This lecture was really a TMI marketing event which included a short talk by Frank Dick who is the Head Coach of the British Athletics Team and who coaches people like Daley Thompson and Boris Becker. Frank Dick is a Time Manager enthusiast. The main speaker was Claus Moller who is the founder of Time Manager.
Frank Dick talked about valley versus mountain people. Valley people are really interested in survival. Mountain people are the people who like to meet every challenge and are looking to win and not just survive.
"Leadership and learning go together", leaders are made and not born. Early achievers do not always develop the proper drive and resilience and hard work which are needed to become major achievers. Not only must one tend to believe that one can win the great quality seems to me that one persists so that one can win ie. this business about resilience, determination and the ability to try again in the face of failure.
Frank Dick talked about managing ones lifestyle and dividing them up into
1. medical
2. performance management.
Medical was really saying that we make sure that our company cars and computers have preventive maintenance and are kept in good shape but we do not do the same with our bodies or with our brains.
He was pushing the fact that prevention is better than cure that we should all have annual check-ups and as well as doing things to make sure that we are physically fit whilst the Time Manager guys were talking about being mentally fit ie. education and training.
Performance management, he said was all about occupational skills and he introduced this new buzz phrase I have not heard before, which was 'High Touch'. People kept talking about High Touch versus High Tech. High Tech seemed to be people like me who understood about computers where as High Touch people seemed to be people who can handle the extremely high rate of change which occurs in modern life. High Touch people who in are described Alvin Tofler' s "Future Shock" book can actually handle and prosper on the high rate of change. Overall his bottom-line was people need to be fit to win, that is physically and mentally fit.
Chris Lane introduced Claus Moller whom he said he had known since 1972 and who persuaded Chris Lane to set up Time Manager UK in 1978.
Claus Moller boasted that Time Manager was doing a large management training programme for the USSR to help implement the Perestroika. In the blurb that was handed it was interesting to note that this might have something to do with the fact that Moller's brother is a Professor of Russian language at a Danish University.
However clearly he made big in-roads there and was talking later on about how big the opportunities are in Russia. He said that Russians preferred to do business with the Europeans rather than the Japanese or the Americans and that the first people to get into the USSR will get all the business.
As a throw away line he seemed to imply that Time Manager are the sole agents for Apple Computers in the USSR which if true is quite a master stroke. However I find it hard to believe.
Moller asked the question, is there difference between European, Japanese and American management?
He characterised the American management as one which takes productivity as its first goal and dollars and the bottom-line as its only priority. He talked about the fast rate of change, of movement of people and how American managers liked this high rate of change which was a great way of gaining productivity. However he reflected that quality actually needs people to stay long enough in-post to learn and improve. This was why American quality is not always as good as Japanese whilst USA productivity is usually fairly high and their rate of change is quite enviable.
In Japanese management people always come first and quality always comes second. Productivity is seen as something which naturally flows from having good human relationships and the group working well with a focus on quality. Productivity just naturally comes when good people who are well trained do quality work. He made the point that in Japan human relations are group based and not individual, that doing things for the company and for Japan are valid effective motivators for people in Japan. Whereas Europeans and Americans are individuals and are not motivated by such group concepts, therefore managers need to find a way to motivate Europeans and Americans as individuals. This he saw as the key to European management.
European management was all about motivating individuals and he took as his tenet the ideas of productivity, quality and human relations. When motivating Europeans one had to see them as individuals and given the three topics above always ask what is in it for the individual.
The implication was that as Americans are always motivated by money, paying people was the big motivator in America whereas the Europeans had a more broader view of themselves and lifestyle, quality of life etc was also important not just money.
Moller gave ten topics which he said must be addressed
An idea here was to draw the organogram of an organisation and add attributes to each ie. for individuals which are their key areas (in Time Manager terms or in Rutherford term the main duties from their Forward Job Plan) as a way of making sure that everybody sees where they fit in and sees what everybody's objectives are and how they relate to each other.
"Keep all instructions as short as possible" becomes "keep instructions short". "Out of sight out of mind" translates into "invisible idiot". Can you teach others to pack a parachute so that you yourself would use it?
People do not complain they just change supplier. He quoted statistics which said only 1 in 27 people actually complain to the supplier. He said it costs 5 times more to win a new customer than to keep an old one and that 60% business is lost because of bad service whereas only 14% business is lost because of the poor quality of the product.
In sport there is one winner and one loser in a match. In psychology there are either two winners or two losers. Whether someone feels like a winner or a loser is a way of characterising self esteem and self esteem is generated from strokes. Strokes can be positive, negative or zero.
Positive strokes are about giving people recognition for things well done.
Negative strokes are telling people when they do things wrong but they must be done very carefully. They must be made very specific they must not be repeated and if possible must be delivered the same time as positive strokes.
Zero strokes ie. giving nobody any strokes at all is the worst possible thing to do with any individual. He quoted the saying that the opposite of love is not hate but indifference.
Talking about the nature of mistakes he defined them as either creative mistakes or sloppy mistakes. Creative mistakes enable one to improve when analysed and one should always say thank you to someone who points out a creative mistake. Sloppy mistakes require negative strokes.
Thus in summary TMI European Management's style is about productivity, quality and human relations. These three things interact in the same way as the SERC management course talked about the task, the team and the individual.
