The wise learn from other people's experience

"The wise learn from other people's mistakes and fools from their own." So goes an ancient proverb that some say was first written in Aramaic. As far as I'm concerned, I have been more often a fool than a wise person. That may be because I prefer experimentation to inertia, feeling that Randy Pausch was so right when he said in the Last Lecture that in life "experience is what you get when you you didn't get what you wanted". This post is about experience sharing and it was prompted by a visit to Genaro Bardy's recent post on a presentation made by Kevin Rose.

Few things are more valuable for entrepreneurs and venture investors than getting the account of some real-life experience, whether it speaks of "success" or "failure" is completely irrelevant so long as the content is genuine and the analysis honest. When speaking to customers during workshops, trainings or coaching sessions I often encourage them to examine cases of other entrepreneurs they might know. I also advise them to cut through the crap of accounts entrepreneurial successes and  failures:

• in the former crap is neat logical explanations of how the successful entrepreneurs identified and captured an opportunity (i.e. they knew what they were doing from day one, had a definite plan and eventually ended up exactly where they'd wanted to be) and 


• in the latter crap is justifications and excuses pertaining to everything but the entrepreneurs themselves (i.e. they did everything right but someone else messed everything up or the circumstances caused them to fail despite their "perfect" plan).

In this post, I'd like to comment a bit further on this matter of sharing experience and use a presentation made by Kevin Rose as an example of the practice of honest and factual sharing of experience gained through different entrepreneurial initiatives.

Accounts of how entrepreneurial ventures unfolded are interesting insofar as they allow us to see how a given entrepreneur acted, both successfully and unsuccessfully, through expected results and unexpected twists and turns of the economy, in the context of a specific industry.

In such accounts there are elements that are very peculiar to the industry or to the entrepreneur and could not possibly be replicated. For example, Steve Jobs has very peculiar ways of doing things and much of his ways cannot be replicated even if we try to immerse ourselves Inside Steve's Brain (very interesting book) and in the business of social marketing there are practices that work very well but could not possibly be applied to financial services where regulatory constraints set clear limits on the nature of open community driven interactions. On the other hand, entrepreneurs' account offer elements that can be replicated and can be used in other contexts, in other industries, by different people. Very often these elements are good practices, activities, initiatives and sets of assumptions about the business. For example, Jamendo's founders could teach volumes about their initial assumption that open sharing of content under Creative Commons licensing would pave the way for new forms of distribution of and interaction on music. Their input would be valid for other forms of content and could be used to examine the impact of social media on traditional media or to carry out an analysis of the current war between Rupert Murdoch's NewsCorp, Google and Bing.

One great example of such account is Kevin Rose's presentation in which he shares his experience of practices that worked well at Digg, Twitter or WeFollow. His low key approach is great as he is giving us a perspective on what worked and what did not, to tell us how to go with the flow and listen to users in shaping a service and to honestly state he is on constant experimentation. Perhaps the most noteworthy aspect in Kevin Rose's presentation lies in his relentless drive to speak of practice and not to preach for a theory or abstract construct. Practices can be replicated elsewhere giving due consideration to the peculiar aspects of a given business or industry.

Taking your Site from One to One Million Users by Kevin Rose

View more presentations from Carsonified Team.

Great insights from Kevin Roberts

Here's a great interview from Kevin Roberts' the iconic CEO of Saatchi& Saatchi and influential creator of the concept of lovemark. Roberts' intelligent insights show that established agencies have
caught up on the core issues of today's marketing and communications,
something that will increasingly be a true competitive challenge to the
new palyers who emerged during the past 5-8 years. In fact, these new
players emerged as a result of radical change in the business
environment and for many of them success was predicated on their
ability to get to the future first. That was easy because they had no
legacy practices, but that is no longer the case and hence their
survival is entirely dependent on their ability to reach critical mass
or to remain on the "bleeding edge" of innovation in marketing and
communications.

Some highlights:

• consumer is king and an empowered one, which has led to a dramatic shift in the power balance between brands and consumers. To me that echoes my belief in the primacy of people in business, one of the central tenets of Business Quests' approach.



• there are three critical dimensions to lovemarks, none of which is discussed in MBA programs as Roberts correctly points out: mystery, sensuality and intimacy



• agencies need to move closer to consumers on an individual basis rather than in the traditional "mass market" kind of way. In doing that they will need to combine "right brain" and "left brain" thinking: analytical insight into the ways individuals "operate" and creative foresight to actually understand the consumer's behavior. "If you want to know about lions you have to go to the jungle, not to the zoo", says Roberts;



• we are in the screen age: people spend an incredible proportion in front of screens that are increasingly networked, interactive and mobile;



• 85% of consumer decisions are made in store and in an age when differences in product quality is less and less significant the emotional connection between an individual and a brand will actually tilt the balance of consumer decisions;



• "it's all about getting to the future first".

Roberts' also made a point about access to information and knowledge no longer being limited to the chosen few and therefore access alone is not a competitive edge as it used to be. To me, this means that the life of service providers like big name consulting companies, well-known agencies and other advisors has become considerably more complex. Their success hinges more on how they'll use knowledge rather than on how much access they have to it. That does create an interesting world.

Kick starting product management with scrum

The recent training on scrum has been an interesting inspiration for me. Even more importantly, it opened up new perspectives on the best way to carry out product management work and provided a framework that helps me understand a bit better things that went particularly well in past projects and by contrast why other projects were such drags.

Thinking about the pains of getting customers to feel happy with a product, I realized that product management is one of the most critical areas that is broken in many companies. In fact in many cases it's stalled and needs kick starting. So, I structured a workshop using scrum artifacts to run it in combination with other tools and disciplines. The purpose is to have participants exposed to scrum artifacts while working to get product management moving again so as to create a positive exposure and to generate motivation to use scrum once product development is reorganized to be agile. In the workshop there is a short introduction to scrum focusing mainly on the way scrum works rather than on the origins and history of it and to run that section of the workshop the excellent introduction slides by Black Marble will be used.

The structure of the workshop is in the following slides. Feel free to use this stuff: it's under BY-SA-NC Creative Commons license... In fact, I will likely run such a workshop pretty soon in one of my projects, but given the nature of the exercise I won't disclose anything about it and it will be yet another situation about which blogging is not an option... Anyway, I hope this will be useful to you and as ever I am really eager to get some feedback about this stuff, especially if there are "stories from the field" :-)

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Done!

Well, I guess it's done in the fullest sense of the word: the scrum master training is over and it's been an exciting couple of days with Jeff Sutherland and great participants. There was theory, there were facts (many) and there was also practice, where I got an opportunity to play with nice fun people like Nicolas and to benefit from the creative ideas of Denis, two team mates in a practice sequence that we blew away. One of the missions was to build a four story house of cards (that's where Denis creative use of post-its came in). Great fun. Here are the pictures.

The team's achievement (OK, the fourth level of the house is minimalistic, but on the other hand that was the description of the requirement in the story point, so why go beyond and take the risk of send everything crumbling down?) with Denis trying to hide behind a bottle of water ;-)

Nicolas, who's given us a great tip to properly achieve estimates: make sure you are absolutely clear about what "done" means... and that makes a world of difference both in terms of quality of estimates and in terms of making the interaction between team members really productive and uplifting:

The team's achievement with Laurent at the right hand side in the background. Laurent works for CRP Henri Tudor, Luxembourg's public research center, which means that Luxembourg had some serious proportion of the audience in this session of scrum master (there were 4 people from Vanksen Group, Laurent and myself - I count at least 50% from Luxembourg given the amount of time I spend there!).

Upgrading my "software"

One of the things that I most love about being a freelance professional is the freedom to choose how I go about upgrading my skills, the software that I have installed between my ears if you will. In fact, following trainings that can help me better coach and help my customers is a priority. That's one criterion for choosing and that's what led me to participate to a two-day training session organized by Xebia with Jeff Sutherland (who I find very impressive with his great combination of expertise, experience and common sense - highly recommended!) on scrum a method that he's helped invent. Scrum does seem to be the kind of methodology that truly binds agile practices of software development teams to agile product management, i.e.exactly what one needs to help customers in fast paced and high-growth business contexts. For more about Scrum this is a good link. No nonsense approach to projects, smart implementation of lessons from complex adaptive systems and action orientation are the characteristics I most appreciate in the approach. I will definitely be looking for projects and environments where to apply this stuff...

Matthieu Ricard at Google

Interesting insights with a strong scientific and philosophical basis. Also interesting is the fact that Ricard was invited to speak at Google. What would happen in the economy if we had truly happy people at work? What would the impact be on our societies and on global issues facing mankind?

Selfish business?

Not too productive these days because of an annoying flu, I've been using some of my time to look for interesting sources of inspiration and I think someone like Richard Dawkins is such a source. A long time ago he took part to a TV program aimed at correcting the misinterpretation of the thesis behind his book Selfish Gene. In that TV broadcast Dr Dawkins discusses evolution theory, game theory and the value of cooperative strategies, showing how fundamentally flawed "survival of the fittest" is and how incorrect a statement "nice guys finish last" can be. It seems like an interesting follow-up to yesterday's quote of the day and good food for thought at a time of the year when many of us are thinking about their strategy for the coming year.

Change management

Change management often puts companies and project teams in shifting sands. It requires discipline, commitment, skills, resilience, creativity, people / soft skills and a hell of a lot of common sense.
The October 2005 issue of the Harvard Business Review contains an article about "The Hard Side of Change Management". The authors report the findings of a research project they started in 1992 showing that there are four "hard factors" to take into account in any change management endeavour: project duration, integrity of performance (capabilities of project teams), commitment of senior execs and staff, effort required of employees over and above their usual activities to execute the change initiative. They call their framework DICE and it's been used by the Boston Consulting Group in 1000 change initiatives since the mid-nineties to assess change management initiatives.

What I found extremely interesting was the statement that one of the most damaging assumptions companies make in dealing with change is that if a change initiative takes a long time then it is bound to fail. The authors argue that it is rather the time span between project reviews and the managerial discipline to take the lessons / the feedback from each review that are actually more significant than overall project duration. This reminded me that GE, publicly known to be one of the best managed companies in the world, undertook no more than 5-6 change initiatives in the past quarter of a century. And while the authors recognize the importance of soft aspects of change management (which I think are fundamental), they were able to isolate the significant dimensions of the "hard side". The article also makes a very valid point on the commitment of senior execs and people. I know first hand how a change initiative fails when commitment is insufficient because I took part in a major project of this type at MasterCard Europe.

Definitely a "must read" for anyone interested in change management, which I suspect is every manager in today's world.

Succeeding by design

Many factors influence successful endeavours. Few do so as much as design. Succeeding by design is a way of doing things that does not leave essential aspects of a product, a service or an experience to chance.

Realising the importance of design is a key to achieving more better results in your endeavours, the enabler to getting more satisfaction from projects. Becoming conscious of the criticality of design is the single most important factor to create your happiness and your success day after day.

Good design is about harmony and style.

Succeeding by design requires attitude and discipline because there are a few universal rules that actually underpin successful design of anything you can think of from...

• hit products like the iMac, a Cartier fountain pen or a BMW,



• to excellent service like Amazon,



• to awesome experience like a show of Maurice Béjart.

This is a book I purchased a few months ago that summarizes all these principles of design; it deals with the 80/20 rule, the way people perceive colors, how metaphors and archetypes work to convey meaning, applications of the normal curve, the golden ratio and many many other principles, all presented in a fabulous manner.
It is a goldmine if you are interested in design and a powerful source of inspiration about things you can do to enhance your experience on the planet. Of course there are a few other things you ought to be informed of, but that will be for a future post on this blog :-)

Imperfection as a core ingredient of progress

 

 

 

   
The illusion of perfection and the often painful  quest of individuals under social influence for this "ideal". Two areas on which I could write a lot because it's been my way of doing in the past. Now I just celebrate imperfection as the best engine for progress ever invented because I think a perfect life without any imperfections would be an imperfect life almost by definition. At least it would be a life that would rob us of fantastic opportunities to evolve and grow.

However, it seems that in some of our social groups or societies the very idea of failure or imperfection is sometimes enough to cause intense reactions. Some people choose to distance themselves from other people's imperfections and therefore choose to distance themselves from the people who they see as embodying them. But a person is not their behaviour nor their performance... Other people choose to blame or cooly underline the imperfection of others... Games of the shadow as Carl Jung would perhaps say.

What prompts this post, aside from my own personal path which is perfectly imperfect or perhaps imperfectly imperfect, is an article published by a Greek doctor in the Public Library of Science (an open-access scientific journal that is worth paying a visit to). John P. Ioannidis studied why most published research findings are wrong and identified factors that seem to favour this imperfection of our world. Nice to know if we are to use this as feedback. "It can be proven that most claimed research findings are false" according to the author. Well, I believe that sentence remains accurate if you replace the words "claimed research findings" by the words "of the claims of anyone of us". And that still does not mean that we should stop thinking, claiming, arguing, writing, speaking, discussing... well, living. While I am really OK about continuous improvement, I am far less happy
with self-righteous "judges of Truth and Knowledge" as Einstein put it.

Whoever undertakes to set himself up as a judge of Truth and Knowledge is shipwrecked
by the laughter of the gods. - Albert Einstein

So let's try to celebrate all those who...

• try stuff that does not work 'cause that's how we get to stuff that works. Real life is not always like the beautiful success stories we are constantly told about ('How Mr X became an instant pop music icon' or 'The innate scientific talent of Ms Y');



• try stuff that works differently than expected 'cause that's how we got cool new products many times over;



• honor truth in practice by daring to show themselves as they are with all their imperfections 'cause they add taste to real life. An example of such a person is a guy called Thierry Janssen (meet him on his site and read the awesome stuff he writes)...

And that includes scientists who sometimes publish research that turns out to be wrong, journalists who happen to publish articles that are inaccurate, politicians who fail to implement 100% of what they promised during a campaign and many others who are only human. And yet magnificently human. Splendily imperfect and therefore truly perfect in a way. I believe every single person does their very best moment by moment to satisfy criteria that are important to them.

Now, sometimes it's useful to...

• think about the relevance of a criterion, or



• the concrete way (behaviour, action, attitude) in which someone attempts to satisfy that criterion, or



• the beliefs that underpin someone's choices, or



• whether all required capabilities are in someone's possession as they embark on an enterprise

It's all a matter of objective and intention. It's a matter of whether we choose to view failure and imperfection as a life sentence or as simple feedback that can be used to adapt ways and means. It's a matter of attitude towards our fellow human beings. At the end of the day I choose to see someone else's mistake, imperfection, failure as being also my own. That's an ingredient of progress in my opinion.

Open feedback tool

During this past year I started developing tailored training material for workshops and training sessions I am organising for my customers. The development of material for an event is always an interesting challenge, especially when customers push for a lot of content. The imperative to explain that more often than not less is more is one of the things I have to deal with on a very regular basis. Sometimes I just warn my customer of the effects of pushing for too much content and just do my best to address their requirements. At the end of the day, a customer has their set of criteria that they want to satisfy (efficiency, economy, productivity...). They also have their learning style: for some people it is learning by understanding why, for others it is learning by understanding how and for a third group it is learning by doing. I respect that because my "truth" is not above or more than their "truth".
All this leads to the issue of being able to assess how well a session went for attendees. Capturing and using feedback in a positive way is one of the keys to continuous improvement of any professional activity. Having performance indicators that mean something and can direct future action is an absolute must; of course, the value of a performance indicator lies in its business meaning, not in its existence.
So, I decided to publish under Creative Commons licence the latest version of the feedback tool I am using for the training sessions and workshops I am delivering. The criteria I decided to use make sense for me because they are derived from my definition of the experience I want for my customers when I delver a session. You are free to amend the documents below as you please; just play by the rules of the Share-Alike license of CC. The Excel document is designed to help you exploit the data collected at the end of a session. It is protected without password (so you can unprotect it if you want) and the range in which you can enter data is shaded in blue. And by the way, your feedback on this tool is most welcome!
Download 20050808_FeedbackForm.pdf
Download 20050808_FeedbackForm.doc

Download 20050808_AP_EventFeedback.xls

Know Thyself

A couple of months ago I posted a quote on this blog; it dealt with knowledge of the past and of the future and somebody asked me "what if you want to know who you are now?". Well, that's a bloody good question; one of those questions humans have been working on for ages and quite frankly I don't know whether there is only one way to do this, nor indeed whether this target is achievable in "just" one lifetime.
The oracle of Delphi has been known to provide wise insights to Ancient Greeks on a range of matters of interest to them. At the entrance of the temple of Delphi, there was an invitation and perhaps a warning for visitors: "know thyself". That sentence can be interpreted in many different ways:

1. the oracle was willing to handle all sorts of questions except those dealing with the bottomless pit of the (sometimes troubled) human soul, perhaps a warning to psychologists, analysts and psychotherapists of our times



2. knowledge of oneself was considered a basic prerequisite for visitors to be able to deal with the impacts of the revelations made by the oracle, perhaps a warning to those of us who are on a quest to accumulate knowledge, expertise and experience (evolution may also stem from shedding knowledge, habits, fears, "truths", values, rules, obligations...)



3. the endeavour was considered as the boldest that a mortal could undertake, definitely an interesting insight for all those who think of walking their personal path and perhaps living their own personal legend as Coelho might put it

The challenge of self-knowledge is huge both because in our universe change is the only constant (and that applies to our souls, minds and bodies) and because there is a large chunk of who we are that can actually escapes the span of attention of our conscient selves. Carl Gustav Jung left an invaluable legacy of wisdom with his work on the self, the inconscious, the social ego and the shadow, which I am currently studying as part of my personal R&D.
I personally used some of the concepts Jung studied and in particular methods presented by Jean Monbourquette in a great book I recommend to anyone interested in the discovery of herself. I must warn you though: if you do it properly the results may rock you a bit, so make sure you have someone to guide you or to support you in case of weakness. And there is no shame in weakness; in fact strength lies within weakness, a wisdom present in the words and thoughts of many great thinkers.
Now to use my NLP skills a bit, let me see whether the goal of achieving self-knwoledge is a "good objective" to pursue for me, that is an objective that is compliant with the conditions of proper formulation of objectives:

1. positive formulation: "I want to know who I am now" - that will do it



2. under my control: I feel it is, even though I know I will not achieve it in one day



3. can be tested: by drawing a diagram showing the different aspects of myself and listing the attributes of my social self as well as those of my shadowy side I will be able to test my current knowledge of myself



4. in context: here and now, all contexts of my life



5. ecology: I don't see any disadvantage in achieving this goal, but to be frank there is no way I can know whether there is any; it's a leap of faith.



6. ultimate objective: harmony, evolution, growth



7. price to pay: I will spend time to investigate, invest energy in facing my fears (see the prayer of the Bene Gesserit of Dune) and devote attention to the subtle messages of my unconscious part



8. coherence for me: knowledge of myself is definitely in line with who I want to be in the life



9. does the achievement of the goal eliminate the problem? - what was the problem agin? No, just kidding. For me it definitely does and I don't see any other more suitable, elegant or short way to do it: I don't want to spend the rest of my life with someone I don't know, and who I am spending most time with but my self?

So, yes, this is an objective for me. Actually I think it is a fundamental prerequisite for just about every single aspect of my life, whether it is dealing with people at work, hopefully someday raising children, perhaps coaching individuals to the achievement of their full personal potential, writing, painting, meditating or "simply" being a citizen of the universe. And I do think it is a path to personal harmony, even though there may be a few quite intense moments of unexpected discovery... But then again, if everything that happens was to fall in the "expected" category, life would not be quite as exciting to live. Enjoy your path, whatever you choose to let it be.

Certified NLP Practioner

I am very proud and pleased to inform you that I earned my certification as NLP Practioner on 13 July 2005. It's been an intense, interesting, challenging and deeply human experience for me, for which I thank the people who put together this training programme, namely Alain Moenaert and Anne Piérard at Ressources.
Over the course of the past 6 months, we have been challenged to understand and immediately apply the tools of neurolinguistic programming; and to apply them on real-life cases. So I also wish to thank from the bottom of my heart all my classmates who provided real cases from their lives as I provided cases and issues from my own. I thank those who helped me discover and learn as well as those who helped me develop new ways of seeing. From a systemic standpoint this group was just fantastic. At the same time I feel for those who did not earn their diploma this time and wish them lots of progress and discovery until their next attempt at something as challenging. I am a believer in one of the basic tenets of NLP: "there is no failure, only feedback". And I know from my life so far that feedback can sometimes be expensive, painful or dreadful... I believe there is a reason for everything that happens in our lives though.
NLP provides a framework for understanding human behaviour, emotions and thought patterns. I consider that NLP has brought unprecedented discipline and structure to psychology. The framework makes it possible for practioners to use tools developed in other branches of modern psychology in a very operational manner. What I really like about it is that systematic exploration and understanding of the way an individual human being "functions" leads almost immediately to actions that can be taken to achieve desired results. For more about NLP, please visit Wikipedia.

NLP - phase 2

Today is the first of four days of my second phase of training in Neuro Linguistic Programming. It's ben a month now since I attended the foundations class. All I can say is that I have seen enormous benefits in my projects and in my daily life from applying what I was taught during the foundations class. I was lucky to have a fantastic trainer and to be following the training with an exceptional bunch of highly motivated individuals.

The benefits are already enormous. What I really like about this part of my training programme of 2005 is that what I learn is applicable in a number of fields in my activity including my personal R&D project dealing with organisational design. I believe that the tools provided by NLP at the level of individuals and team communication can be applied in ways that leads to desired effects in terms of organisational structure. Now I must research this and test the statement in field conditions.

For me NLP can also provide tools to help talent emerge from the inert industrial age organigrams and dry workflow / process diagrams. I am committed to show that in the Information Age Talent Rules. For me people make the world go round (or not).

Edge of Chaos

Last year I bought and read "Surfing the Edge of Chaos" for a paper I was writing. I am currently reading it again as part of personal research on organisational design for the information age. I strongly recommend it if you are interested in a fresh way of looking at companies and business.

This book made me realise why organigrams, workflows, procedures and working instructions are sometimes so difficult to really implement in a company. I personally believe that the more a company makes use of information processing devices, the more it allows its people to interact in novel ways that often do not fit in traditional organizational molds. I even remember one of my employers in the business of payment cards (a priceless experience...) who used to distribute hard copies of the company's organigram once a month. These documents where no sooner printed than they were out of date and on top of that they did not reflect the real dynamics of decision making (or decision non-making sometimes). On decisions, you can read another piece I published earlier.

So for a professional manager, I guess one of the questions to be examined is "how do I organize that part of the business for which I am in charge so as to fully leverage dynamic interactions within my teams and with the rest of the company in accomplishing my business objectives?" And this is where it may be useful to think of a company not as a set of boxes or matrix-structures or silos, but perhaps as a set of agents that operate following certain rules and who interact in various ways to assemble as project teams or temporary workgroups and disband once the mission is accomplished.

Why NLP?

Some of the people who know me asked me: "what the heck are you doing learning about NLP?" Well, it's a good question. I have been involved for a number of years in IT projects (trying) to bridge the gap between users of tools and makers of tools (IT geeks & gurus) and I hold an Master of Science in Management... So where does NLP fit in the picture?

I guess the answer is simple:
"people make the world go round (or not)"

Another way to put it would be "Talent Makes Capital Dance" as Ridderstrale & Nordström show in Funky Business. From experience I formed the opinion that over 80% of unsuccessful endeavours are rooted in "people" problems, interpersonal issues... in other words lack of ability of all of us to interrelate in a good enough way.

At the same time, we live in a world that is blessed (and sometimes cursed) with the technical capabilities to develop interactions (this blog is an example, email is another one, short messages on cellular phones...) And because I strongly feel that developments in our world happen for a reason ( I even believe that in the long run it's for a positive reason that brings more Harmony to the universe, but that is another topic), I interpret the existence of these tools as a response to something very essential in human nature: the need of a person to relate to other people. This is one of the foundations of team endeavours, which are enhanced when individuals are able to interrelate better day after day. And when it comes to designing an organization, to agreeing on strategy, to transforming decisions and words into action... in short to walking the talk (which is key to good management in my opinion), it's people who make things happen.

Human organizations (NGOs, political parties, sports clubs, companies, entrepreneurship networks...) do not exist because somebody drew a beautiful org chart, or because thick binders with ISO procedures are printed or revisited twice a year before audits of the quality management system... And organizations don't just march when somebody barks marching orders or when headquarters send out directives... These are to some extent things of the past: can anyone seriously think of managing a team or a project today by applying the principles of Frederick Taylor? No, because our world is moving out of the era of "mass logic", of "bell curves" and "standard consumers", giving more breathing space (and great opportunities if you ask me) to

• individuals not organisations / entities



• project teams not frozen hierarchies / bureaucracies and



• communities of practice not once-obtained-never-questioned diplomas

No, because our world needs talent, I mean indecently good talent, and talent does not bow to orders and barks (especially from less talented people).

Of course, there is always the old saying: "it's who you know, not what you know"... That has always been there and will never disappear. The bureaucratic system was invented among other reasons to eliminate this factor... Still the tide is turning in favour of talent and networks of talented people.

So anything that improves my ability to relate to other people, to help them interrelate better, to unearth enthusiasm that will make a business perform beyond its people's wildest dreams, to inspire... Anything that makes me more able to listen and truly understand my prospects, anything that helps me understand better user requirements when working as an analyst... Anything that helps me achieve these goals is good for me. And these goals are amongst the most central to good management in my opinion.

But that's just my own very personal truth and I don't expect anyone to endorse it. I just share it with those who dare asking good questions :-)

"A man is but the product of his thoughts: what he thinks he becomes"
Mahatma Gandhi