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[post_content] => The Irish Management Institute report Closing the Gap published at the end of 2010 found that a "long tail" of companies with poor management practices is damaging Ireland's competitiveness.
Research carried out internationally and in Ireland in 2009 by the management consultants McKinsey & Co. and the London School of Economics has identified day-to-day management practices that are associated with better firm profitability and performance.
They have found, perhaps unsurprisingly, that the standard of management varies between companies and indeed between countries.
Their ongoing study employs a 5 point scale to benchmark management practices in an organisation. The average of all organisations studied in a country provides an overall management score for that country.
Ireland's score of 2.77 shows that there is a considerable gap between overall management practices here - a score of 3 represents having good practice processes and practices in place in each area and a score of 5 represents having best practice processes in place which are constantly monitored and evolving. Our score sees us rank behind Germany, the UK, Italy and Poland, but ahead of India and China in terms. The US tops the table, with a rating of 3.30.
What is troubling for Ireland is that there is a concentration of low scores; 19% of businesses have an overall rating of less than two meaning that very few profitable practices are in place. Firms in this tail of low scores are generally indigenous small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs).
Maintaining and improving competitiveness in Ireland relies on improvements to profitability and performance at the firm level which the evidence suggests can be achieved through better management. There is good news here too; Ireland has an advantage in the quality of our workforce and in the comparative size of the 25-40 age cohort. There is an opportunity to improve management skills in this area of the population, particularly within small to medium sized firms, can and will create jobs and will drive productivity growth.
[post_title] => Closing the Management Gap in Ireland
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[post_date] => 2016-09-20 14:18:38
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[post_content] => Sydney Finkelstein is the Steven Roth Professor of Management and Director of the Center for Leadership at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College, where he teaches courses on Leadership and Strategy. He is also the Faculty Director of the flagship Tuck Executive Program, and has experience working with executives at a number of other prestigious universities around the world. His latest
bestselling book is SUPERBOSSES: How Exceptional Leaders Master the Flow of Talent. He will be a keynote speaker at the IMI National Management Conference on 29th September 2016.
IMI: Based on your current work – if you only had 6 words of advice to give a business – what would they be?
SF: Great leaders create other great leaders.
IMI: What does this mean?
SF: Imagine a world where the work you did really mattered. Where the person who you call your boss changed your life by helping you accomplish more than you ever thought possible. Where your own opportunities would multiply in ways you may have been afraid to even dream of. That’s the world of “superbosses”, leaders with an incredible track record of generating world-class talent time and again. By systematically studying business legends and pop culture icons like Lorne Michaels, Ralph Lauren, George Lucas, Larry Ellison, Miles Davis, Charlie Mayfield, and Alice Waters, what superbosses actually do comes into focus. And anyone can do these same things. Superbosses identify, motivate, coach and leverage others in remarkably consistent, yet highly unconventional and unmistakably powerful ways. Superbosses aren’t like most bosses; they follow a playbook all their own. They are unusually intense and passionate — eating, sleeping, and breathing their businesses and inspiring others to do the same. They look fearlessly in unusual places for talent and interview them in colorful ways. They create impossibly high work standards that push protégées to their limits. They partake in an almost inexplicable form of mentoring, one that occurs spontaneously and with no clear rules. They lavish responsibility on inexperienced protégées, taking risks that seem scary and foolish to outsiders. When the time is right superbosses may even encourage star talent to leave so they can then become part of a strategic network of acolytes in the industry.
IMI: Where should we look for further information?
SF: I put together a list of interesting articles related to this subject:
Superbosses aren't afraid to delegate their biggest decisionsThe rise of the superbossesGeorge Lucas: Management Guru?The Power of Feeling UnthreatenedHire People and Get Out of the WaySydney Finkelstein is a keynote speaker at the IMI National Management Conference taking place on Thursday 29th of September. To register for this event, please click here.
[post_title] => "Great leaders create other great leaders" Six Word Wisdom from Sydney Finkelstein
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[post_date] => 2016-09-28 11:32:28
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[post_content] => Frances Ruane served as Director of the ESRI from 2006 to 2015. She previously taught in the Dept of Economics at TCD, and earlier in her career she work at Queens University in Canada and at the Central Bank of Ireland and the IDA. In Ireland, her current activities include chair of the Interdepartmental Group on Making Work Pay for People with Disabilities at the Department of Social Welfare, membership of the Public Interest Committee of KPMG, and an Honorary Professor in the Department of Economics at Trinity College, where she contributes to the MSc in Economic Policy Studies. She is also a Research Affiliate at the ESRI and a member of the Royal Irish Academy.
IMI: Based on your current work – if you only had 6 words of advice to give a business – what would they be?
FR: Look positively beyond the immediate.
IMI: What does this mean?
FR: After a period of rapid growth, the global financial crisis meant that Irish businesses had to concentrate on handling immediate challenges. They managed that disruption well and this contributed to the strength of Ireland’s recovery. But the focus on the immediate has left many businesses with legacy issues (debt burdens, under-investment in innovation, poor staff morale). And now businesses need to prepare for the medium term when we discover what is really meant by ‘Brexit means Brexit’. Forward looking businesses leaders need now to ask: what could Brexit mean for my market and company? Where am I exposed to risk and how can I mitigate it?
[post_title] => "Look positively beyond the immediate" Six Word Wisdom from Frances Ruane
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Yves Morieux is a Senior Partner and Managing Director at The Boston Consulting Group, a BCG fellow and director of the BCG Institute for Organisation.Yves' Six Simple Rules of Smart Simplicity, has helped CEOs with their most critical challenges, for instance, moving their companies from quasi bankruptcy to industry leadership.He will be a keynote speaker at the IMI National Management Conference on 8 October 2015.
1. What is the chief thing that managers/leaders get wrong about what effective leadership means today, in your experience?
Managers often don't understand what their teams really do. They understand the structures, the processes, the systems. But this is not what people do – it is what people are supposed to do. A company's performance or a department's performance is what it is because people do what they do, because of their actions, decisions and interactions – their "behaviours". Because we don't understand what people do, we create solutions – new structures, processes, systems, scorecards, incentives, training, and communication – that don't address the root causes.
We don't solve the problem, we simply add more internal complicatedness. And the more complicatedness we create, the less we understand what is really happening, the thicker the smoke screen, and then the more rules we add. This is the vicious circle of modern management. This is why the first rule of what I call Smart Simplicity is "understand what people really do at work."
2. Do leadership principles work best when understood as a top-down process, or is this understanding of leadership out of touch with the modern workplace?
From collaboration to performance to employee engagement, everything we know about work is changing – but our businesses are seemingly slow to respond. People are more attuned to sharing posts, writing blogs, and providing instant feedback through ‘likes’ and ‘favourites’ than they are to completing surveys, so why does our approach to employee engagement still centre on a set of fixed statements and a rating scale?
In their personal lives people collaborate naturally with those around them and have an amazing propensity to share even when there is no immediate benefit to them, hence the success of crowdsourcing sites like Wikipedia. So, why do we spend so much time and energy in organisations on encouraging people to practice these seemingly natural behaviours at work?
The challenge for businesses is to disrupt every process and practice in the organisation by asking: Why does it exist? What are we trying to achieve? If we were to start the organisation from scratch, would we choose to create this? And perhaps most tellingly of all, would this practice exist if we trusted our employees?
3. A core feature of your approach to leadership and better workplace productivity is the concept of ‘Smart Simplicity’. How does this play out in a world where the data available to companies now – be it through consumer feedback, predictive modelling, data analytics etc – has surged? Does the effective use of all of this data necessitate more complexity, rather than simplicity?
The environment is more complex – the problems to resolve in order to attract and retain customers, in order to create value and build competitive advantage – are more demanding than in the past. This is a fact of life. Based on our analysis, complexity has been multiplied by 6 over the last 60 years.
The real problem is not business complexity. The real problem is internal complicatedness – the solutions companies typically use to try to respond to this complexity: a proliferation of cumbersome structures, interfaces, coordination bodies and committees, procedures, rules, metrics, key performance indicators and scorecards. Based on our analysis this complicatedness has been multiplied by 35! This complicatedness creates obstacles to productivity and innovation.
People spend their time writing reports, in meetings. There is more and more work on work, and less and less work! A lot of data, a lot of information is always good. The difficulty – and the value-added – is sense-making, to derive meaning and knowledge from the data, so that companies can interpret and act on the data. But complicatedness makes it increasingly difficult for companies to make sense of the data. There is at the same time a data indigestion and a knowledge deprivation.
4. When it comes to Irish businesses, how do their workplace dynamics compare with other countries and what would be your principal advice to them on what to change?
Irish businesses face the same problems as other mature economies. They need to manage the new business complexity without getting complicated. Smart Simplicity is not about becoming simplistic, we cannot ignore the new complexity of business. This is why I refer to "Smart" simplicity. The six rules of Smart Simplicity concern Irish businesses because Irish businesses are also confronted to a greater complexity.
5. Should business leaders focus more on improving employee productivity per se, or should this be balanced with also ensuring that staff are happy at what they do and not afraid to be creative? How does one strike an effective balance?
We must not strike a balance here! We must break the compromise between productivity and happiness or creativity. We must not improve one at the expense of the other. In fact organizational complicatedness hinders productivity while demotivating people and making them suffer at work. They lose direction, purpose and meaning in the labyrinth. They have to work longer and longer, harder and harder, but on less and less value-adding activities.
This is why Smart Simplicity and removing complicatedness simultaneously increases performance and satisfaction at work: because you remove the root-cause common obstacles that hinder both.
6. What do you think are the key organisational challenges that face a country like Ireland over the next few years, for both business managers/leaders and their staff?
Organizations are going through a deep revolution in their ways of working. We are going through a new economic revolution, and every economic revolution entails and organizational revolution. The organizational solutions on which we have built profitable growth over the last 30 years are obsolete. Irish managers and employees will have to invent new ways of working.
Smart Simplicity provides guidelines for this, but what mainly matters is boldness and courage in breaking with conventional wisdom. Irish people are certainly well placed in this respect!
Yves Morieux is a keynote speaker at the IMI National Management Conference taking place on Thursday 8 October. Apologies but this event has now reached maximum capacity.
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IMI Insights
29th Jan 2018
Related Articles
Closing the Management Gap in Ireland
"Great leaders create other great leaders" Six Word Wisdom from Sydney Finkelstein
"Look positively beyond the immediate" Six Word Wisdom from Frances Ruane
"Understand what people do at work" Six Word Wisdom from Yves Morieux
5 Top Tips for Being Focused in Work
People spend almost 47% of their waking hours thinking about something other than what they’re doing: we are spending almost half our time on autopilot.
Have you ever had this experience? You arrive at the office with a clear plan for the day – before you know it, the day is over and you are on your way back home.
Nine or 10 hours have passed, but you’ve accomplished only a few of your priorities. More worryingly, you can’t remember exactly what you did all day.
If this sounds familiar, don’t worry. You’re not alone. A 2010 study by Harvard University psychologists suggests that people spend almost 47% of their waking hours thinking about something other than what they’re doing: we are spending almost half our time on autopilot.
Lack of focus is common in the ‘attention economy’ (Photo source)
We have now entered the ‘attention economy’. In the attention economy, the ability to maintain focus and concentration is every bit as important as technical or management skills.
We need need to absorb a growing flood of information in order to make good decisions.
However, our brains have not been designed to cope with this and hence we suffer from stress, which impacts both our mental and physical well-being.
The good news is that you can train your brain to focus better by incorporating mindfulness exercises throughout your day.
Based on our experience with thousands of leaders in over 250 organisations, here are five easy tips to help you become more focused, productive and effective: .
1. Practice 10 minutes of mindfulness training each day
Most people find mornings the best time to practice mindfulness, but you can do it any time of day.
Close your eyes, relax and sit upright. Place your full focus on your breath. Simply maintain an ongoing flow of attention on the experience of your breathing: inhale, exhale; inhale; exhale.
To help focus on your breathing, count silently at each exhalation. Any time you find your mind distracted, simply release the distraction by returning your focus to your breath.
Most importantly, allow yourself to enjoy these few minutes. .
2. Avoid reading email first thing in the morning.
Our minds are generally most focused, creative and expansive in the morning. This is the time to do focused, strategic work and have important conversations.
If you read your email as soon as you get up, your mind will get sidetracked and you’ll begin the slide toward ‘reactive leadership’.
Making email your first task of the day wastes the opportunity to use your mind at its highest potential. Try waiting at least 30 minutes, or even an hour, after you get to work before checking your inbox. .
3. Turn off all notifications . The notification alarms on your phone, tablet and laptop are significant contributors to reactive leadership.
They keep you mentally busy and put you under pressure, thereby triggering reactionary responses. They cause damage far more than they add value.
Try this: For one week, turn off all email notifications on all devices. Only check your email once every hour, or as often as responsibly needed for your job. But don’t compulsively check messages as they roll into your inbox. .
4. Stop multitasking
It keeps your mind full, busy and under pressure. It makes you reactive.
Try to focus on a single task and then notice when you find your mind drifting off to another task — a sign that your brain wishes to multitask.
When this happens, mentally shut down all the superfluous tasks entering your thoughts while maintaining focus on the task at hand. .
5. Team-up to stay on track
Consider engaging one of your peers to do the same thing. This gives you a chance to assess each other, which can be both helpful and motivating.
Schedule a check-in with yourself and your buddy – every two weeks for example – to assess how well you’re doing and to share experiences and differences you have noticed.
Mindfulness is not about living life in slow motion. It’s about enhancing focus and awareness both in work and in life.
It’s about stripping away distractions and staying on track with individual and organisational goals. Take control of your own mindfulness: test these tips for 14 days and see what they do for you.
This article was originally published on Fora.ie. Rasmus Hougaard will be speaking at the IMI Membership Launch Day on 30th January. The IMI Membership Launch Day is invite only for IMI Members. If you are interested in becoming a member, please contact the IMI Membership Team.
Yves Morieux is a keynote speaker at the 
