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Welcome ...
As the economy struggles and more companies are forced to lay off workers and cut any remaining unnecessary costs, numbers of challenges appear which are not so obviously present when things are going well. This month’s Decisive Views Newsletter takes a look at a couple of the key ones as well as including our normal leadership thought and monthly book review.
Confronting and Changing the Status Quo
How many times have you come across a team whose solution to a problem is to do the same as they have been doing but faster or longer. That may work some of the time but, as competitors also improve, the margin to be gained reduces while the effort to find further efficiencies increases. The challenge for all leaders is to know when and how to confront and change the status quo.
That certainly does not mean throwing out all that has come before and losing what may already be providing the base of your success. Indeed, radical change may be as dangerous as doing nothing. So maybe part of confronting the status quo means spotting the opportunities to get your people to look beyond the confines of their own work to find ways to improve.
Children will always challenge the process, “Why do I need to do that, go there, eat this?”. Perhaps the nub of the challenge is to develop your culture so that people feel able to do just that, to question without fear, to suggest without being laughed at. The US General George Paton famously said “Don’t tell people how to do things, tell them what to do and let them surprise you with their results.”
Our leadership and team development training looks at this and other related challenges and can help your team or organisation confront the status quo.
The Problem with Risk
The failure of businesses to manage their risks is mentioned alongside many of the ongoing business, and banking, problems. It is not that they don’t have risk processes in place, but that executive managers chose to ignore them.
Why then is it that existing risk management processes often fail to properly inform the decision makers? Perhaps it is that the phrase ‘risk management’ carries with it the belief that it is about constraining or preventing an organisation from doing what it wants, rather than helping it. As such it may be that some, although clearly not all, organisations look on it as an interference with their management processes.
So what can we do to ensure that our organisational decisions are underpinned by an understanding of risk, both the threats and opportunities? Why not work with your own executive or senior management to develop a robust decision process which allows you the freedom to think as broadly as you want, but also gathered the detail essential to allow you to know, with confidence, that you are making the best decisions available to you at the time.
Fraud
Open any newspaper and there will be at least one high profile case of suspected fraud. In the last couple of months we have had Bernard Madoff and Sir Allen Stanford. In between there have been numbers of other large scale fraud investigations across the world. They affect us all, because they affect our economy, but they also highlight the real risk of fraud in all organisations. In a timely manner, it is perhaps important to understand that the incidence of fraud tends to increase as economic conditions deteriorate.
When did you last review your counter fraud controls. Why not spend ten minutes thinking about it right now. Does your organisation possess assets which somebody/anybody could attempt to acquire fraudulently?, What controls do you have in place to secure those assets?, Do any people ever have the opportunity to commit the fraud?
If you are worried about your counter fraud controls and want some help, why not give Decisive Operations a call. We can move quickly to help you review how appropriate your existing controls are and help to build improved controls and practices if required.
Recommended Reads
Bill McFarlan’s easy to read “Drop the Pink Elephant” is a guide to personal and business communication. At a time when banks and numbers of other businesses are criticised for failing to communicate clearly, and appropriately with stakeholders, this book provides entertaining, provocative, simple advice on communications which work.
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