Championing Management Excellence
Well I'm in Seattle, (Bellevue actually) talking about Management Excellence: How to foster and maintain a vibrant community of managers at Microsoft. It's certainly an interesting set of discussions with a collection of people with such different backgrounds to me. I think I'm the only technical manager here (out of about 40 people from our management Development group, HR and training organisations) and I'm amazed at the differences between the job functions that are internally facing versus the "field facing" job roles. There are some huge disconnects in the way we think and the way we get things done outside of corp, so my input into the conversations we've been having today sometimes appears to be very "left field". It's an odd feeling indeed.
It's also rather odd watching the TV over here. Every single damn channel I switched to was covering the Super Tuesday part of the elections. Aargh! It's as though I've landed in a microcosm where there's only America and nothing else is happening anywhere else in the world.
Even the weather channel talked about what the weather was going to be like in different states of the US where the campaign was being held. Thank goodness there's the BBC news to give me some sort of balance to this world
I mean where would I be without news of Starlings flocking and flying in well defined patterns. Research that I read in the Guardian shows that although scientists used to think that the starlings in flight watched the bird in front them to work out where to fly, but recent high speed filming techniques have shown the birds actually watch the 7 birds around them to work out where to go so effectively. Just think of how that would translate to the managers in your organisation,
If all of us could influence the direction of 7 others, who could, in turn, influence the direction of 7 more, just imagine the results we could achieve in companies or within the management teams at Microsoft.
Or even influence the outcome of Super Tuesday come to think of it....
