business organization or lead a country after working with such high stakes, right?

Wrong.

Their entire military career was based on a very clear hierarchy, and within that hierarchy they had absolute power to make decisions based on their rank. Their subordinates had to comply or face jail. When former military leaders join a business organization or political party there is still a kind of hierarchy, but they do not have the absolute power they had within the military establishment. They experience a lot of pain from the need to adapt. Some retire, in spite of their relatively young age. Others go through the pain of adaptation to live with constraints they are not used to.

Now, consider the story of Donald Trump. He ran a family business, not a public company where the constraints on what he can and cannot do would have been more prominent. In his privately owned, family company, he was free to make his decisions as he saw fit, even if it led to bankruptcies. He made a lot of bad decisions but no one had the right to challenge his decisions.

The fact that Trump is an independent thinker who runs his own show as he sees fit was manifested in how he ran his campaign for presidency. He listened to no one. He defied and rejected his advisors. And he still won. His unexpected win probably reinforced his leadership style of running the show like an emperor: Trump, the one and only. (That explains for me his enchantment with Vladimir Putin—the one and only Putin. Their leadership style is cut from the same cloth.)

In Russia, an imperial leadership style is acceptable because the country does not have a history of democratic institutions, but this is not how the White House runs the show in the US. The USA is a world-class democracy. As president of this country, Trump will have to deal with political constraints he is not accustomed to deal with due to his leadership style, his character, and his long history of success (as he defines it).

So what is going to happen?

He will have to suffer a lot. He will have to manage, to lead, in a way he is not used to, or he will continue leading in the way that made him successful in the business world and, by doing so, violate some principles of democracy.

I believe he will go the second route. He does not strike me as a man who takes pain easily, or who is able to adapt to the new requirements a new situation poses. He will push, shove, and de-democratize the system of governance. The result could be a field day for the media, debating his moves—or actual impeachment. Even his own party, due to its greater loyalty to the country than to the president, could vote against him.

I believe America is facing leadership turmoil, which could spin out of control and lead to impeachment. In the process, the turmoil will sap energy from the system to deal with some chronic problems like immigration, criminal justice, taxation policy, the horrendous mushrooming debt, and the country’s position of power and leadership on the global scale. The ultimate result will be accelerated decline of this wonderful country as the leader of the free world and of Western civilization.

How sad.

Just thinking,

Ichak Kalderon Adizes

Dr. Adizes at Austrian Course held December 2, 2016

This blog post was featured in the Huffington Post on January 9, 2017.

Dr. Adizes: I welcome you to Adizes Methodology.

I think it would be good if I express to you what I believe is critical to make the methodology successful and why some companies are not fully successful.

What is the essence of the Methodology?

We all deal with change. Whenever there is change there are going to be problems. How do you handle problems? How do you grow a company when there is so much change?

The problem is that there is uncertainty, you don’t know what is going to happen, and there is risk. How to handle uncertainty and risk better than the competition?

This methodology was not developed in the library in a university. I left the university to go to the real world and see how to make this happen; how to make companies grow, in spite of uncertainty and risk.

This methodology has been tested for 50 years. Please look at our website and you will see presidents of companies who say they grew the company from $12 million to $4 billion with the Adizes Methodology. It is a testament for the methodology. It has been tested in 58 countries, in companies from startups to the biggest in the world.

Why the success?

If you have a complementary team, you see things I don’t see; I see things you don’t see. Together we see more. That reduces uncertainty.

Now, if you have the same interest, if we have common interest, that will make risk lower because those who you need will cooperate. When there is common interest there is cooperation. When there is cooperation there is less risk. A complementary team that shares knowledge and is based on common interests, reduces uncertainty and reduces risk.

That raises the question, what causes people to share information to make better decisions?

Mutual respect.

And what will make people have common interest?

Mutual trust.

So the whole Adizes Methodology is how to build mutual trust and respect in a company, so that the company can handle risk and uncertainty, and handle change better. Not only to make you happier, but also to make you richer.

A company will grow better outside if it is integrated inside. If people are fighting inside, no energy is available to deal with the outside.

Now the question: how do you build mutual trust and respect? Especially in Russia ( the audience is Russian, ed note) — because Russia does not have a history of democracy. It was always a totalitarian system, and companies in Russia are run in a totalitarian way. So there is a cultural problem: We have to change the culture inside the company.

How?

The program is very systematic, with a program and manuals…. The results are exceptional. As I told you, companies grew from $12 million to $4 billion. But the program is not easy to apply. Changing the culture of a company is a very, very time-consuming and difficult job.

It is normal that people want change as long as they don’t have to change. So in order for the program to work, in order for a company to succeed with the Adizes methodology, it requires commitment.

Many times a president of a company has asked me, “Dr. Adizes, have you ever failed?” I say, “Yes. Not every company succeeds.”

And they ask me, “What is the difference?”

I look them in the eye and say, “You.”

How committed are you? Because people will complain: “It takes too much time… it’s too much work… we cannot do it…” Are you going to hold the line? Or not?

Adizes is not a consulting company. It’s not a training company. We are like a coach. We will train you to be an Olympic champion but you have to work hard. You have to do it. And it’s not going to be easy.

What is going to be difficult?

Number one: The program takes time. You cannot hire somebody to do physical exercise for you. That is what is wrong with some big consulting firms: You hire them to do the work for you. You just need a report and the job is finished. Is it?

To be a champion you have to show up. “But I don’t have time,” people complain. In that case forget Adizes. Try a consulting firm, and good luck.

Adizes requires commitment — at minimum one to two days a month. If you really don’t have time, then you start the Adizes program at 1 o’clock in the afternoon to 10 o’clock at night twice a month.

Problem number two: As a first-line supervisor, you tell people what to do. You listen, but not too much. Your mouth is big; your ears are small.

As you ascend the hierarchy to be the president of a company, your mouth should become small and your ears should become big. Small mouth and big ears. That’s right: You have to listen what is going on.

You have to listen to the people, what is going on with them. You are now far from the action. They are on the fighting floor, so you have to listen to what is happening down there. That is where the roots of the tree are. Watch the roots, not just the leaves. Financial statements are important but remember they are the leaves not the roots of your success.

That means that you have to change your style. You have to sit in the room and listen to the people. Some people are difficult. You must learn how to lead people whose style is different from yours.

Adizes is training you so you can handle change in the future without us. We are proud of every client we lose. Our job is to teach you the tools how to manage as a team, and then say goodbye, thank you very much. Finished. It’s like psychotherapy, organizational therapy: You should not be dependent on your therapist for too long. A good therapist makes sure you are healthy and says goodbye, you are done with therapy. You are on your own. You can come to our conventions every year and learn what is new and update yourself so your company continues to grow.

You get 4 results from the program:

You solve problems.

You build a team.

You become better managers.

And you enrich your managerial style.

I can promise you one thing: If you do a diagnosis of your company, and you identify problems which are chronic — they come back, and back, and back, and back—this is what is blocking your growth of the company — this is what you lose sleep over at night — I promise you—because we have the experience of 50 years, thousands of companies — 40% of these chronic problems will disappear. Minimum. 40% will be better; 20% will not change; and the second year, what was better will disappear, what did not change will become better. In 3 years, all problems you have today should disappear. That is on average. Some companies do it faster. It all depends on how committed you, the CEO, are to give time and energy.

In 3 years, it does not mean that you will have no more problems. You will have bigger problems. Because you are as big as the problems you are dealing with. Today maybe you have problems of quality control, you have problems of marketing, and maybe you have problems of hiring the right people. In 3 years, you will have a big problem: how to become an international company. By solving the small problems you can address the bigger problems.

Once I sent a New Years card, with wishes for the new year to my clients: “I wish you bigger problems next year than this year that you can solve.” Tell me how big the problems you are dealing with are and I will tell you how big you are.

The Adizes Methodology does not only make the company bigger, it makes you — you personally — better. People say that it helps their marriage. Next year it’s coming out, a new book of mine on how to apply Adizes in family life. And I just finished yesterday a new book on how to apply Adizes to personal life. So, this methodology is not a consulting methodology, it’s a philosophy of life.

I welcome you, I hope that you will enjoy the methodology, and I hope you will join us and many, many companies around the world and have a better company and a better quality of life.

Thank you .

Watch the presentation here.

The Repercussions of Deprivation

Have you ever been on a certain diet that prohibits, say, sweets? If you ever stop the diet, you go for those sweets with a vengeance; you overeat.

Have you ever been deprived let us say, of pasta?

One day you dared to break the diet and tasted pasta.

What happened?

For the next few days, you probably overate pasta as if to compensate for all those days you deprived yourself of it.

Have you ever been sleep deprived? When you finally can sleep, you oversleep, right?

It is as if nature seeks balance. You do not satisfy one need enough, at the first opportunity your emotions or body will try to catch up.

And this does not apply just to food.

Communist regimes deprived people from accumulating wealth, accumulating capital. Money was not in abundance.

As the communist regime bit the dust and opened the gates for wealth accumulation, the people in those countries behave like starving people freed from a prison where food was allocated scarcely. They are more capitalistic in their behavior than the people in those countries that define themselves as being capitalist.

If you want to see a person eager to make more money in any way he can, go to any of the CIS countries. Work with Russians for instance.

If you try to talk them out of this eagerness to make a higher salary or more money and use the argument to follow what is good for the company or country, notice how they are grimacing. As if ready to throw up.

They have been fed this propaganda during communism to saturation. They are fed up with calls to sacrifice their personal interests for the good of the whole. They are interested in their own well being, first and above all, if not exclusively and now, not tomorrow. . .

Marxism was applied prematurely in countries, which economically were not developed enough.

In terms of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, one can not jump into self realization till one fulfills the lower level needs first.

The USA, which has accumulated wealth to the point that its industrial behavior is wasteful, is prone more to Marxism and socialism, than those that are attempting it now like Cuba or Venezuela.

The accusations thrown at President Obama that he is a closet socialist and the phenomena of Sanders who is openly a socialist is not a fluke. It is a predictable outcome of where the USA is in its development.

More examples:

People who have been deprived of love in their childhood are very needy for attention and love. Apparently when our needs are not provided for, we are in a deficit. Whenever we can replenish that deficit we do it with a fervor and obsessively, compulsively.

Consider people who did not get recognition growing up, who feel they were deprived of respect. They often react with a vengeance, and may even spread terror: If you do not recognize me when I act peacefully, maybe you will do so when I cause you pain. This phenomenon does not only happen on a macro level, like we see now with Islamic extremists in France. It happens in our households as well.

What about the Jewish people of Israel? For two thousand years the Jewish people were deprived of any power. They were oppressed and discriminated against. Now that they have a country of their own, power plays a very important role in their decision making in dealing with the Palestinians.

Just thinking,

Ichak Kalderon Adizes

To All my Readers on The Eve of Year 2017

Instead of a blog, I wish to share with you my mantra which I repeat when I meditate.

It is a driving force for my behavior when I am in doubt about what action to take.

Here it is. Author unknown to me and to the internet.

LIVE WITHOUT PRETENDING

    LOVE WITHOUT DEPENDING

               LISTEN WITHOUT DEFENDING

                   SPEAK WITHOUT OFFENDING

Hope it serves you well as it did me.

Furthermore, I am including a link to a lecture of mine to Catholic Priests on How I Found

My God.  I hope you will find it worth listening to.

WISH YOU WELL IN THE YEAR 2017 AND BEYOND

Ichak Kalderon Adizes

Still thinking…….Thank God!

The Future of Management Theory and Practice and How It Applies To Russia

This blog post was featured in the Huffington Post on December 19, 2016.

What is the future of management theory and practice?

How will it impact  Russia, if at all?

Theories are developed to respond to needs, to problems that call for answers.

The dominant need in the present, and will increase in its importance in the future, is how to handle change.

Change is  accelerating and getting increasingly multi faceted; A change in political conditions has almost instant repercussion on economic conditions which in turn impact social conditions and legal regulations which in turn impact back political and economic conditions …It is like a closed loop that one finds difficult to predict the outcomes and successfully analyze.

Prominent among the changes that are driving most of the other changes  are technological changes. That has formidable impact on how companies will be managed in the future. Information Technology,  how to manage it, how to incorporate it in company life, how to make it available and at the same time secure it,  is a major challenge facing management .

Another major change is the emerging of the millennia generation as the dominant labor force. This generation has different work habits and ethics than the generation that has known war and depression. Grown in abundance, their expectations what work means, how it should be performed and how it should  reward  them is different from previous generations who are still in leading positions in companies.

The millennia want self-actualization. Freedom of choice, flexibility in working schedule, factors that disrupt the working process as we know.  The older generation on the other hand expects discipline, sacrifice, loyalty, and long-term employment, factors that are not at the top list of priorities of the millennia generation. Autocratic style of management with which older generation feels comfortable will not work with the millennia. That creates a cultural clash that needs to be managed.

More on change: The world is shrinking. As information sharing technologies improve, and transportation effectiveness and efficiency progress, distances are not a barrier for trade and in spite of some protectionist tendencies, globalization is here to stay. This has its own impact on management practice.  Competition increases as more companies can reach your market and the need for strategic thinking and capability to implement the strategic changes you might weed to make

become now indispensable.

The globalization  created conditions for the emergence of multi national companies; they are emerging as a major force in world markets and pose their own demands on management. The multi national raises funds on the American stock market, its factories might be in China, its R and D in Israel, its IT needs are outsourced to India and the market it serves is world wide.

The management of such a company by definition is composed of multi national leaders that have different cultures, have different expectations from their jobs and the company has to respond to multi national laws and tax regulations. The complexity of managing is increasing exponentially. The company has to think and plan globally but act and be responsive locally. Not an easy maneuver to make.

One more change: As technology enables faster and faster decision making, the time it takes for a stimulus to get a response is getting shorter and shorter. It feels as if time is shrinking. Decisions have to be made faster and faster, which causes managerial stress to expand.

As our materialistic needs are being satisfied, as we live in abundance rather than in scarcity, people are looking more and more for a meaning in their life. Religious revival, spiritual awakening is a trend that should not be ignored. Management has to take it into account in their recruitment practices, in their marketing messages and in their corporate mission.

One more point: Change causes disintegration. Those who know how to capitalize on change for their own self interests take a bigger piece of the pie in comparison to those who find change a threat and freeze in their tracks. The shrinking of the middle class and increased polarization between the rich and the poor manifest it.

This gives birth to increased confrontations, management against workers and even management against management.

The result is that the management of conflict is emerging as a dominant facet of managerial practice. It calls for a major educational training effort on  how to avoid destructive conflict to be a cultural trait of the company.

One more point. Due to the complexity of change and the accelerated rate of change, people are getting older younger. What I mean by that is that in certain industries, IT industry for instance, by the age of forty a person is considered too old to be hired. Companies look for people in early twenties (soon to be early teens). The technology is changing so fast that it takes young people to master it. This development poses its own challenges for management: what to do with the turnover of personnel, how to retrain those not fired etc.

The above changes are not an exhaustive list of changes that impact management. It is a list to manifest that change is intense and accelerating and management has to deal with it.  Those changes will give birth to new needs that will call for new theories and practices of management .

How can a company be managed under such an increase in uncertainty and risk which are the by product of change?

What new management theories and practices are going to emerge or are already emerging to respond to the changes we are experiencing?

I see several developments.

1} The end to autocratic style management.

The rate of change and the complexity that is born by the changes makes it impossible for any single individuals to dominate the decision making process.

No one alone can evaluate risks in an environment of chronic accelerated change.

The need for a complementary team that works in unison is becoming indispensable for the success of the modern corporation.

That has repercussions for how the organization should be structured.

2) The end to hierarchy

The pure military system of hierarchy is not flexible enough to handle change. To provide channels for information and know how for information and knowledge to flow from the bottom up and across the organization.

There are many attempts already to break the mold of hierarchy. We are witnessing theories and practices that negate hierarchy totally. For example Holocracy, network organization, flat organizations and even the Agile system of management has anti hierarchy characteristics. .

Moving from total hierarchy to no hierarchy is not the solution to the problem hierarchy creates.  Both systems,  absolute hierarchy and no hierarchy whatsoever, in their extreme, have side effects that hamper the effectiveness of organizations.

Hierarchy is inflexible. It makes the company    effective and efficient in the short run but the organization has problems in adapting the organization to changes in the long run.

No hierarchy on the other hand enables flexibility of the system and thus enables it to deal with change more effectively then a hierarchy would,  but implementation of decisions taken to deal with change is not as effective nor efficient.

What is needed is a double system, democracy for decision-making and dictatorship in implementation. Double culture. Double organizational structures with the same people in the organization.

Not an easy feat. (The Adizes methodology has addressed this problem successfully.(1))

3) Because of the increase in complexity of managing companies in the future,  the future corporation will have to develop and nurture a culture of teamwork. Team work across organizational silos is indispensable in solving complex problems. Following the hierarchical lines of authority does not work well because problems in the modern world are multi dimensional and call for a multi disciplinary interventions.

The emphasis on team work started already but, in my judgment, in light of the needs, it is still in its infancy. In the future it will be the corner stone of management

.

Team work calls for collaborative leadership, complementary teamwork composed of people with a global vision of the world.

4) I strongly believe the future management theories and practice will give more emphasis to organizational architecture and less to strategic planning.

Our capability to predict the future is getting increasingly weaker. It is because of the complexity of the changes occurring. Because of their multi faceted nature. No one predicted the oil crisis of the last century. No, one including the central banks, predicted the financial crisis of this century.

As our capability to predict and thus plan declines, the need to have a flexible organization that can change direction fast increases. Thus having a flexible organization where people do not hold to their chairs till they retire becomes an indispensable managerial practice to follow.

5) The emergence of millennia generation will require a change in motivational and compensation schemes. Just monetary compensation is not good enough any more. The millennia labor force wants to feel their work has a meaning, has a spiritual purpose of making a better world, not just more money. Companies will have to emphasize the values that govern their behavior and develop control systems to monitor that those values are not being violated.

6) In order to make better decisions in time of increased uncertainty, which is a product of change, transparency of information, is a call of the day.

Systems like the Open Book approach(2), the  Balanced Score Card  system(3) and the Adizes Executive Dashboard (4)are only the beginning of what will be needed to introduce transparency of information.

7) All above changes and the management theories that will be developed to deal with them and the practice that will apply those new theories spell out one thing: more stress on management to change itself, how it works, what it believes in and how it is being evaluated. That means that new theories of management on how to handle stress will be needed.

8)Because of all the changes enumerated above, corporations will need more and more training and the services of consultants who with their knowledge cross pollinate industries.

The training and consulting industries will grow but the technology of consulting profession will change as well from just giving reports to the leading of  change and implementation.

That will give birth to the field of organizational therapy, making dysfunctional companies to function well. In my judgment consulting profession will experience a major traumatic change. It will move away from the medical analogy where by the consultant gives a prescription to the client to a methodology which is more akin to therapy. Client decides what to do. The new age consultant only help the client to make the decision and implement it.The Coaching profession is the beginning of such transformation. So is the Adizes Organizational Therapy profession taught for certification by the Adizes Graduate School (www.adizesgraduateschool.org)

9) In my judgment the most important change that will hit management theory and practice is a change in how the goals of a corporation are defined. So far the holly grail has been profits. In the short and in the long run.

I believe profit is the holly grail because business schools were and still are in some universities an offshoot of the school of economics.

It also fits the capitalist model where companies exist for their investors, owners.

Profits as a goal will need to be removed from being an exclusive or dominant goal   and become part and parcel of a basket of goals. And I believe we will go beyond that too. I believe we will slide away even from  addressing goals of stake holders as the basket of goals to follow. I believe we will come to  identify that the primary goal of any organization is to be healthy. First and above all.

In the pursuit of profits many companies become dysfunctional, sick with internal conflicts, with loss of direction, and furthermore make the environment in which they operate, the community they belong to , sick as well, polluting air, water  and the society at large. That is done by firing people and causing unemployment which frequently can become chronic; The unemployed people can not be easily retrained.

Healthy means integrated within the company and outside the company boundaries.

Integrated , healthy organizations can have sustainable profits. Not true for companies that are falling apart.

How to maintain organizational health, how to define what it is, how to identify early signs of “ sickness” and what to do about it is a new field I have personally devoted my professional life to  and I hope it will be one of the main developments of the future of management and leadership, theory and practice.

10) Management by values

As our society becomes more and more affluent, materialistic goals will pale in comparison to goals that embrace spirituality. We have discussed that already above. This has repercussion on how companies will be managed. I believe values will be a dominant factor in decision making.

We can see that already in the United States where companies devote part of the their revenues to philanthropic purposes and advertise it on their product.

We can see this development in how many executives retire or leave their business leadership position to dedicate their time to a social purpose that makes sense to them.

Companies that just pursue profits as a goal, that focus only on stockholders interests, I believe, will find themselves not attracting talent which in modern society is critical for success. Talent will go to work for causes they believe in .

Where does Russia stand with all these changes?

I believe Russia is significantly behind in adapting or proactively changing in joining the modern world of management. It is still trying to learn and adapt management theory as established in leading business schools in the West. What is wrong with it, in my judgment, is that business schools like any bureaucratic institutions are not prone to change easily. They are still the outgrowth of schools of economics (some are still divisions of the department of economics) and still focused on profit as the dominant goal of corporations.

They are more like museums where one can find what HAS worked for companies rather than an R and D institution where management innovation occurs in theory and practice.

The reason why I believe they are not research and development oriented but rather in the business of documenting and explain what the industry has already  done is because they do not have a lab where they can experiment. They are like  a medical school without an attached hospital where students and faculty practice.

All managerial innovation is done in the field and documented in the field. Business School faculty studies what has happened and documents it. Not good enough in my judgement for developing leaders of the future.

Russian Business Schools are still hung on copying Harvard or other leading business schools although in my judgment those schools  are not up to the latest practices used in practice.

Russian management practice is also hampered by the Soviet Union legacy of authoritarian corporate leadership, central planning. Hampered by a culture that supports Uravnilovkas in condering appointments and rewards and by a culture of nepotism and corruption.

This environment does not encourage investments and through it importing of managerial knowledge and the newest managerial practices.  Only companies like Sberbank that are blessed with unusually entrepreneurial leadership with a global vision that are able to escape the barriers to good management that exist in Russian culture and environment. Another barrier to import or be exposed to modern latest developments in management practice is that Russia is well behind in developing or allowing multi national companies to operate in Russia. Thus Russia is well behind in joining the developments encompassing the world of today.

Communism has had other impacts beyond authoritarian leadership on how company are managed. It has left behind the fear of government. Of authority. People in companies keep to themselves . Do not challenge decisions made. There is no real team work. There is the “boss” who keeps the cards close to his or her vest and the rest of the organization that is supposed to follow.

In the short run that looks very good . Company is functioning but the fact is that

the organization is not using well the brain of its people. Success in modern world is based on how much active, intelligent, brains does a company have. We are not living anymore in agricultural or industrial society where the focus was on muscles.  Or on raw material . In the information based society, brain is critical and the more brain power the better..

Russia has incredible pool of brain power. Well educated population . Well read. Creative. Entrepreneurial, if given a chance. In an authoritarian leadership this does not happen well. If at all.

Another factor inhibiting Russian management from adapting to the changes I have elaborated above is the preoccupation with materialism . With profits.  With money.

I attribute it to the many years Russia was under communist regime which negated materialism and nurtured sacrificing oneself for the good of the country.

When market forces were introduced in Russia  and private ownership was allowed, materialism as a driving force in decision making erupted with full force. As if by keeping it down for so many years under communism . it needed to be over compensated now.

Russian managerial decision making is very much focused on profits. Almost exclusively. Any talk  on social responsibility, attention to country needs is reacted with a shrug of shoulders as if saying, just get off it, we have been there . We do not need more of it. I see the immigration of so many oligarchs out of Russia, the capital leaving the country, a small sign of  self interests at the expense of social interests.

In summary, I see major changes in management theory and practice in the developed world and I see Russia struggling to catch up because of the soviet union legacy and the culture of authoritarian management .

(1) see Ichak Kalderon Adizes: Mastering Change ( Russian publisher), Managing Corporate Life Cycle ( Russian publisher) and How to solve the Mismanagement Crisis  ( Russian Publisher)

(2) Jack Stack: The Great Game of Business: Unlocking the Power and Profitability of Open-Book Management ( Doubleday Publishing 1994)

(3)  Robert S. Kaplan, David P. Norton:The Balanced Scorecard: Translating Strategy into Action Hardcover – (Harvard University Publication, 1996)

(4) Adizes Executive Dashboard ( Proprietary Software, in Russia available from Rarus Co)

Democracy in a Time of Change

A country is a system.

All systems are composed of subsystems.

Subsystems change at different speeds. Technological subsystems change the most rapidly. Business subsystems, change more slowly. Political subsystems change even more slowly, and the values subsystem of a society change the slowest of all.

Due to the fact that subsystems change at different speeds, in times of change we experience disintegration and accelerated change causes accelerated disintegration. If the change is systemic, it results in systemic disintegration.

Modern societies are experiencing accelerated systemic changes. Globalization is one of them. It causes financial and economic interdependence.

Accelerated systemic changes create  complex systemic problems like terrorism, immigration, and a domino effect in cases of financial failures.

Systemic problems call for systemic corrective actions.

Systemic corrective actions  require that the legislative, executive, and judicial branches of a democratic society work in unison. The participants in all these branches are either elected or appointed by elected politicians.

Politicians fight for power, and in a democracy by definition they do not necessarily cooperate. The result is that systemic problems in a democratic society do not get solved until they are acute, and the level of crisis is so unbearable that all parties are in danger. Only then will politicians close ranks and solve the problem. But by then it might be too late to take  corrective action. The result could be a revolution or a breakdown of the country.

One more reason to ponder how change and democracy are related. .

As change accelerates, government machinery and thus expenditure, and power will mushroom in  attempting to solve the problems caused by change.

People in a democracy resent the increasing power of government and the taxation necessary to finance government  and its services.

Politicians emerge that  make promises that they will lead change of the government role in society. Because the cooperation of all political powers is needed to make major changes they are not able to deliver. ( See Obama).  As a result, politicians lose credibility, which makes systemic solutions even more difficult. ( Trump by having Republicans in control of both houses and having the choice of appointing a Supreme Court justice has a better chance to make change but will the other half that did not elect him accept those changes? Expect turmoil.)

The solution is not to change only certain decisions  like the right to reproduce, immigration law, taxation laws etc.  What we have is a systemic problem which calls for a systemic solution. We need to change the system not just the decisions the existent system produces.

My conclusion is that representative democracy, as we know and practice it now, might not be the adequate system for a country with accelerated, chronic change.

Dictatorship is not an answer either . in accelerated change decisions have to be made and dictators who listen only to themselves, who do not allow diversity of opinions and judgments can make major mistakes and lead a country to ruin.

The Answer?

Not a movement on a horizontal scale from democracy to dictatorship. It should be a vertical change.

We need to reduce government’s role and decentralize. We need grassroots involvement. We need grassroots democracy. On all levels. Comprehensive grassroots democracy. On corporate, local, state and federal level. In business and in non business organizations. Comprehensive. All encompassing grassroots democracy. (1)  What we have now is partial (only in political governance, not anywhere else ) representative one and it does not work well anymore.

Just thinking,

Ichak Kalderon Adizes

(1) see a. Ichak Adizes : Industrial Democracy;

b. Ichak Adizes Self Management , New Dimensions to Democracy

Both published by  Adizes Institute Publications

To Whom to Listen to and When

This blog post was featured in the Huffington Post on December 5, 2016.

In April of (2008), I spent two weeks in India following a meditation guru from town to town.

This was my fourth visit to India, but I consider it my first real one. The other three were too touristy. Two were lecture tours, and I stayed in the best hotels, with warm water and the most excellent services money can buy. The third was for a Maha Kumba Mella, which is a gathering of Hindus on the Ganges River every 144 years. Sidhus descend from their caves in the Himalayas, and while it was an interesting experience to see them, it was not day-to-day India.

This time it was different. I slept in an ashram, was driven from town to town in terrible traffic, ate with Indians on the floor, and meditated with them. At my age (71), it was not an easy experience, but the guru was older (80-something) and he held on well, so who am I to complain?

What did I learn?

The meditation I was practicing is called sahaj marg, which means “the natural way.” The practice is to focus on the heart. No mantra, no focusing on the breath or on a candle or whatever, just listen to the heart by slowing down the mind.

I joined this type of practice because I believed I needed it. First, being Jewish, I spend most of my time in my head, and it needed some rest. Second, because I saw my dearest relatives and friends sent to their deaths during World War II, my heart has been closed all these years and it needed opening.

What does it mean to “listen to the heart?” How do you know, when you meditate, which thoughts are of the mind and which of the heart? Thoughts are thoughts, right?

No. There is a difference. You can argue with thoughts of the mind. You might toss and turn, and debate with yourself. But when your heart speaks, there is no argument. There is no discussion. There is no “Why?” or “Why not?” You are complete. You are at peace with yourself. The answer to the question “Why?” is “Because,” and that’s it.

That brought me to the next insight: If you really listen to your heart when you make a decision and your heart does not give you the answer, it means that you are not ready to finalize your decision. This is a case where it is better not to make a decision at that point in time.

That brought me to an interesting conclusion: When you decide with your heart, you cannot make a mistake.

Why?

Well, what is a mistake? It is always a conclusion you come to after the fact, right? It is a feeling of remorse and a judgment that you should have decided differently. It leads to self-accusations: that perhaps you did not deliberate enough, that you did not listen to advice, that you ignored facts, etc. All this is in your head.

When you make a decision with your heart, you are at peace with yourself. If, after the fact, you discover that your decision did not work out as you expected, you can not feel remorse because at the time you made the decision you had no doubts as to what to do, therefore you could not have done better. The fact that it did not work out is now only of academic interest. You can analyze what can be learned from what happened, but there is no place for remorse. You were at peace when you decided, and that was it.

Coming to this peace of mind when you decide with your heart is not a logical conclusion that you have reached after endless debates, internally or with others. It is beyond logic. It gives you a sense of completion, of integration, that almost defies logic. That is how you should feel when you decide to get married. That decision should be made with all your heart, not as a result of analyzing the cost-value relationship or an optimization model. When you make a decision with all your heart, as is the usual expression, you have the feeling of being integrated with your decision totally, wholly—maybe even holy. Mind, body, emotions, and spirit all feel at peace, united.

How does one come to such peace—usually we say “peace of mind,” though it would be more accurate to say “peace of the total body ” which is really peace of the heart—especially if there is a difficult decision to be made? You can do it by meditating. When you meditate you do not get attached to thoughts. Thus, you do not get into endless arguments with yourself. Instead, the decision eventually and automatically emerges as an insight.

If that description leaves you wondering how this insight can happen, let me share with you a story told to me by my one of my colleagues at UCLA, Professor Will McWhinney, that demonstrates this point. When McWhinney was a student at Yale, the fraternities held a contest for best choir. McWhinney’s fraternity had the worst voices at the university, except for one person whose voice was a pure, evangelical tenor. So they devised the following performance: The whole choir got on stage and began to sing where each person sang a different melody, which produced total cacophony. Then, slowly, one by one, each member of the choir stopped singing, except for the tenor, whose voice became stronger and stronger until it was alone, pure and crystal clear and totally enchanting. They won first prize.

This story is analogous to what happens in meditation. You have many voices in your head competing with each other. The more difficult the decision is, the more voices you hear, which can overwhelm you. When you meditate, the voices calm down one by one, while your heart’s voice grows stronger and stronger, until you simply “hear” the answer to your question and feel at peace with your decision.

But not only the head and heart think. We often say, “I have a gut feeling,” as if the gut is doing some decision processing.

That fact brought me to think in (PAEI) terms. The (A) processing is in the head. The (I) is processed by the heart.   Where is (P) then? Sunil my associate suggested that if we follow the chakras, it is below the belly button, where our sexual organs are. Their role is survival of the species. That is where we feel instinctively. That is where the fight-or-flight reaction is processed: When we get scared we tighten the rectum, and the pelvic floor muscles.

Some people think with only one part of their body. Those who only react to their instincts are the (P)s: Act first, think later (if at all). Some do not listen to their instincts and use only their brain: These are the (A)s. Some people are only (E)s: all ideas and exciting priorities without considering what the repercussions of these ideas could be. And some people are all heart: They let their feelings for fellow humans or animals or whatever be the exclusive factor that determines their decision. These are the (I)s.

When a person processes information with all his faculties, the first one to respond to a new situation is the (P): His instincts  of self preservation urge him to do something. Then the left mind, (A), gets activated: “Let’s think about it.” Next the right side of the brain gets involved, the (E),  bringing new ideas to the table, while all along the heart, (I)  is crying out, “Hey, listen to me too.”

To put it another way, instinctively you have the urge to do one thing, (P), but you think, (A), that it might not be prudent to do it, so new ideas, (E), come to mind, while you constantly check with yourself to see whether you feel at peace with the decision, (I). All these voices run through you at the same time. It is like a committee meeting where all the different styles compete with one another for attention. It’s a pure mess. Thus it’s not strange that when you have a really big problem to solve you get physically and emotionally exhausted. Your whole body hurts.

There is a difference between processing the (P), (A), (E), and (I) roles—between processing information with your instincts, mind, gut, or heart.

In processing (P), (A), and (E) roles you try to manage the process as best you can: You debate with your gut feelings, you challenge your instincts, and argue with your thoughts. When processing (P), (A), and (E) , you “talk” to the various parts of your body. You disagree with them. You may even get mad at them. It is as if you are the center and they are on the outskirts.

With the heart, (I),  it is different. You do not argue with the heart, you listen to the heart. It is as if you subject yourself to something bigger, more powerful, than you. You are not the center any more. You say, “My heart tells me…”  Compare that to what you say when you activate your mind: “I have to think it over.” Thinking it over, and over again, means that you are having a debate.

Now the weird stuff: Assume that “out there” is a cosmic, total, ultimate data warehouse. But it is not just data or knowledge, it is the ultimate wisdom based on values, the ultimate truth. It is endless, fixed energy with consciousness. (For me, that is God.) To connect to this cosmic energy you need to open your heart, to listen to your heart. It is as if the heart is the way to connect to God.

How do you hear the heart? How do you listen to it? Through meditation. Not through prayer. Prayer is like trying to manipulate God, pleading and begging him to act. If he does not listen to your prayer you might feel cheated, angry, and deceived.

When you pray, you talk to God. In meditation you listen to God. When you pray you make requests. Perhaps meekly, but no matter how nicely it is packaged and how much you are offering to “pay,” that is, what sacrifices you are willing to make, it is like a purchase order. When you meditate you listen to what God wants from you, not what you want from God. That is the difference.

Listen to your heart. That is where the truth is. Listen to the heart and you will not feel you made a mistake when you decide. If your heart is not ready to decide, you are not ready.

How should you make a decision then?

How should you decide? Here is the optimal path, the road less traveled. This is the lifecycle I suggested for organizations in my Managing Corporate Lifecycles book: Start with (I). Start with your heart first.  Ask your heart first what is the right thing to do. Then go get some ideas about what to do, (E), but in doing so do not violate what your heart dictates. Then check those ideas to see if they make sense, (A), and finally be ready to  act, (P) but first go back to the heart and check if you are at peace.

If more people would start with their heart and not with their penis, (P), maybe there would be less war, less divorce, less crime. Maybe we ought to teach meditation in prisons. Scientific tests of transcendental meditation have shown that when a certain percentage of people in a community meditate, there is less crime.

In yoga, they say that the mind is a terrorist. It often terrorizes our bodies, making us do things that are not good for us. I once saw a bumper sticker that said, “Do not always believe what you think.” For me this is profound because we Jews not only honor the mind, we worship the mind. With our Talmudic minds, we often complicate problems even when they are simple. We overdo and over-complicate our decision making, sometimes to the point that we cannot solve the problem. We do not listen to our instincts very well. In order to survive two thousand years of persecution, I wonder if we have not closed our hearts except to each other.

 

Just thinking

Ichak Kalderon Adizes