Effectiveness is a miracle

I am busy preparing with colleagues a program on transformational leadership. Pretty pretentious. What does really transform a business, a mission, a work situation?
I remember a client, a Brazilian engineering firm, who, in the seventies, spent 1,5 million dollars on a motivation program for its employees by a prominent US consultancy firm. What difference did it make? Half a year later, bosses and employees couldn't tell.
I think of seminars I attended by famous authors. What did I really learn from them? From a lecture by Carl Rogers I just remembered one example he gave. That example stuck in my mind and taught me something.
I recently met a Finnish colleague. In the early eighties I gave a workshop for his new consultancy firm how to do strategic consultancy. He remembered only two things I taught them. Interestingly, those were exactly the only two items I remembered teaching them. At least, I didn't teach them wrong things, because they became the premium strategic consultancy firm in Finland. But the encounter reinforced my general impression that teaching that is not part of the real daily work, has a moot chance of being remembered or, more important, having effectively improved practical work. Therefore, I am a great fan of Action Learning. If people have been to a 3-year MBA-program and they are asked years later what it meant to them, quite a few mention first and foremost the contacts and business relations they won, not the course content.

Though I don't come across as a particularly modest person, I have always felt very modest about the real and durable effects of my seminars, training programs and consultancy assignments. I am relieved when I hear years later that at least some people had some real benefit.
Few subjects are more important than leadership. Few subjects are more slippery and more intangible. So to start a program on leadership that really will make work situations more effective, more meaningful, more rewarding and more successful, is pretty pretentious.
I want to concentrate on the few interventions and exercises that at least have helped some managers or some consultants in my experience. I did (and I still do sometimes) with a colleague a program called 'Management and Intuition.' How more intangible can you get? To my amazement, I got the highest evaluations on any management program I ever did, on the item I expected it least: practical applicability. That taught me something.
Once a prospective client asked an other manager what kind of a consultant I was. The answer was "a no-nonsense consultant." That was a great compliment, especially because I deal in intangibles: strategy, mission, leadership. If a new type of gearbox in a car is nonsense, it wont survive the test phase. But in consultancy and coaching the difference between meaningful and meaningless, effective and ineffective is much more difficult to establish. And it may change between one person and the next, one situation and the next.

I want to present a program that is effective. That may be pretentious, but that's my ambition.
I think I am about ready. I will blog and tweet about it when it's presentable.

Meanwhile, if you have any experience of a lesson you learned that really changed your way of working, share it in a reaction to this blog. Others may learn from it, I may learn from it.

The March of Folly - about power and sex

I read Barbara Tuchman's The March of Folly right after it was published in 1984. I reread it now. Being a fan of 'good government' - today often changed in 'good governance' - it remains interesting to read her shortlist of misgovernment:

1. Tyranny or oppression
2. Excessive ambition
3. Incompetence or decadence
4. Folly or perversity

Tyranny and oppression we can  read about each day and we can watch the uprisings against it, especially now in the Arab world. Excessive ambition, also known since Paul Kennedy as imperial overstretch, we know mainly from the US. On a personal level, many more examples can be found. Decadence doesn't survive too easily in today's interconected world, incompetence is rampant. And as to folly, think of the Peace Process (yes that one). This reminds about an old quip about processes: a process is anything that is almost succeeding for a long time.
Tuchmann defines folly as grounded in preconceptions, contrary to common sense, rational inference and cogent advice. Government is it favorite field, because power not only corrupts, it also blinds. She sees lust for power as the chief trigger of political folly. Government remains the paramount area of folly because there men seek power over others - only to lose it over themselves.

Combine this with the often noted connection between sex and power: powerful men are usually oversexed. Think of that IMF-chief (whose name I strangely can't remember right now, although it is blaring all day over the news). Now the relationship between sex and folly we don't need to explore. Even love, that much nobler emotion, can blind us easily. Anyway, power, sex and folly are a potent cocktail. Good for storytelling, bad for real people. Now what again is the name of that Italian prime minister?
Are powerful women also oversexed? Probably often, but they are less aggressive about it - and they usually don't need to be.
Anyway, the March of Folly has a twin sister: The Waltz of Folly.