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May 27, 2007

Clash of purpose

Therese Rein has decided to sell the Australian arm of Ingeus - the business she has built up from herself and a part time assistant to a multi-million dollar company employing over 1400 people over the past twenty years

I hesitate to mention that Rein is married to Australian opposition leader Kevin Rudd because if you google "Therese Rein Ingeus", you will scroll a long way before finding a link that does not mention this fact. This despite the observation that Rein is a successful business person in her own right.

It's hard to find details about Rein on the internet because there is so much comment on her latest decision and the events leading up to it.

My angle in this story is the clash of purposes rather than the conflict of interests. Before making her decision, Rein passionately spoke of how her work was much more than a business but was her life support. She passionately believes in what she does – helping disadvantaged people find work – and no-one seems to suggest that she doesn't do it well.

But what happens when two people are tied together and their purposes clash? I am often asked this question in terms of leadership teams. What happens when the members of the team have different purposes (this is often expressed as 'agendas')?

This is a difficult question. I don't have an easy answer because there is no easy answer. However, somewhere, I believe the answer lies in the higher purpose that ties the people together. In the case of Rudd and Rein, him becoming Prime Minister does not directly affect her business. But her remaining in her (at least Australian) business does affect Rudd's ability to do his job if he becomes PM. What is the higher purpose? Only the people involved can answer that. In politics, it is often the politician who wins out and the politician is usually a man. I wonder how it would have been if it was a woman running for PM and her husband was running a successful business?

Regardless, it is the difficult task of those involved to find their higher purpose. In many cases, this leads to each individual finding their deeper purpose.

Posted by chriscurnow at 5:49 PM | Comments (0)

Feedback on this blog

Due to an overwhelming amount of comment spam, I have changed the restrictions on commenting.

If you do want to comment you will find you now have to log in via Typekey.

It only takes a moment to get a Typekey account and you can use the same account for any blog powered by Moveable Type.

After just deleting nearly 1000 trackbacks, I have also disabled this feature.

I will try to change this in the future, but for the moment, this is the way it will have to be.

As with many of us, when we started blogging we spent lots of time setting up our blogs. Now the reality of the amount of time maintenance takes has set in. I don't spend nearly as much time as I would like blogging, I don't want to be spending large amounts of the time I do have on maintenance.

Posted by chriscurnow at 8:46 AM | Comments (0)

May 19, 2007

Changed Perspectives

It's amazing how a seemingly small event can so profoundly change your perspective.

Two events have had this impact on me in the past week.

The one that made me think about this post was actually the second event – the resignation of Margaret Jackson as chairman of the Qantas board. I have had deep qualms about the APA private equity takeover offer for Qantas. My initial reaction to Jackson's press comments was cynical. She stood to make a substantial personal gain if the bid succeeded. How could she avoid a conflict of interest I thought? I took some perverse enjoyment from the collapse of the bid. I don't like the arrogance of Private Equity much and it worries me that a consortium like that can have such a huge impact on people's lives.

But when Jackson announced her resignation, I felt sorry for her. Margaret Jackson is recognised as one of, if not the, leading business women in Australia. She has been on the Qantas board for fifteen years and chairman for seven. When the bid was announced she would have to have thrown the dice. Would she throw her weight behind the bid (with the personal cudos and financial reward she would receive if it succeeded) or would she fight it. I don't know how long she agonised over this decision, but it could not have been automatic. There was never a guarantee the bid would succeed. In the end, it sat on a knife edge and failed by the slimmest of margins. Had the late offer been accepted, or received by the deadline she would have been seen as a master strategist, placing the airline in a position for its next phase of growth.

As it is, she is seen to have mishandled the whole affiar. In business, you are either one or the other. A hero or a villain. Never a real person with strenghts and weakness. With both doubts and courage.

The other event to spark my thinking about changed perspectives was the screening earlier this week on ABC TV of the drama series Bastard Boys – a fictionalised account of the 1998 Australian Waterfront Dispute. Nominally this was a dispute between the Maritime Union of Australia (MUA), (led by John Coombs) and Patrick Stevedores (then owned by Chris Corrigan). This dispute was a seminal piece of Australian industrial relations history about the power and place of unions on the one side and the right of management to make changes to work practices on the other. The dispute involved almost everyone of note in industrial relations in Australia at the time, including Peter Reith (Minister for Employment, Workplace Relations and Small Business) in the Howard Government; Greg Combet (then Assistant Secretary of the ACTU) and Bill Kelty (the Secretary of the ACTU).

At the time, those of us on the left were horrified by Corrigan's tactics (backed by Reith) of sacking his whole workforce, putting balaclava clad security guards with guard dogs around the docks and bringing in a non-unionised workforce trained in Dubai.

Having been brought up in a working class family, I still too readily see bosses as the enemy and unions as on the side of good. Although I could see there was obviously a desparate need for waterfront reform I felt Corrigan's approach was beyond forgiveness. When Patrick bought a share in Virgin Blue, I considered not flying with the airline anymore.

Although, I have yet to watch the whole of the two episodes, Bastard Boys jolted me out of my comfortable oversimplification of the issue. In particular, it gave me a totally different view of Chris Corrigan – even though he believes he was misrepresented and charicatured by the series. I realised that like Margaret Jackson, Chris Corrigan was a real person. In his case he had invested all he had in Patrick and his own livelihood was on the line. It took me another step along the path in realising just how much my childhood view of unions as the good guys was also an unreal representation of the truth. Yes, wharfies had been treated badly in the past and the MUA had won protection for them. But the reality was that we needed new work practices on the waterfront and the unions were using bully boy tactics as well.

My own message to Chris Corrigan is to take heart from the series. No you weren't portrayed exactly as you would have portrayed yourself. But from the perspective of a deyed in the wool leftie like me, it made you a real person to me.

Another changed perspective.

Posted by chriscurnow at 6:40 PM | Comments (0)

May 16, 2007

Avoiding Boring Meetings

Leon Gettler has a good piece on meetings here.

The trouble with meetings is not meetings themselves but the people who attend them. None of us say what we really think.

Although how we create an environment in which it is OK to say what we think is another matter. Now that sounds like something I would like to write about.

Posted by chriscurnow at 2:08 PM | Comments (0)

Lucky Entrepreneurs

What type of person makes a good entrepreneur?

I am currently a student at the Australian Graduate School of Entrepreneurship. It won't suprise you to know that we spent one semester studying Entrepreneurship and Innovation. One of the big questions of the seminar subject was the one I posed at the beginning of this post, as well as the related question "How can we tell if an entrepreneurial venture will be successful?"

I value the research that has been carried out in this area, but I wonder about the questions. How do you define success anyway? Even if we agree on what success is, can we really tell what made a venture successful and what characteristics of the entrepreneur made it so? In the popular press, we look at "successful" entrepreneurs like Richard Branson. How do we know that for every Richard Branson, there are a thousand people out there with exactly the same mindset, the same life experience, the same outloook on risk taking and venture formation who have eitther tried and failed or never tried at all.

All of that is to assume that you can take two people and say on these range of measures they are the same. Who is to know that the single most important measure is the one you left out. Of course just like no two people have the same fingerprint, no two people are exactly alike. So what's the point of trying to find what makes and entrepreneur?

I seriously considerr the possibility that it is all a mattter of luck. The right person in the right place at the right time with the right idea and with the right lucky breaks.

I was prompted to write by this piece [sorry can't login to afr.com to provide a link — It was the main Leadership piece in the May 3-9, 2007 issue] in BRW.

Kevin Hindle is commenting on the 2006 Global Entrepreneurship Monitor which, according to the article, found that

Australia is still very much a 'milk-bar economy': a nation of small business owners whose ambitions are limited.

James Womack goes on to say

You've got one guy, and the product concept is between his or her ears — no marketing system, no no supply base, no media, no apparatus, nothing. It is esier to do it right when you begin with than it is to rework it into right once you are a way along."

The article then suggests:

A common failing is neglecting to define the business's purpose. Womack says most managers say the purpose of the business is to make money, which is not an observation that leads to action.

The Spiral Path is dedicated to guiding people to think not so much what the purpose of the business is, but what their own purpose is in starting and running the business. These two are related but not the same.

Posted by chriscurnow at 12:32 PM | Comments (0)

May 6, 2007

Churchill's never give-in speech

I have often retold the story of Winston Churchill visiting his old school, Harrow during the second world war.

According the story, the boys were told that Churchill, as Prime Minister of Great Britain was a very wise man and they should listen very carefully to what he would tell them. The were ushered into the school hall and sat ready to hear to words of the great man.

At the appropriate time in the assembly, Churchill was introduced to the boys. He stood up solemnly, looked at the boys and said "Never give in, never give in, never, never, never, never give in."

I was sure I first heard this story reading Martin Gilbert's work Winston S. Churchill: Finest Hour, 1939-1941.

I will have to go and re-read Gilbert's book because according to The Churchill Centre, Churchill actually gave a much longer speech.

Posted by chriscurnow at 5:52 PM | Comments (0)

May 2, 2007

65 Roses Day Volunteers

I just received this email from Cystic Fibrosis Victoria:

CAN YOU = HELP?

We would love the support of volunteers to help us = promote National Awareness of cystic fibrosis on 65 Roses Day, Friday May = 25.

Please call CFV on 03 9686 1811

Please call CFV on 03 9686 = 1811

Cystic Fibrosis Victoria

80 Dodds = Street

SOUTHBANK VIC = 3006

Ph:   +613 9686 = 1811 

Fax:  +613 9686 = 3437

Email: = njessop@cfv.org.au

Website: www.cfv.org.au

Posted by chriscurnow at 6:13 PM | Comments (0)