08 Mar March 8, 2019 – The ODD Simon Mac Rory, Retail Disruptors Jan-Benedict Steenkamp and College Grad Rules Michael C. Taylor
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Dr. Simon Mac Rory – Founder and CEO of The ODD Company, Visiting Research Fellow at NBS and Author of Wake Up and Smell the Coffee: The Imperative of Teams – Read interview highlights here.
90% of what we do in the world of work happens through collaborative
effort. And that makes team work the imperative that it is.
Dr. Simon Mac Rory is the founder and CEO of the ODD Company, a team effectiveness specialist organization that provides a cloud-based team effectiveness platform, TDP, and methodology designed to be self-serve for team leaders. Simon is an experienced international conference speaker on the topics of corporate team strategy, organizational development, employment law, strategic HR policy development, and reflective practice in doctoral studies. His new book Wake Up and Smell the Coffee: The Imperative Of Teams, calls for a more structured approach to team development and implementation, one that involves corporate strategies and the deployment of models to ensure consistency of approach. Mac Rory introduces the Team Diagnostic Profiler, a tool for evaluating the effectiveness of teams, and for leaders to share ideas on how to improve performance. Simon operates the business from London with a Dublin-based development and support office. Simon is a Visiting Research Fellow at Nottingham Business School.
Dr. Jan-Benedict Steenkamp – Keynote Speaker and Author of Global Brand Strategy: World-wise Marketing in the Age of Branding
Private label products grow especially strong during a recession, and
they do not give up their gains afterwards.
Dr. Jan-Benedict Steenkamp is the C. Knox Massey Distinguished Professor at the University of North Carolina’s Kenan-Flagler Business School, Fellow at iSIG, Fudan University, Shanghai, Honorary Professor at EIASM, Brussels, member of the Committee of Global Experts of China Association of Quality (Beijing), and Chairman International Advisory Board, Institute for Nation(al) Branding (Shanghai). He is co-founder and Executive Director of AiMark. He has written four books on strategy and branding; translations have appeared in Chinese, Spanish, Portuguese, and Polish. Brand Breakout was rated one of the best business books of 2013. He has written ten cases and over 200 articles on branding and marketing. His work has received over 43,000 citations. He was ranked number 1 in the world on scholarly influence in marketing. One of the world’s leading thinkers on global strategy and branding, he has taught, consulted, and given executive seminars on all continents. His work has been featured in Harvard Business Review, Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, The Economist, New York Times, Bloomberg Businessweek, Steenkamp has been recognized as “Teaching All Star” by UNC’s MBA program. He has received an honorary doctorate from Aarhus University and lifetime achievement honors from the Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences, the American Marketing Association, and the European Marketing Academy.
Michael C. Taylor – Author of The Financial Rules for New College Graduates: Invest before Paying Off Debt―and Other Tips Your Professors Didn’t Teach You
Your first job is not going to be a living wage. The cost of living is set up for
40, 50 year old’s. Think rice and beans for the first couple years.
Michael C. Taylor sold bonds on Wall Street and founded a private investment business. His new book teaches the important financial rules for people in their 20’s. He also writes about finance for the San Antonio Express News and the Houston Chronicle.
Dr. Simon Mac Rory Highlights
We specialize in working with organizations in the organization development space. Our expertise is with teams, particularly with senior teams, and in particular with the development of what we call corporate team strategies. This is the overall embracing strategy that an organization needs to employ to get the best out of teams in their world.
There’s no such thing as a dream client. We’re very lucky. We have a vertical product in the horizontal market; we can work with any organization. the dream customer is the customer who really, really wants to do something better with teams. That’s the person we can have the most impact with, where they take that whole concept of teamwork in the organization seriously. We can be very effective and working with them and support them to develop better strategies and to drive that team performance right across the organization by anything up to 25%.
I would very seldom meet a true individual contributor in the world of work that isn’t dependent on somebody else. So teamwork is something that’s critical, essential to the organization. It is such an imperative that it has to have a strategic space within the organization in terms of their thinking, too many organizations, if not most, do not have a strategic approach to market despite the fact that 90% of what they do comes out to teams.
We have to create environments where we create what’s called psychologically safe environments in which the teams will work, which is a leadership responsibility. I might add to each individual team leader needs to create the environment for people not only want to work in the team, but want to contribute. They want to be capable of innovating in the team, putting in new ideas and most importantly, being able to ask all the questions that need to be asked, so that ultimately a team leader gets to hear everything that he or she needs to hear. Not just what they want to hear.
Teams tend to be three to 10 people, not any more than double digits. Although people will call groups of larger size a team, but they’re not, in fact, the team that comprised of many teams, but no, a team tends to be three to nine people. That’s probably where you’re looking at. And that’s when the importance of team collaboration comes into play. And that’s when the importance of team characteristics that I talked about throughout the book become critically important to the individuals within the team.
One of the key issues with a virtual team is the early on board socializing that needs to happen, so they get to know each other, that you set the rules of engagement, you set the protocols for how you want to work with each other. Also you get people time to spend with each other, even though it is online, but they have time to do that.
A well functioning team will operate very effectively without the leader. I think it was once described to me is in a schoolroom of young children. Successful teaching is the kids are doing everything that they’re expected to do when the teachers in the room. Effective teaching is the kids are doing everything they should be doing when the teacher is not in the room.
They may need to know each other’s roles and what’s expected of each other. They need to know what one is doing versus what the other is doing, so that they can look out for that duplication, look out to support each other, to innovate together. There’s so much they will do more effectively if they know what each other’s roles are, and how each is contributing to the overall goal.
It’s also about showing why teamwork is becoming more and more important as the nature of our employment market changes. And the very nature of work itself is changing. So we’ve got the impact of the millennials, we’ve got a Generation Z now, but they all see the world very differently.
Our needs in the workplace can only be met through a team and culture. We’ve got the gig economy, which is now driving everything up to within the next 10 years. 50% of the workforce will be happening through the gig economy rather than a direct employees again. How do you get people on board quickly? How do you get them into the norms of your work? How do you get them productive from more or less day one, because sometimes only there for three months with you.
Provide the team with a means of checking themselves against the criteria to be effective in that particular criteria. Every team is capable of doing that for themselves.