The global leader for 
creating AGILE leaders, 
teams and organizations!

MARCH 2016
Nick Horney will be speaking at the annual HRPS Conference in Scottsdale, AZ on April 12. In his presentation, he will be speaking about the following ideas...
  
The Gig Economy:  A Human Resource Agility Fitness Challenge
By Nick Horney, Ph.D., Leadership Agility Practice Leader 

This is the era of Uber. Airbnb. TaskRabbit. Handy. All of these firms are examples of the "gig economy," and human resources (HR) professionals are being pressed to update their approach to talent management as a result.  

The gig economy will continue placing pressure on HR leaders, HR policies and HR processes to become more agile so that they can accommodate the kind of turbulence now being created by contingent workers as a growing element of their talent pool.  

The word "gig" has its origins in the music industry and now can be applied to all sorts of part-time employment: adjunct professors, management consultants, lawyers, doctors, farm managers, architects, street vendors, barbers, auto mechanics, landscapers, cab drivers, caregivers, truck drivers and more.
 
Most organizations have embraced the need to effectively identify their key talent who will enable them to thrive into the future.  Many conferences, articles and books have been focused on the contribution of key talent identified and developed through a rigorous process of talent management.  

How is Your Triage Agility?
By Tom O'Shea, CMC, Organizational Agility Practice Leader 

Do you know anyone who operates in an everyday normal state of PANIC where EVERYTHING is touted as mission critical urgent and you can't really tell what is truly important?  Reminds me a little bit of the children's story about CHICKEN LITTLE who constantly ran around shouting ... THE SKY IS FALLING!  Well, one of the dynamics of this VUCA world we are all experiencing is that quite often it can seem like the SKY IS FALLING multiple times every day.  No doubt the speed of play today is daunting and can feel like a locust storm inside a massive F5 TORNADO with wind speeds over 250 mph and where cars become projectiles as they are hurled through the air; entire houses are completely destroyed after being ripped from the foundation and sent tumbling into the distance; steel-reinforced concrete structures can be seriously damaged. Did you ever have a day like that?  I have a couple of clients where that seems to be the everyday normal.

What is the leadership challenge like in those LEVEL 5 VUCA environments?  I can tell you it is extraordinarily important for sure because teams, customers and even families depend on these leaders finding the strength, courage, grittiness and core value system to stand tall and hold onto the helm in the midst of this maelstrom.  True leadership agility comes through in a really big premium way as the environmental context gets crazy.  The crazier the environment - the more valuable it is to have leaders who can help guide the team to anticipate change, generate and re-generate confidence, initiate action on doing the right things, liberate thinking to find new solutions to evolving challenges and all the time continuously evaluating results to calibrate and re-calibrate what is delivering on the team success value proposition.  

5 Reasons Why We Experience More Wheel$pin Than We Should 
(& the 5 Realities, 5 Roles & 5 Drivers of Everyday Agile Leadership)
By Mike Richardson, Team Agility Practice Leader
The question of my diverse career as a leader has been:
 
"Why, despite all of our investments in developing our businesses, do we still experience much more wheel$pin than we should, which costs us a fortune and potentially our future prosperity, in business and life?"

My first book, "Wheel$pin: The Agile Executive's Manifesto"  is dedicated to exploring this question.  The answer: agility (or rather, a lack of it) which is now the focus of my career.  More specifically, over the years I have crystallized 5 reasons:
    • Chaos
    • Triage
    • Insight
    • Luck
    • Journey-Orientation
The reason why the majority of leaders, teams and organizations experience a lot more wheel$pin than they should is that they are stuck facing these realities of their day to day challenge and having the wrong relationship with these attributes of agility.  This leaves them fragile not agile.  To be agile they must change their relationship with these attributes of agility, to leave the fragile majority and join the agile minority.
 

Bill Gates Built the Deadliest Weapon in the U.S. Military
By Ben Baran, Ph.D., Agility Analytics Practice Leader 

Bill Gates, the co-founder of Microsoft, unwittingly created a weapon of mass destruction for the U.S. military when his company created PowerPoint. It can be a useful tool for presentations, but within the U.S. military it has become a ubiquitous technology and communication format that structures much of what gets done, particularly for staff officers.

The proliferation of PowerPoint within the U.S. armed forces is nothing new, and its presence is no surprise to those of us who have served within it. But one could argue that its use is so pervasive that it even structures how people think and how they make decisions.

So in some ways, Microsoft PowerPoint is the deadliest weapon in the U.S. military's arsenal. The question, though, is one of targeting: Toward whom is this weapon aimed?

While serving in Afghanistan during 2013, a friend and I pondered this. Fortunately, we were both in roles that somehow avoided being directly responsible for the production of specific PowerPoint slides on a regular basis, although we were frequent contributors to them. This particular friend and I both have young children, and we reflected upon how the use of meetings and PowerPoint often coincided in a cycle of dependency much like what is described in Laura Joffe Numeroff's popular children's book, If You Give a Mouse a Cookie.
 
So, in homage to that wonderful book, we wrote what follows.

If You Give a General a Staff Meeting....                                                                                       READ MORE 

Creating Agility in a VUCA World!



STAY CONNECTED


View our profile on LinkedIn  Like us on Facebook  Follow us on Twitter  View our videos on YouTube


Click here to email Rhonda for more information


 
You are receiving this email because you subscribed at www.agilityconsulting.com