Mike Hohnen

Coaching for personal growth, change and development

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How to Balance Power and Love

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I attended a fabulous workshop at the ALIA European gathering in Menorode last week.
The workshop is based Adam Kahane’s work and well described in his latest book Power and Love: A Theory and Practice of Social Change. I can highly recommend the book.

The big eye openers for me where:
1) It is not an either or but a both and – it is a polarity, and needs to be managed constructively
2) If you are excellent at one or the either don’t turn down the volume on what you are good at – start working on the part that needs improving
3) The task of a manager is a continuous process of balancing power and love

There is a great interview with Adam Kahane in S+B you can read it here

”Power properly understood is nothing but the ability to achieve purpose. It is the strength required to bring about social, political and economical change…

And one of the great problems of history is that the concepts of love and power have usually been contrasted as opposites – polar opposites – so that love is identified with the resignations of power and power with the the denial of love.

Now we have to get this thing right.

What we need to realize is that power with out love is reckless and abusive and love with out power is sentimental and anemic. It is precisely this collision of immoral power with powerless morality which constitutes the major crisis of our time.”

Martin Luther king Jr.

Wishfull thinking…

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The quote below, is from the 4Hoteliers site – you can read the full post here

In spite of the popularity of new electronic media, we expect the face-to-face meetings industry to continue to grow and to continue to contribute more to the US GDP. We also believe that were the studies available for other parts of the world, we would see similar, if not greater, increases.

It just reminded me of a few other famous quotes in history:

“I think there is a world market for as many as 5 computers.” – Thomas Watson, head of IBM,1943.

“The horse is here to stay, but the automobile is only a novelty.” – President of Michigan Savings Bank, 1903, advising Henry Ford’s lawyer not to invest in the Ford Motor Company.

“Television won’t be able to hold onto any market it captures after the first six months. People will soon get tired of staring at a plywood box every night.” – Darryl F Zanuck, 1946.

As we all know there are many more like this.

My point is, yes we would all love to see f2f meetings grow, but the reality is that most of the professionals that I talk too are experiencing exactly the opposite. That be people in the meetting industry or their clients. Big corporations are talking about ‘travel avoidance’ as a way to cut costs. IKEA has an internal slogan ‘Meet more travel less’ – encouraging employees to use the electronic media for instead of traveling.

Personally I have never ever received so many offers of webinars and other online forms of ‘meeting’ that I do at the moment.

Yes we all prefer the quality of a a face to face meeting, the same way we prefer a delicious home cooked meal to industrialized fast food – but if what we prefer was equal to what we do there would be no fast food business…

Do you have a source of renewable energy…

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Tony Schwartz in his blog asks these three questions:

“How many of you would say that demand in your lives has increased significantly during the past several years?”

“How many of you, expect that demand in your lives is going to get even greater during the next several years?”

“OK, so here’s the $64,000 question: How many of you expect your capacity to rise right along with demand?”

And it is a really god point.

What do we do to ensure that we are renewing our own energy supplies. The pressure mounts for all of us virtually on a daily basis – but the only energy that will last is the the energy that gets renewed – so what are you doing on a daily basis to preserve and renew your energy sources?

Read the full blog post from Tony Schwartz here

New survey: Customer Experience Management

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New research shows that organisations can differentiate themselves especially in terms of the emotional element of the experience. Up to 60% of customer loyalty is created by the customer’s emotional experience, according to Professor Lars Grønholt, CBS.

The study’s main conclusions are:

  • Strong relationship between Customer Experience Management ability and financial performance Customer Experience Management generates increased differentiation. High differentiation improves the companies? ability to create high market performance and financial performance.
  • Customer Experience Management contribute to create significant financial performance If Customer Experience Management is improved by 10% differentiation capabilities will increase by 9%, that subsequently will improve financial performance by 5%.
  • ?Top management involvement and implementation of customer focus in all customer touch points are the most important Customer Experience Management dimensions The two dimensions account for more than 40% of the companies? ability to differentiate from competitors and are the starting point for better market performance and financial performance.
  • A balanced emotional and rational customer experience creates better results
    Overall, top performing companies balance rational and emotional elements when creating customer experiences.

You can request the full study from Stig Jorgensen & Partners here

This all fits very well with our own experience working with The Service Profit Chain

Read more about our approach to the Service Profit Chain here

What is an organisation?

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The Danish Broadcasting Corporation runs a series of very interesting lectures and educational videos that I have only just now discovered – some of them are in English – here is one i enjoyed a lot and I think you might as well:

Professor Ralph Stacey from Hertfordshire University gives a short 20min lecture on the future of (public) leadership you can listen to the whole lecture here – but one thing really struck me. Prof Stacey talks about how we perceive or think about organizations as ‘things’ something mechanical a 3D object – but as he points out that is nonsense.

Take the hotel industry. If you visit a hotel that is closed for say renovation it is not really a hotel – it is just a building with a lot of stuff in it, slightly more upmarket than a Shuregard storage building possibly, but still, just a building.

What makes the building come alive as a hotel is when you put people in it – guest and staff.
The unique relationship and interaction between all these people make it a hotel and make it different from a Shuregard building. If those people where different and had different capabilities and relations – it could be a hospital or a university or what ever.

An organization is a complex web of relations and it is organic, not mechanic. But are we paying attention to the quality of those relations in the same way that we make sure the paint is not peeling of the walls ?

Finance is fun

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We kicked of the ‘dreaded’ finance module for our Service Management students this week.

Finance is clearly not a favorite subject. But by using the HOTS (Hotel Operation Tactics and Strategy) simulation it all became much clearer, and in the end they had to admit that finance can be fun – well almost.

I find that using the simulation creates a lot of frustration upfront as they get upset at what they can’t do and why it won’t do what they thought it would do – but as they then slowly start the discovery process and see how the quality of their decision from month to month actually improve and thereby improves the the bottom line… well the the smiles come back on their faces.

HOTS is internet based and you can learn more about it here

The best time management & productivity advice ever…

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From HBR by Tony Schwartz – president and CEO of The Energy Project and the author of “The Way We’re Working Isn’t Working”

A 90-Minute Plan for Personal Effectiveness

For nearly a decade now, I’ve begun my workdays by focusing for 90 minutes, uninterrupted, on the task I decide the night before is the most important one I’ll face the following day. After 90 minutes, I take a break.

Read the full article here

Focus Executive Development on Real Business Issues

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This is the approach that is at the core of all our training and development.
Great to see it here as part of what is needed for the future…

From the HBR blog in the series on “Imagining the Future of Leadership”:

…the concept of action-learning programs has been gaining momentum since the 1980s — but it’s never been so vital as it is today. Leaders confronting constant change and great complexity need marketplace experience with the intensity and speed of strategic and organizational change. Leadership development interventions should support these drivers — they’re likely to have the greatest payoff, and they are likely to be the easiest to sell to any CEO contemplating an investment in executive education. Educational initiatives have to become far more customized and tightly integrated with the organization’s strategic agenda; their aim will be to build leadership capabilities while simultaneously facilitating progress towards critical strategic objectives.

Read the full article here