Tag Archives: Harvard Business Review

Making America More Competitive through our People

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The theme for this month’s issue of Harvard Business Review is “Reinventing America – Why the World needs the U.S. to Bounce Back”.  There is one article in particular which highlights the need for the U.S. to become more competitive.  Here Michael E. Porter (ever hear of Porter’s Five Forces Model?) and Jan W. Rivkin discuss the need for America to repair some “cracks in the foundation” which from a macro perspective include:

  • Sound monetary and fiscal policies (such as manageable government debt levels);
  • Strong human development (good health care and strong K-12 education systems) and
  • Effective political institutions (rule of law and effective law-making bodies)

The area that I found most critical is human development, particularly the lack of focus on our education systems and the training / development of our employees.   There is a sister article in HBR entitled “A Jobs Compact for America’s Future” which really hones in on the human capital side of America’s challenges. In this article, author Thomas A. Kochan states “Without a well-trained, well-paid workforce the United States cannot compete with other nations effectively…”  He observes that “Corporate leaders frequently say that people are their most important asset.  Evidence suggests that many of them don’t believe a word of that claim.”   Kochan also points out that not all U.S. firms have fallen behind the rest of the world.  “Every industry includes firms that compete on innovation, product development and service quality.  These companies invest heavily in human and social capital. In the HR literature, the approach is called a high-road strategy, accompanied by high-performance or knowledge-based work systems. The specific practices vary across industries, but there are some generic features:

  • selection of employees with technical, problem-solving, and collaborative skills;
  • significant investment in training and de­velopment;
  • commitment to building trust and relying on employees to solve problems, coordinate operations, and drive innovation;
  • compensation systems that align the firm’s and the employees’ interests;…“

“Two decades’ worth of research on high-road companies has documented their ability to achieve world-class productivity and service quality.  If we define U.S. competitiveness as the capacity to be attractive to businesses and to simultaneously create a more widely prosperous society, then high-road strategies become critical.”

Mr. Kochan is not alone in his thinking or his research.  There have been numerous articles written about how professionals (even those with advanced degrees) are leaving school with a lack of “soft skills” (we call them strategic competencies), which are the very skills (problem-solving, collaboration, communication) that are required for America to be competitive.  MBA and Masters programs (particularly in Supply Chain) are listening to the complaints from corporate America and are adjusting their curricula accordingly.  But many companies have not gotten the message and continue to cut training and development budgets entirely OR focus merely on technical training thereby cutting out all “soft skills” training.  Those “soft skills” or strategic competencies are the backbone of high performance work systems (“HPWS”).  HPWSs have been around for decades but seem to have gone through a resurgence as America scrambles for answers to our lack of global competitiveness.

If you think about it, the answer really isn’t all that hard.  America needs to put its money where its mouth is and make the American workforce an asset for our country.  Like any other asset it requires investment:

  • strengthening early childhood education
  • access to affordable post high school education
  • university curricula that REQUIRE more emphasis on strategic competencies
  • a significant investment in training and development within companies

If we can do all this, maybe America can be a global competitor once again.

Please join in the conversation.  We welcome your comments  . . . . . . . . .

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What Your Parents Were Afraid to Tell You About The Birds and The Bees – Secrets FINALLY Revealed!!

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No, this is not about the Kama Sutra – sorry!  But before I tell you about The Birds and The Bees, let me ask you a serious question.  If you were faced with a life and death situation, what percentage of the time do you think you would make the right decision?  What if the decision criteria were fairly complex?  Would your percentage drop?  What if you had to get a few more people involved in making the decision?  What if I said that your process MUST involve collective fact-finding, vigorous debate, and consensus building?  Would your percentage drop even further?  By the way, this represents the decision making situations in your work everyday -n’est ce pas?  Let’s stretch this a little further – how about those few more people are actually 10,000 people?  What would your percentage be now?  I’m not done yet: what if you had to make that decision every year, year after year?  What kind of success rate would you predict of making the right decision every time?  Would you like to learn about a top secret methodology that will guarantee a success rate of close to 90% given ALL the criteria above?  All you have to do is to forget whatever your parents taught you about birds and the bees and listen to what Professor Thomas Seeley from Cornell has to say about bees in a Harvard Business Review article. I’ll cover the birds some other time.

A beehive has to find a new place to call home every single year because of over population.  And what I described above is the actual situation that they face, every single year, and Seeley’s research documents a success rate of 90% – year after year.  They have very complex criteria that they have to meet because their survival depends on it, and they have developed a process which depends on experts to gather data, ways to consolidate the market research, validate the information, communicate to everyone and build consensus and then most importantly, make the decision and get it Adopted and Implemented.  And then they live happily forever – till next year!  90% success rate!!!!!  Seeley points to the fact that bees have figured out how to achieve a high collective IQ and that organizations would be well served to emulate bees.  I could not agree more, and we at TMG have been preaching similarly.  Here are his 5 keys:

  1. Remind the group’s members of their shared interests and foster mutual respect, so they work together productively.
  2. Explore diverse solutions to the problem, to maximize the group’s likelihood of uncovering an excellent option.
  3. Aggregate the group’s knowledge through a frank debate.
  4. Minimize the leader’s influence on the group’s thinking.
  5. Balance interdependence (information sharing) and independence (absence of peer pressure) among the group’s members.

Raising the collective IQ, High Performance Work Teams, Change Management,   etc. are clearly critical competencies in organizations.  In addition, decision making is the most overlooked competency in organizations today.  People are promoted based on an assumption that they are better decision makers than others.  Group decision making is probably the single biggest bottle neck in corporation today.  Yet, there is very little attention paid to this issue-both at an individual level and at a group level.  If you do find competencies related to Seeley’s list above, my guess is that it will be in the dreaded soft skills category and we all know how those are treated most of the time.

You first must fundamentally believe that those Strategic Competencies (soft skills) are the key to your organization’s success. Defining the right competencies, developing those organizational competencies (CBTM) and then adopting and implementing (AEIOU) can get you a 90% success rate.  With 10,000 stakeholders to boot.

And again, my apologies to those who were expecting something from the Kama Sutra!

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