Practicing these 5 principles could help your organization improve profitability by 82 percent

Learned a lot lending an editorial hand here:

InsideHR, July 31, 2018

by Madhura Chakrabarti





People analytics has emerged as an essential competency for professionals across the HR function. One major reason: profitability. Last year, a Bersin research study, which included a survey of 900 HR and business leaders across a wide range of companies, found that organisations with the highest level of people analytics maturity reported a three-year average profit that was 82 per cent higher than those with the lowest level of maturity. Unfortunately, our research also revealed that only two per cent of the organisations surveyed has reached the highest level of people analytics maturity.

One big reason why so few companies have a mature people analytics capability is the lack of data literacy in HR. Many HR departments have core people analytics teams, but the expertise they contain is siloed. Our research found that the HR staff in nearly 60 per cent of organisations do not yet have basic data literacy skills.

One demonstrated solution is upskilling. HR practitioners need knowledge and skills to use data and analytics. When we looked at how organisations with the highest level of people analytics maturity attained that status, we found that their success at scaling data literacy across HR was supported by five action principles...read the rest here.

Chaos Is Not a Viable Leadership Style

strategy+business, July 19, 2018

by Theodore Kinni

Thirty years ago, the business world had a fling with chaos theory — the idea that although nonlinear systems, such as markets and companies, are inherently unpredictable, some order exists within them nonetheless. Tom Peters told us that chaotic markets harbored valuable business opportunities. Meg Wheatley said that chaotic companies were more adaptive, creative, and resilient than hierarchical companies. But I don’t recall anyone recommending chaos as a leadership style.

To be sure, there are prominent leaders today who adopt chaos as their modus operandi. Take Brandon Truaxe, the CEO of Deciem, a fast-growing Canada-based beauty products company that expects to record US$300 million in sales this year.

Since January 2018, here are a few things he has done. Truaxe fired his social media team and started posting strange messages on Deciem’s Instagram account, including, as described in Elle, “closeup videos of him talking disjointedly about the popular skin-care line’s vision, a river flowing around a mass of garbage, and a photo of a dead sheep, captioned with a promise to never test products on animals.” He fired co-CEO Nicola Kilner, which prompted chief financial officer Stephen Kaplan to quit. (In July, Kilner rejoined the company.) Truaxe also emailed the company’s employees, “I’m done with DECIEM and EVERYTHING. No need to discuss.”




Illustration by Dina Belenko / Alamy

One big benefit of being a chaotic leader is that you get a lot of attention. In this social media–driven, attention-addled, 24/7 world, it could be that the quantity of attention matters more than its content. Indeed, even as media and customer reactions to Truaxe’s actions turned negative, the company’s products continued selling briskly. “All they’re (his actions) doing is creating more sales for me,” Truaxe told WWD.

Well, maybe. But before you adopt a chaotic leadership style for its Barnum-like marketing effects, you probably should pause to consider what it does to the people and organizations that you are charged with leading. Chaotic leaders are like Loki, the trickster of Norse mythology, who sows the seeds of confusion and discord...read the rest here.

The Enthusiasms of Tom Peters

strategy+business, July 10, 2018

by Theodore Kinni

A couple of years ago, prior to an interview with Tom Peters, I visited his website to see what he was up to. I found the answer in a gargantuan 4,000-slide PowerPoint deck that Peters titled, with his trademark typographic hyperbole, “THE WORKS.” By way of introduction to the deck, he wrote, “Make no mistake…THIS IS A 17-CHAPTER BOOK…which happens to be in PowerPoint format.”

The Excellence Dividend punctuates that claim almost as well as the ! that Peters adopted as his corporate logo after two years of noodling 25 years ago. The paperback is an annotated version of “The Works” — a fleshed-out outline that frequently depends on fonts to make its points.

The CEO’s first commandment, per Peters?
“CEO Job #1 is setting — and micro-nourishing, one day, one hour, one minute at a time — an effective people-truly-first, innovate-or-die, excellence-or-bust corporate culture.
The key words in my declaration are…
one day, one hour, one minute at a time.”

The best way to keep up in a fast-changing world?
“READ! READ!! READ!!! READ!!!!”

The world’s most underserved market?
“W = >2 x (C + I) = $28T
Women’s Market Size = More Than Two Times China Plus India Combined = $28 Trillion”

Swallowing such a book whole is exhausting, mainly because it is delivered with such brio and packed with enough insight and advice to keep you busy for the next 50 years. When I review a book, I fold page corners, underline in ink, and scrawl marginalia. I folded so many pages in The Excellence Dividend that its top right corner is half again as thick as the rest of the book. I ran a new pen dry while reading it; at first I thought the pen was defective.

As you may be starting to suspect, The Excellence Dividend is a 450-page boldbardment of ideas, facts, figures, memes, and manifestos. Peters calls it the sum total of his 50-year career, more than half of which he’s spent as a leading light of management thought. Read the rest here.