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Now that's what I call a book delivery...

I buy a lot of books - maybe three or four deliveries a week arrive to my home office from Amazon.com. But even for me, it's unusual to have 300 books arrive at once, as happened last week. And it was especially exciting to discover they all had my name on them as the author.

Julie was back in the UK when the advance review copies of 'Predictable Success' arrived (visiting her favorite nieces of course), and I got so excited I had to go get my trusty Flip and record the event for posterity...



Since then I've calmed down (a little) and even managed to send out the copies promised to the winners of our 'Help us choose the cover' competition.

Next week we start sending out review copies to TV, radio, newspaper, magazine and blog book reviewers. If you would like a copy to review in your publication, web site or other media, just send us details and we'll get a copy out to you.

Boredom - The Leadership Killer

About half the executives I meet are in the wrong job - they either shouldn't be in a leadership position at all, or the position they're in is a mismatch for their talents and skills. (This is not always the executive's fault, exclusively - many have been herded into their mismatched position as a result of a 'battleground promotion', or have simply fulfilled the Peter Principle).

Of the other half - those executives who are truly competent, and in the right role for their skills - I'd say only about ten percent demonstrate true leadership on a sustained basis. Some show leadership occasionally when a crisis demands it, some show leadership in every circumstance other than a crisis, some start out leader-ly and watch it dissipate, while others simply never try.

Of those that remain (10% of the competent executives, say 5% of the total executive pool), the most frustrating executive to watch (and work with) is the individual who clearly has the capacity for leadership, but who blows it for a simple, common, infuriating reason - a low boredom threshold.

Over and over again, the same pattern repeats: a good leader emerges - sometimes even a great one, the leader develops a loyal and committed team, and exciting things start to happen. Then exciting things stop happening. It never becomes totally clear why, the team (and the leader) get frustrated, and one or more careers get put on standby. Additionally, major resources may have been burned off by the leader taking the organization down a series of cul-de-sacs that are expensive to get out of, and certainly much time and effort will have been wasted.

Truth is, the reason why those 'exciting things stop happening' and the organization gets derailed is incredibly prosaic: the leader's low boredom threshold torpedoes sustained forward momentum. Impatient for success, bored with the mundane and uninspired by routine, the leader becomes an arsonist, carrying a can of gasoline and throwing a lighted match at anything not burning brightly enough. Consistency of routine is traded for the pyrotechnics of newness, adherence to process is sacrificed to the thrill of a hail mary, and change is valued for its own sake, rather than as a tool for delivering results.

Here are a few indicators that you may be boredom-bombing your own leadership:

Monday mornings you play 'shake-em-up'. Your team members increasingly dread the monday morning meetings where you lay out the next new intuitive or call for 'radical new thinking' about existing initiatives.

You have unplanned meetings with whoever is available. That 'great idea' you just had can't wait for the next executive team meeting, so you grab whoever's walking past your office door to flesh it out.

Agendas are for sissies. Now that you do actually have everyone in an executive team meeting, it's too good an opportunity to fire-hose them with your thoughts on, well, whatever you want, rather than actually work through the agenda.

You're incredibly passionate about... ...well, what month is it? Each month there's a great new business model or strategic tool or business insight or vision or phrase or word that if only everyone will truly 'get it' will revolutionize how we do business.

You complain that your team members are universally poor at being accountable. It's highly unlikely that you're suffering the statistical misfortune of a 100% strike-out rate in having un-accountable employees. It's much more likely that they can't practice accountability because you keep moving the goalposts.

The New Rules For Managers in 2010

Although it will undoubtedly be better than 2009, this next year is still going to be tough for many organizations. It's going to be even tougher - perhaps even disastrously so - if your managers don't understand how deeply the last economic cycle has changed the rules of effective management.

In this half-hour webinar, I explain how the rules of effective management have changed and what it means for you and your managers.

(Note: This is a remote recording of a screencast given to a group of managers, so the recording quality is only average, and questions at the end have been edited out for confidentiality.)



Not seeing the video above this text? Click here to view 'The New Rules for Managers' from Les McKeown on Vimeo.

China doesn't matter - here's what does. (And if you don't care about China, read this anyway.)

During the last two days I counted 15 articles in the New York Times and Wall Street Journal that referenced China and its potential impact on business. Nothing unusual about that - the press has to fill its pages with something, and there's a regular and consistent tendency to lock on to some geographical area and a timeframe and make an issue of it - India was the happening place in the 'aughties', before that countries as disparate as Japan, Ireland and Singapore had their time in the sun, now it's China's turn.

The truth is, China doesn't matter to your business. Nor did India, Japan, Ireland or Singapore. That's not to say China won't have a major impact - of course it will. China represents both an enormous potential competitive risk and an enormous potential market for many industries and individual organizations. And therein lies the point.

As a high-level decision-maker, you may or may not need to respond to the threat and opportunity of China (it depend on what industry you're in and what size you are) - but either way, that's a tactical matter. Of much more importance - and highly relevant to everyone, irrespective of industry or size - is the deeper, strategic question:

How, and how well, do we respond to substantial opportunities or threats.

Quite possibly China is an irrelevancy to you and your business, but chances are there's a China-equivalent that's stealing focus from your strategic thinking: maybe it's a looming new competitor, an impending substantial change in technology or market-threatening legislation. Whatever your 'China' is, the key point to remember is that responding to it is a tactical matter and needs to be seen as such. Your 'China' will come and go, and will be replaced next week, next month or next year with another threat or opportunity. Then there will be another. Then another. And another.

Predictable Success isn't built by hand-rolling tactical responses to individual opportunities and threats - even if they are is as big as China. Predictable Success is built by building the organizational meta-capacity to respond well to any threat or opportunity.

So, are you spending today building a one-off tactic that's focussed on one specific target and which, once that target is hit or disappears, will clutter up your organizational toolkit like a rusted monkey-wrench? Or are you using this specific 'China' as a platform to enhance your organization's (or your division, department, team or group's) ability to respond nimbly and effectively to threats and opportunities?