The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing. One cannot help but be in awe when he contemplates the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvelous structure of reality. It is enough if one tries merely to comprehend a little of this mystery every day. Never lose a holy curiosity. - Albert Einstein

There are three areas where improved "questioning" can strengthen managerial effectiveness; and it might be worth considering how you can improve your skills in each one.

First is the ability to ask questions about yourself. All of us fall into unproductive habits, sometimes unconsciously. Good managers therefore are always asking themselves and others about what they could do better or differently. Finding the right time and approach for asking these questions in a way that invites constructive and candid responses is critical.

Second is the ability to ask questions about plans and projects. The examples mentioned above both fall into this category. The challenge with questioning projects is to do so in a way that not only advances the work, but that also builds relationships and helps the people involved to learn and develop. This doesn't mean that your questions can't be tough and direct, but the probing needs to be in the spirit of accelerating progress, illuminating unconscious assumptions and solving problems. This is in contrast to some managers who (perhaps out of their own insecurity) ask review questions either to prove that they are the smartest one in the room, or to make someone squirm. On the other hand, many of the best managers I've seen have an uncanny ability to engage in Socratic dialogue that helps people reach their own conclusions about what can be done to improve a plan or project, which of course leads to much more ownership and learning.

Finally, practice asking questions about the organization. Although usually unspoken, managers have an obligation to always look for ways that the organization as a whole can function more effectively. To do this, they need to ask questions about practices, processes, and structures: Why do we do things this way? Is there a better approach? Asking these questions in a way that does not trigger defensiveness and that is seen as constructive is an important skill for managers.

Most of us never think about how to frame our questions. Giving this process some explicit thought however might not only make you a better manager; it might also help others improve their inquiry skills as well.

Adaptability : The new competitive advantage

We live in an era of risk and instability. Globalization, new technologies, and greater transparency have combined to upend the business environment and give many CEOs a deep sense of unease. Just look at the numbers. Since 1980 the volatility of business operating margins, largely static since the 1950s, has more than doubled, as has the size of the gap between winners (companies with high operating margins) and losers (those with low ones).

Market leadership is even more precarious. The percentage of companies falling out of the top three rankings in their industry increased from 2% in 1960 to 14% in 2008. What’s more, market leadership is proving to be an increasingly dubious prize: The once strong correlation between profitability and industry share is now almost nonexistent in some sectors. According to our calculation, the probability that the market share leader is also the profitability leader declined from 34% in 1950 to just 7% in 2007. And it has become virtually impossible for some executives even to clearly identify in what industry and with which companies they’re competing.

All this uncertainty poses a tremendous challenge for strategy making. That’s because traditional approaches to strategy—though often seen as the answer to change and uncertainty—actually assume a relatively stable and predictable world.

Think about it. The goal of most strategies is to build an enduring (and implicitly static) competitive advantage by establishing clever market positioning (dominant scale or an attractive niche) or assembling the right capabilities and competencies for making or delivering an offering (doing what the company does well). Companies undertake periodic strategy reviews and set direction and organizational structure on the basis of an analysis of their industry and some forecast of how it will evolve.

Thor's Strategic Leadership

THORS Strategic Leadership is the relentless pursuit to positively impact the personal and professional lives of business managers. This allows us to multiply team´s influence on making the world a more prosperous and better place to live in.

In our daily actions we are guided by 5 core values, that are such big influencers on us, that they should be easily experienced by all our clients. They are as follows:

RESPECT:  Every person that we meet, enjoys our respect. We treat all people equally, with care and concern for their well being. This we see as the premise for our other values. Without respect for others, the following values are rendered meaningless.

PASSION:  We are so passionate about our mission to positively influence the lives of others, that we never let up in our efforts to help them….or in learning how to perform better on that quest. Our passion is the engine that drives us forward……an engine that never stops!

LEARNING:  We use our passion to drive our learning about leadership. We are full of respect for the challenging task of leading other people and we see our learning about  it as a life-long process where we have the attitude of “rookies with experience”  (translated into: humble and willing to learn, but balanced and confident in what we do for a living).

HELPFULNESS:  We constantly go out of our way to help our clients. We always aim to go “the extra mile” to exceed our client´s expectations. We are proud of always being ready to help and are happy to have the chance.

ENTREPRENEURISM:  Every one of our team members thinks and behaves as if our company were theirs. We all make decisions in the field, seek ways to recuce costs and are constantly seeking new business opportunities. This provides the foundation of a healthy business, that provides secure and well paid jobs to all of us.

Collaboration

Collaboration is a buzzword these days. Leaders want to get people to think as one company. But managers in different functions or different business units seem surprisingly reluctant to work together. Jealousies, misunderstandings and enmity seem more common than collaboration.

Why does collaboration fail? There are lots of reasons. Collaboration can be time-consuming. It creates risks for the participants. Competing objectives can be hard to resolve. But to my mind the biggest problem is that people confuse collaboration with teamwork.

To understand the difference, think about what a team is. Teams are created when managers need to work closely together to achieve a joint outcome. Their actions are interdependent, but they are fully committed to a single result. They need to reach joint decisions about many aspects of their work, and they will be cautious about taking unilateral action without checking with each other to make sure there are no negative side effects.

Now, so long as the team has someone with the authority to resolve disputes, ensure coordinated action and remove disruptive or incompetent members, teams work well. Team members may dislike each other. They may disagree about important issues. They may argue disruptively. But with a good leader they can still perform.

Collaborators face a different challenge. They will have some shared goals, but they often also have competing goals. Also, the shared goal is usually only a small part of their responsibilities. Unlike a team, collaborators cannot rely on a leader to resolve differences. Unlike a customer-supplier relationship, collaborators cannot walk away from each other, when they disagree.

So a collaborative relationship is necessary when you cannot use a team or a customer-supplier relationship. It is a form of customer-supplier relationship in which the participants have all the difficulties of contracting with each other without the power to walk away if the other party is being unreasonable or insensitive.

For these reasons, my advice is to avoid relying on a collaborative relationship except in the rare cases when a company objective is important enough to warrant some collaborative action but not so important as to warrant a dedicated team. For example, you might want to rely on collaboration if you need to get geographic business units to work with a central product development team or where business units share a sales force or a brand.

In these circumstances, success depends on whether:

• the participants have committed to work together — collaboration requires emotional engagement;
• the participants have high respect for each other's competence on the topic of the collaboration or a natural first-among-equals exists amongst the participants, because of technical knowledge or experience; and
• the participants have the skills and permission to creatively bargain with each other over costs and benefits.

Before setting up a collaborative relationship, assess whether it is really necessary and whether the conditions for success can be created. And don't think of it as a permanent solution. You should be looking to transition to an easier form of interaction, such as a team or a customer-supplier relationship. In these forms there are clear mechanisms for resolving disagreements.

Servant Leadership

Ronald Claiborne in a 2010 article “Benefits of practicing servant leadership” quotes Karakas (2007) as saying”

“Leadership in the 21st century must deal with problems of global uncertainty, chaos, innovation, change, dynamism, flux, speed, interconnectedness, and complexity therefore, the benefits of practicing servant leadership becomes a critical success factor in any business.”

 It is insightful that Jeff Iorg, in his book “The Character of Leadership, states in describing servant leadership, “Servant leadership is, in its essence, an attitude. Servant leadership is defined more by who you are than by what you do” (p.117), and yet our talk must match walk in order to be a true servant leader. How is this essence and attitude lived out for the world to see.

Servant leadership takes many forms, some outside corporate boardroom and office. Whether it is being a servant leader attempting to usher in change in a nation, or whether it is being a servant leader in our particular vocation, as a fellow human being, becoming a servant leader is a process that happens over a lifetime. It involves for many of us becoming a work in process as we continue to read, study, and slowly implement change into our lives, developing that servant leadership perspective.

Employees and followers want leaders who are honest, open, and who keep the   organization moving in a positive direction during both calm and stormy seas.       Employees and followers want leaders who are “others-centered.” Employees and followers want leaders who can bring out the best qualities in them. Beyond   this, leaders must also love all the organization’s stakeholders from customers, vendors, regulators, shareholders, members, as well as contributors (p.9).

In The Steward Leader: Transforming People, Organizations and Communities, R. Scott Rodin (2010) quotes leadership expert Max DePree’s saying, “The first responsibility of the leader is to define reality. The last is to say thank you. In between the leader is a servant.”

Dr. Corné Bekker, associate professor for the School of Global Leadership & Entrepreneurship, Regent University, in his paper Prophet and Servant: Locating Robert K. Greenleaf’s Counter-Spirituality of Servant Leadership, (2010), states that for Greenleaf, servant leaders are characterized by:

§  Being visionaries

§  Having high ethical standards

§  Doing things with excellence

§  Being persuasive

§  Rational thinking

§  Being prophetic [futuristic] imaginative

§  Ordinariness

§  Comfortable with paradox

§  Being a good listener

§  Accomplishing transformative actions

 Dr. Bekker, noting that Greenleaf himself was a religious man, and described servant leaders leading as prophets by (a) healing, (b) persuading, (c) creating systems of thinking, (d) opening alternative avenues for work, (e) serving, (f) inspiring, (g) facilitating individual and societal transformation, (h) empowering followers, (i) uniting leaders and followers, (j) building bridges between organizations and communities, and (k) by ushering in a new era of servant leadership. The intended outcome of these prophetic servant leaders is to re-imagine and reshape the social domain of leaders and organizations (p.10).

Whether you believe Jesus at best was just a good man who lived and died on planet earth some 2000 years ago, read the story found in the Bible’s Gospel of John 13.1-17. It is the story of Jesus washing the feet of his disciples. This is what being a servant leader is about. Would any of us as an organizational leader be humble enough to wash someone’s feet if that is what it would take to make him or her committed followers? Who among us is the next Mother Teresa?

The Medici Effect

The Medici Effect by Frans Johansson investigates how new and extraordinary ideas can be formed by established ideas from different cultures, disciplines or fields of study when they collide. According to Johansson innovative ideas spawn from intersections. Intersections happen when two unrelated fields, for example culinary arts and the flocking formation of birds, are connected and made relevant to each other. At an intersection a vast pool of creative and unlikely ideas can be created due to the unlikely pairing. This intersection spawns the Medici Effect, which is a burst of creative ideas resulting from this convergence of knowledge. The book then details the trials and tribulations encountered on the path to creativity (generation of new and valuable ideas) and innovation (realization of creative ideas).
Johansson speaks with many innovators of the époque throughout the entire book and they all agree upon the Medici Effect and its remarkable potential. While innovation is universal throughout history, Johansson highlights that globalisation and recent advances in technology make way for innovation now more than ever. This intriguing model outlines three forces which favour intersectional ideas to form. Intersections are becoming more likely first because of the movement of people since cultures and perspectives can clash, mesh and feed off one another, second by the convergence of science or interdisciplinary sciences which make way for new discoveries and perspectives and lastly the leap of computation which enables human capital to be freed from tedious tasks to engage in further innovation.
One concept, lowering associative barriers to facilitate innovation suggests that laypeople in a specialisation are more likely to be able to come up with creative solutions. Ideas are linked to one another in the mind based on previous experience and gained knowledge in chains of association. These chains of association streamline thought and make the process efficient but may also inhibit creativity by directing thought towards assumptions and blind-siding us to unconventional associations between ideas. Low associative barriers can be built when a person is exposed to a diverse range of knowledge and move outside their expertise so that they ideas are not always linked to one another in a “typical” fashion. This concept reveals to us why it is important to have a mixture of experiences as well as be exposed to different perspectives to be effective problem-solvers and creative thinkers.
Another interesting concept is the link between productivity and innovation. Although the burst which happens at an intersection opens doors to fantastic ideas, obviously not all ideas can be hit-wonders. One key to innovation is constant productivity. Innovation does not necessarily happen in an incremental fashion. Just because a vast number of new ideas is accessible by combining two different fields does not mean that every one of these permutations is viable therefore constant and voluminous productivity is necessary to be able to innovate. Also, being primed for failure enables people to learn from mistakes as well as lowers the risk of spending all resources on the first trial if we know that it is highly improbable that we will succeed on the first attempt.
What Johansson proposes in this book does not only benefit innovators but are smart nuggets of advice for any person, professional or layman living in the 21st century. The paradigms have shifted from specialized to interdisciplinary, from homogenous to diverse. In an age where knowledge is a commodity an innovative approach to thought and life has become extremely valuable. Organisations of the world can use this standpoint of innovation on many different planes.
The Medici Effect reaches past innovation and applies also to how people can up their quantity and thus probability of quality of work by doing some rudimentary things like diversifying their experiences, learning and practicing outside of their specialties, keeping low associative barriers, always being productive and priming themselves for failure. These concepts are very simple, very obvious and yet they are revolutionary.

The Alchemist and Business

“To realize one’s destiny is a person’s only obligation.” Paulo Coelho author ‘The Alchemist’

'The Alchemist' is an allegorical novel by Paulo Coelho, and is one of the best selling books in history. Its a simple tale of young shepherd who follows his dreams of treasure and encounters  many experiences, learning wisdom and life lessons on the way.

The core message of the book is, doing your best to fulfill your life’s true calling. It’s about having the courage to listen to your heart and often going against all odds to get what you want. Along the way you will be severely tried and tested. The fear of losing it all will tempt you to quit and take the easier path. However, if you truly want to fulfill your Personal Legend you will overcome all odds and will achieve what you set out to get.

This, I feel, is the most important lesson for any entrepreneur.