The best run companies in the world tend not to measure their success by column inches. One of the best examples of this unassuming, but successful, breed is Pitney Bowes, which has over two million customers.



“Between now and 2005 or 2006 is my sweet spot to be a change agent” Michael Critelli

CEO is Michael Critelli. Leadership Critelli-style is not leadership according to the gung-ho, up-and-at-em military model.

Critelli has a very clear breakdown of how he spends his days. He calculates that he spends around 5 per cent of his time on board and corporate governance matters. The next 25-30 per cent is spent on meetings -- individually with people who work with him, staff meetings and a lot of one-on-ones. He estimates he has around 150 of those a year with people who don’t work directly for him from all levels of the company. He spends another 5 to 10 per cent of his time meeting with postal officials, politicians and other regulators. The next 10-15 per cent is spent in some form of interaction with customers. Then there are maybe a few days a year talking to shareholders, analysts and the rating agencies – probably five days a year. The remaining time is spent on a variety of outside activities which somehow relate to his job.

“Between now and 2005 or 2006 is my sweet spot to be a change agent,” Critelli observes. “Part -ially overlapping that, even today I am actively working on the succession process.”

John Kotter’s timing has been impeccable. His ideas have struck a chord. Kotter was on the leadership trail at the right time. Then it was change management. Then culture. Then careers. His bestselling books include Leading Change, Corporate Culture and Performance, and A Force for Change. Managers feel that he understands them. So much so that one speaker’s bureau quotes Professor Kotter’s speaking fee as starting at $75,000. He talked to Idea-log.


How do you work?

The simple logic of my work is that I am a pure field guy. I hang around talking to people. I talk to managers. I sit and watch them. I snoop around, listen to their problems. My work is developed by looking out of the window at what’s going on. It is about seeing patterns.

You have adopted a more personal tone in your recent
work.

I have become more aware of the power of stories. 95 per cent of what I do is storytelling.

What are your stories drawn from?

There’s no-one who has spent more time talking to managers. That’s one reason why my books have won awards.

Is that worth more than theorising?

Who would write a better book about trees: Someone in the forest or someone in an office?

“Communication” seems to crop up in most discussions of organisation effectiveness and certainly in discussions of effective change. What do you mean when you use the term?

Effectively communicating the change vision is critical to success. This should seem obvious, yet for some reason, executives tend to stop commu -nicating during change, when in actuality they should be communicating more than ever. Effective change communication is both verbal and nonverbal. Change is stressful for everyone. This is the worst possible time for executives to close themselves off from contact with employees. And this is particularly important if short-term sacrifices are necessary, including firing people.

Every manager must have wondered at some time why some initiatives and new strategies simply don’t work. According to management researchers Michael Beer and Russell A Eisenstat, the reason is that companies have silent killers working beneath the surface – mutually reinforcing barriers that block strategy implementation and organisa -tional learning. They can be overcome, but top managers must engage their organisations in debate about their existence and their underlying causes.


Among the top silent killers are: poor vertical communication; others include unclear strategy and conflicting priorities; poor coordination across functions, businesses, or borders; and inadequate down-the-line lead -ership skills and development.

Organisations respond to the silent killers in one of three ways: avoidance, which is ineffective; managerial replace -ment, which may work in the short term but will not remove the silent killers; and engage -ment, the best approach.

Although there are no magic remedies, Beer and Eisenstat have developed an approach called Organizational Fitness Profiling (OFP) to replace the silent killers with series of six core capabilities. To do this a company’s top management must turn poor vertical communication into an open fact-based dialogue, turn inadequate down-the-line leadership skills into strong leadership with a general man -agement perspective, turn a top-down management style into engaged leadership; turn unclear strategy and conflicting priorities into a clear business direction; turn an ineffective senior management team into an effective one; and turn poor coordination into teamwork.



The traditional MBA is heavy on analysis and hard skills, ratios and economics, shareholder value and gearing. But, with growing interest in soft skills, such as motivating star per -formers and negotiating globally, business schools are taking note. At MIT’s Sloan School of Management, for example, MBA students learn theatre techniques to help them "become more vulnerable" in order to become better leaders.

Durham Business School uses boardroom role-playing to rep- licate the tensions of a real leadership challenge. The grow -ing emphasis is on mastering human interaction rather than dry analysis.

“MBA programmes must prepare graduates to lead from the front” Kai Peters, Ashridge Business School

“To be successful in business, one needs to combine functional, organisational and personal competencies with effective act -ion and behaviour,” explains Ashridge CEO Kai Peters.

“The traditional MBA reflects a traditional management model of business where analysis and control serves to manage raw material and human inputs in a production function. The world, however, has moved on to a knowledge economy where peo -ple are not inputs, but are human capital and the owners of their own knowledge. To reflect this reality, an MBA programme must prepare graduates to lead from the front, to manage people in a positive fashion, to encourage creativity and cooperation.”