The Wisdom of Cows – choosing leaders the Swiss way

The news of Andy Hornby ’s appointment to Boots was of course the cue for the digital cuttings file to be raided for lots of images of him being abused by Parliamentarians. How could this man so recently discredited, rise again so soon to head up one of our great British businesses? How can this happen to a man so fresh from being bombarded by rotten vegetables in the stocks of public opinion?

The appointment of managers is a process that more and more, takes place in public. As the process of ‘externalisation’ takes place in the NHS with lots of new social enterprise service organisations being established, how will they find their managers and agree stable management structures for all these new businesses? Read on for the Moore Adamson Craig & Millar solution to filling the need for a credible and effective process for choosing our future business leaders.

Managing in the Public Eye

How do we learn to manage in the public eye? How can we find the leaders we need and organise succession in a way that will provides solutions that stick? We give you the Swiss Queen Cow approach to succession management – an organic approach to organising succession and finding leaders, tried and tested every year.

Heirarchy and the Herd

Each spring the herd emerges from its long winter confinement in the village barns out onto the mountain meadows bright with Alpine flowers. A natural amphitheatre in the bowl set in the mountain side is our stage and it is here that the drama of the annual struggle for the right to lead the herd, takes place.

The black bull-like Herens cows stand out against the green hill and their horns while carefully tended and trimmed are kept in full working condition. These vast beasts clash – click on the clip below to see the video captured by our on the spot but rather far away cameraman.

The hours pass, the onlookers get steadily more refreshed and steadily over time, the winner emerges from the group. All can now look forward to a summer under their their Queen Cow until the autumn transhumance when crowned with flowers, top cow leads the herd back to winter quarters.

We have witnessed a management process that is fit for purpose, regularly tested and is based on the principles of wide consultation with the involvement of the key stakeholders. The process is sustained by total confidence in the result giving a period of stability to ensure maximum outputs over the critical production period.

No to Testosterone

One final point – we are just talking cows. The animals may look a lot like bulls but they are not.

Bulls have no part in this. No flashy parade of testosterone-fuelled fighting for the sake of it from males – au contraire, a contained process calibrated to achieve the desired outcome, agreed by all.

Put them in the field and let them fight it out, we say.

Engaging Health & Social Care Communities Online

Just published on the main Moore Adamson Craig site – a case history of building the website for the Wandsworth LINk:

Engaging Health & Social Care Communities Online – setting up a website for Local Involvement Networks (opens as Adobe PDF file).

September Re-entry (September newsletter)

The title of the newsletter would sound better in French: ‘la rentrée’ – a season in France when the State re-awakens after its long summer off and the supermarkets are filled with bargain notebooks and pens – the ones that are all squares and no lines. It is much more than ‘back to school’ and money off school shoes.

On Leadership & Management in Business

Shoes are on my mind because I have been reading the latest book by John Timpson of Timpson Shoe Repairs. The book talks about the reasons for the survival of Timpson Shoe Repairs when so many other larger and equally well-established companies have gone to the wall. The high street is a pretty spooky place if you think about it filled with the ghosts of retail chains – ou sont tous les magasins ‘d’antan’? as François Villon would have put it looking at the C15th retail scene. The British Shoe Corporation was once the Colossus of the high street with 26% of the shoe trade. All gone. Timpson Shoes itself has bitten the dust. You will have the ones you miss in mind – was it Timothy White’s? Mac Fisheries perhaps? John Collier? Salisburys for a nice bag? All this is very timely as corporations crash and burn.

The Timpson answer to the question is not 42 but 28 bullet points on p186. My own take on his survival is that John has kept things under his control – no external shareholders, no private finance companies to keep happy. He bought the company back under family control and runs it the way he and now (other son) James wants. Timpson Shoe Repairs can do their own thing. This is refreshing as we watch so many managers struggle with the new demands for accountability and transparency while trying to innovate. Compare the ease with which a private retailer shuts shops and 100s of them with the long drawn-out agonies of the post offices closure programme. Are there not better ways to manage public change especially with failing institutions?

There is a Department of Health Consultation out on this very topic about the best way of coping with failing NHS providers as they move, in the careful parlance of the document, from being ‘underperforming’ to ’seriously underperforming’ to – the horror! the horror! – ‘challenged’.

At least the problem is being faced up to which is always an achievement in the NHS that bulky leviathan where change and innovation mean that institutions and managers are often ‘challenged’. And what politician wants to be associated with closure of services the voters want? In this complex environment, the race goes so often to the small and fleet of foot who like Timpson Shoe Repairs know their business and their users and can make things happen.

On Leadership, Management & Innovation in Health Services

Which is why 2nd September was such a good day in Leeds for Andrew Craig and our client the Motor Neurone Disease Association. The Association has developed a new product called the Year of Care (YoC) Pathway Commissioning Tool in two years which more than meets the challenges of World Class Commissioning.

Andrew had the pleasure of representing M-A-C at the Motor Neurone Disease Association Year of Care Pathway launch and “thank you” event at the Thackray Medical Museum in Leeds earlier this month. It was well attended by mainly Leeds PCT and Leeds Social Services people and also people with MND and carers who had helped with interviews, focus groups and general validation of the draft pathway we undertook there.  Mick Ward, Head of Strategic Partnerships and Development across the PCT and Adult Social Services, gave the main speech and was excellent. This is just the kind of joint leadership that is needed to make progress for people with long term neurological conditions across the health and social care cultures. He committed the PCT and City Council to being in the MND Year of Care early implementers group so we shall be seeing more of him in the next twelve months. He related the YOC to the World Class Commissioning competencies and stressed the leadership, service transformation and market development aspects inherent in WCC. Clearly he sees the bigger picture. Andrew said he couldn’t have written it better himself! The Association has produced the ‘Learning from Leeds’ report by M-A-C as a 4 page colour brochure with pictures which looks terrific. Lunch was good and it was sunny and warm in Leeds. What more could one want?

For a flavour of the MND Year of Care pathway see the snapshot and read the press release

We will be putting more details about this work which we are proud to have been associated with on our website in due course. For more details of this event and an earlier one at the House of Lords as part of the NHS 60th Birthday celebrations, see the MND Association website.

Baroness Finlay of Llandaff, a Professor of Palliative Medicine said at the House of Lords event that

“This is one of the most important documents for patient care I have seen. This is exactly what the new NHS needs, a practical working tool to help achieve patients individual choice and improve their quality of life.“

Well done MND Association and while it may be strange to make a comparison between this terrible condition and shoe repairs, both achievements come from doing the best you can for your customers/users when you can with the resources available to you. Of course that will always involve other people – whether partners in PCTs and local Councils or staff and managers – but someone has to take the risks and do it first.

Survival often means not following the herd.

The challenge is to find the right leader and I will leave you with the definition of leadership given by the anonymous bard or bards who have handed down the text of The Wanderer, one of the most plangent and moving Anglo Saxon poems on the theme of ‘ubi sunt?’ mourning the good times in the past and musings on the qualities that make for success.

Wita sceal geþyldig                                          A wise man must be patient,

ne sceal no to hatheort                                    He must never be too impulsive

ne to hrædwyrde,                                            nor too hasty of speech,

ne to wac wiga                                               nor too weak a warrior

ne to wanhydig,                                              nor too reckless,

ane to forht ne to fægen,                                 nor too fearful, nor too cheerful,

ne to feohgifre                                                nor too greedy for goods,

ne næfre gielpes to georn,                               nor ever too eager for boasts,

ær he geare cunne.                                        before he sees clearly.

Bonne Rentrée and if Anglo Saxon verse is too cutting edge for you, take a look at our September post on how the Health Service and others are using the new social networking technology. One for your LINk perhaps?

P.S. We have been asked how to retrieve old blogs now that we have moved to the new style of presentation. These are all still available. The answer is on the right hand side of the blog page – try this link

Insert your LINk link now – the NHS is on Facebook

The lead article in the HSJ of 18th August looked at how NHS organisations are using this Web 2.0 social networking site to connect with patients, staff, Government ministers and the public.

Some are using it to tell people more about the personal side of their lives. We are told that the Health Secretary Alan Johnson

“is taking his excellent staff out for a very liquid lunch”.

Hmm – rather inviting comments from the alcohol units police but we get the point – Government ministers are human and have humans working for them.

Andrew Duggan of the Countess of Chester Hospital Foundation Trust wants to use Facebook to engage with young people and is quoted as saying that

“an important objective for us at the moment is engaging with younger people; our staff, patients and (foundation trust) members of the future”.

He acknowledges the fact that this group is traditionally difficult to engage with.

This is the sort of challenge that local involvement networks (LINks) have to meet as well. The younger people are – as the phrase goes – ‘digital natives’ as opposed to digital immigrants i.e. anyone who has not grown up in the digital age. They are most comfortable working in the sort of e-environment that Facebook and others of that ilk e.g. My Space and Bebo provide.

The challenge of course is not so much the technology. It is easy to set up what Facebook calls ‘pages’ where companies and organisations can post news and promotional messages for fans who have signed up to the page. Quantities of said fans are then supposed to post their reactions to the content. The difficulty lies in coming up with the hook that gets users signed up, interested and posting. Remember the internet phenomenon ‘the lurker’ – those who observe silently but never join in? I shall ask the MAC instant family-based research panel of digital natives – some pictured below and ranging in age from 5 to 26 – what would get them interested in a NHS site? We will report back.

 

It sounds interesting and fun and one for the Wandsworth LINk to take on board at once. Watch their space.