Twentieth century futurists certainly had a sense – whether of foreboding or optimism – of looming technological disruption, a phenomenon rippling through entire industries and which leaders in 2014 ignore at their peril.

Exactly 50 years ago, Isaac Asimov (1964) – speculating on what work might look like in 2014 – wrote:

The world of AD 2014 will have few routine jobs that cannot be done better by some machine than by any human being. Mankind will therefore have become largely a race of machine tenders. Schools will have to be oriented in this direction. The lucky few who can be involved in creative work of any sort will be the true elite of mankind, for they alone will do more than serve a machine … Indeed, the most sombre speculation I can make about AD 2014 is that in a society of enforced leisure, the most glorious single word in the vocabulary will have become work!1

Asimov's vision was, in some ways, prescient. Twentieth century futurists certainly had a sense – whether of foreboding or optimism – of looming technological disruption, a phenomenon rippling through entire industries and which leaders in 2014 ignore at their peril. They asked questions that preoccupy societies today: what do we do with our young people? What skills should workers have and how will they get them? How do we provide jobs for everyone able to work? Is technology the road to the good life, dystopia, or both?

In April 2014, the Centre for Workplace Leadership held its inaugural Future of Work conference, on the theme of People, Place and Technology. Part of the Faculty of Business and Economics, the Centre aims to bridge the gap between academic rigour and the real world challenges facing Australian businesses.

Nearly 50 domestic and international speakers speculated on how the nature of work is changing, what this means for entire workforces, workplaces and teams, and the sorts of demands these developments are placing on workplace leaders. The event was held in partnership with the Australian Chamber of Commerce & Industry, Cisco Systems Australia and Clayton Utz. The conference enabled employees, managers, business leaders and business owners to access cutting edge technology, research and thinking on the modern workplace and beyond.

On technology and knowledge

Trying to second-guess the future can be fun, a chance to let the imagination run free. In 1958, the American illustrator Arthur Radebaugh began a futuristic comic strip called Closer Than We Think2, in which he depicted space-age marvels that would deliver us into an era of high-tech leisure. Some of these were not far off the mark: electronic home libraries, wall to wall television, and 'bloodless surgery' using 'proton beams'. Radebaugh's jetpack-propelled postmen begin to look positively old fashioned when we consider that drones are now being developed to deliver mail3 and pizza4. Alas, his pogo police car5 never gained traction.

Envisioning the future can, however, also be confronting and sobering, with a complexity that can defeat our ability to digest the implications. Perhaps this partly explains why decision making in business and government is notoriously short-term. Keynote speaker Lynda Gratton6, labelled one of the world's leading business thinkers by the Financial Times, is a consultant and organisational theorist at London Business School. She is also the founder of the Hotspots Movement7, an interactive research project with 200 executives from 23 multinational corporations that, among other things, looks at the Future of Work. Gratton argues five forces have created a 'perfect storm' that will require people to embark on massive shifts in their approach to their working lives8: technological developments, globalisation, demographic trends, societal trends and low-carbon developments.

Shrinking technology, expanding knowledge

According to conference keynote speaker Dave Evans, chief futurist at Cisco, the sum of human knowledge used to double every century but is now doubling every two years and growing exponentially, especially in fields like nanotechnology and biotechnology. Evans noted some estimates that the world's data stores will double every 11 hours by 2025. Much of this activity is in rich-text media like photos and video, but data in the workplace, he said, has grown 50 times faster than consumer data. He also told the conference:

As of 2008, we're now creating more new data every 10 minutes than we did in all of human history. If we don't invest in the tools and technologies to mine this data, we're going to be buried in so much data we won't be able to extract the knowledge that we need to make smart decisions.

Evans outlined several developments that are ushering in, or are expected to usher in, new waves of digital disruption, especially in health and medicine and manufacturing. Some of them raise serious issues about privacy, although Evans, a self-confessed optimist, prefers to see them as opportunities that can be managed.

The first of these is Augmented Reality (AR), in which a view of real-world information (either online or direct) is overlaid by computer-generated input such as text, sound, video or GPS data. Examples include text being overlaid on a driver's windscreen, navigation and weather data to help pilots9, or imaging on a patient's body to help guide surgery10.

Since the dawn of time, humans have been accustomed to adapting to technology. The future according to Evans is technology that adapts to us. We will move away from actively searching for information to letting information come to us.

This technology will transform consumer habits through innovations such as digital signage in shopping malls that recognises, if customers opt in, shoppers' faces, ages, ethnicities and shopping preferences. Another scenario is television sets that recognise when a small child is in the room and filters out inappropriate content, or recognises when viewers are bored. Evans believes brain-machine interfaces are not far away – devices such as thought-driven wheelchairs, or the ability to download a new skill or even a language – a theme in Nicholas Negroponte's 2014 TED (Technology, Entertainment and Design) talk11.

The second is 3D printing, which has dropped ten-fold in price in the past five years. 3D printers can already process 70 materials, including carbon fibre, aluminium and precious metals, to produce objects such as bicycles, jewellery and turbo engines. Online marketplace websites such as Shapeways have sprung up to enable bespoke manufacturing, similar to Etsy (the online marketplace for handcrafted and vintage items), but for plastics and metals. The implications for medical research and transplant medicine are enormous: scientists have already printed a human liver that can survive for 40 days, and miniature organs. Airbus Industries predicts that by 2050, it will be able to print planes using hangar-sized 3D printers. The Zeus 3D printer, expected to be available to consumers later this year, will allow people to insert an object, make a copy and even fax it to another Zeus.

'The entire physical world is becoming digital,' Evans said. 'We will download things as easily as we download music today. Who will be the manufacturer, the innovator, tomorrow? How will this shape the workforce?' Evans is optimistic about the prospects for future workforces as a result of these digital innovations, acknowledging that jobs will be lost, but that new opportunities will emerge. 'The top 10 jobs in the next six years don't yet exist… we're training kids for jobs that don't yet exist, using tools that may not yet exist. It would be quite easy to move into a dystopian future. I don't think that would be the case.' In any case, he says, as outlandish as talk of virtual people and 3D printing sounds, all of this is underway. 'It's not science fiction, it's science fact. And every single thing was enabled by the internet.'

Are we creating coin-operated employees?

Technology disrupts and transforms, but it does not do away with the eternal conundrum that is people, and questions such as how best to lead, manage, follow and work with others. The way we work is changing. Australians are increasingly employed in non-traditional industries, working flexible hours and using technology to work anywhere. Expectations of leaders are changing with an ever-increasing imperative to innovate and build dynamic workplace cultures.

Employees, too, are feeling buffeted by technological advances and globalisation. In survey results released to coincide with the Future of Work conference, 49 per cent of Australian workers aged under 55 reported feeling worried about what the future holds for them at work. Executive and middle managers were more fearful than non-managerial employees. Despite this, the survey also revealed 79 per cent of Australians are open to change in their workplace to improve productivity.

Better leadership and new technology were the two key areas that Australian workers identified to increase productivity, with government workers in particular highlighting more effective leadership and management as a change that would most likely increase productivity.

What makes for a productive or 'high performance' workplace might be called the holy grail in management and business research, especially in the area of human resources management and industrial relations, where a great deal of effort has been expended in investigating the relationship between different types of workplace and management practices, and higher productivity and other workplace performance measures.

The Centre for Workplace Leadership has just completed a literature review of prior research12 to underpin the Centre's own research agenda and inform the development of programs and events. There is abundant international research on the effectiveness of different leadership styles and approaches, but a significant gap in our understanding of leadership capability in the Australian context.

The last 20 to 30 years of research on the 'high performance workplace' consistently shows that better workplace productivity and performance is associated with the deployment of management practices that invest in skills and capabilities, enable employee discretion and involvement, and engender employee motivation and engagement.

Paradoxically, however, the evidence also indicates that a minority of workplaces deploy them. There are many reasons that explain this paradox, but clearly, developing the ability of business leaders and managers to translate these principles into their workplace practices presents a great opportunity to lift productivity significantly.

Anecdotally, we know that many firms are still stuck in a nineteenth-century approach to leadership, and this was a theme taken up by conference speakers who explored motivation and incentives. Terry Lee, Director of Leadership Psychology Australia, whose clients include Wesfarmers and Bunnings, said many organisations were finding themselves in a cultural cul-de-sac at a critical time. 'We've spent 100 years designing organisations not to change, to dumb down initiative, to structure people into compliance, and now we're trying to transform those very structures into high-performance organisations which unlock the potential of people', he said.

Lee expressed scepticism about financial incentives, arguing they work only in a narrow range of circumstances. They can discourage employees not traditionally rewarded in this way. For example, small businesses that reward sales staff with bonuses are signalling that they value this class of worker more than others. While these incentives are measurable, clear and do work, they have 'a demeaning effect on people who operate in a support capacity'.

When financial incentives are used to stimulate innovation, Lee argues they have a perverse effect in drawing out mediocre contributions from people keen to harvest financial rewards rather than those genuinely passionate about an idea. Motivation, Lee says, is about carrots and sticks, 'whereas inspiration is to awaken something in the person… If you're paying people to do the thing they love to do, then you demean the thing they love to do.'

Jason Clarke, author, consultant and founder of Minds at Work, charted a common demotivation trajectory, saying:

When you hire someone, guess what they bring to the job? Their heart, their mind, their body. The first couple of days you get the whole package. And do you know what happens when we say we're not interested in your ideas? They leave their mind at home. You know what happens when we say we don't care about your passions? They leave their heart at home. And you know what's left? We've thrown away all the best bits, and this husk turns up and we become coin operated.

Diversity, collaboration and reluctant leaders

Mid-century futurists like Arthur Radebaugh emphasised technology but seldom speculated on how it might shape us. People might have been portrayed as taller, shinier and happier, but their roles defaulted to the mid-century American norm: the women were at home and the faces were white.

The reality Australian leaders face today is much more diverse. Geoff Aigner, former management consultant and now director at Social Leadership Australia, told conference attendees that leaders and managers need to understand diversity in much broader terms, not only because the make-up of our workforce is changing but also because collaboration is a much more significant part of our working lives. Beyond the familiar categories of race, class and gender there are also age, experience, psychological outlook, confidence, and connection to a deeper purpose. Australian managers are, he says, too conflict averse to navigate through this diversity. He says:

The way through collaboration is anything but capability. You can have as much technical capability as you like – great processes, great nous, a great project plan and lots of money. But what's missing is that we haven't been educated or rewarded to work across differences. We've been rewarded to work with similarity.

Aigner is the author, with Liz Skelton, of The Australian Leadership Paradox, which argues that Australian leaders are reluctant to acknowledge the power they have and are unsure what to do with it. He told the conference that every day, society sees the effects of misused or unacknowledged power in child abuse, domestic violence and workplace bullying.

'The people who are throwing their weight around or bullying and harassing people are not people who are owning their power,' Aigner said. 'They're generally people who don't understand their power and as a consequence abuse it or neglect it. We see a repeated dynamic in Australian workplaces where people use too much firepower: 'I don't think I have any power so I turn up the heat'.'

Neglect might seem a benign alternative to misuse, but Aigner argued that disavowing power is not the answer: it is crucial to use it well. And in collaboration, there is no escaping power:

Collaborative efforts are essentially a negotiation of power, a movement of power between individuals. Collaborative efforts are necessarily shifting power because the (pre-existing) hierarchies which have much clearer power structures are being shaken up.

This ambivalent attitude to leadership was echoed by Jason Clarke: 'We keep asking for leadership and it's the thing we're most cynical about; 'Tell us, oh mighty one – you idiot – what are we doing?''

Clarke too advocated an expanded view of diversity: 'Great minds don't think alike. You want change? Then you want cynics, idealists, pragmatists and lunatics, panic junkies, devil's advocates. You need them all, they're all beautiful. The trick is knowing how to get them to work together.'

Conclusion

Envisioning the future of work requires both examining the past but also recognising that there are, as Lynda Gratton argues, limits to what the past can tell us about the future in times of massive volatility. The forces shaping new worlds of work not only shape the macroeconomy, but have significant and often disruptive effects 'on the ground'. They are destroying old businesses and prompting the development of new ones.

Of particular interest for understanding productivity, we can say that these changes are reshaping labour markets and workplaces. These developments challenge managers and business leaders, as well as workers. They are altering models of work and employment, changing our attitudes towards different forms of employment and sense of careers over the life course.

Read the full article here. This article first appeared in Insights (The University of Melbourne) By Elisabeth Lopez and Peter Gahan

Incentive Travel & Conventions, Meetings Asia (IT&CMA) and Corporate Travel World (CTW) Asia-Pacific is The World's Only Doublebill Event in MICE and Corporate Travel. The 2015 event is on in Bangkok, Thailand on 29 September to 1 October.

Please find below some trending topics and highlights you can expect from the Association Days on 30 September and October 1

Forum 1 - Are You Prepared To Be Led By Millenials?
Associations rely on member volunteers to take on leadership positions. Many of these positions are now filled by Baby Boomers who are reaching retirement age. Millenials are up next but their sense of volunteerism is quite different from the older generation. How should associations approach succession planning, and what changes are afoot?

Forum 2 - Being Smart About Rising Meeting Costs
The rising cost of services in the meetings and events space is a constant challenge for associations. What are some of the ways around this challenge? Is outsourcing end-to-end meetings management really the most cost effective approach for time- and budget-strapped associations?

Forum 3 - Incentive Travel For Associations
Corporations often use incentive travel to motivate employees and spur performance. But unlike for-profit businesses, associations are largely funded, directly and indirectly, by their members. How relevant is incentive travel to associations? Should such a programme be limited to full-time association executives only, or do board members need incentivisation as well? This session explores the case for incentive travel in the association industry.

Forum 4 - Partnering Your Sponsors
For associations, the sponsorship dollar is as important as it is elusive. Building greater efficiency into your sponsorship programme could start from changing your perspective and looking at potential sponsors as business partners. How do you create a menu of sponsorship opportunities that deliver greater value to your sponsors? This session will feature a recent case study.

For more information about the event click here and to register please click here.

Out with annual financial reports and in with the more comprehensive performance reports. Why this mandatory change for registered charities and what does it mean?

Hopefully by now most involved with registered charities in New Zealand will be aware that, thanks to legislative change and the initiatives of the External Reporting Board, for periods beginning 1 April 2015 registered charities will be required to follow new reporting standards.

However it is in the detail of these new reporting standards for Public Benefit Entities that the magic happens. (At least for tier 3 & 4 entities). Changes are however also coming for tiers 1 & 2 PBEs) Rather than just requiring entities to provide an annual financial report with details of their income and expenditure and assets and liabilities, they are instead also required to provide information about the entity, why it exists, what it set out to achieve, and what it actually achieved.

This makes great sense. Unlike a profit seeking company, the success of a PBE is not easily measured by whether it made a surplus or a deficit. While a statement of financial performance is important hygiene information that can be a measure of activity and sometimes financial efficiency, it doesn’t help assess whether a PBE organisation is actually delivering on its purpose.

Hence the changed requirement for PBEs to provide a more comprehensive Performance Report instead of just an annual financial report.

What is a performance report?

It is designed for those users who cannot require the entity to disclose the information needed for accountability and decision making. Most users of a PBEs performance report will fall into two groups:

• providers of resources to the entity i.e. funders, donors etc
  
• recipients of services from the entity
  

While the performance report will still contain much of the accounting information that annual reports used to contain, it goes further in that it also requires some crucial entity information explaining what the entity is, and why it exists. It will also require performance information which will generally be a mix of qualitative and quantitative reporting.

The fundamental aims of this new style of reporting is to enable stakeholders to better assess an entity’s performance and to improve the quality and consistency of reporting.

Benefits of performance reporting;

There is a saying that you get more of what you focus on. Performance reporting is designed to help focus the entity on reporting on its raison d’etre, it’s reason for being. As anyone who has ever been to a meeting where financial reports are discussed and heard some minor amount like the telephone expenses queried will attest – giving people lots of financial detail often is counterproductive to focusing on the important matters. Rather than focusing on a lot of the detail the performance report essentially requests PBEs to report on their KPIs (key performance indicators). That is, those key measures that show whether the organisation is achieving its aims or not.

An organisation with a clear vision and mission that is then further expanded into a strategic plan with KPIs or other milestone targets should have little difficulty in providing a valuable performance report. And hopefully by forcing entities to consider their outputs and outcomes we should see better focus on the things that really matter towards achieving their purpose.

Read the original blog post here which includes what challenges there are likely to be and audit considerations. This article originally appeared on RSM Hayes Audit.

Your organisation has the power to change lives. The 2015 Diversity Awards season is upon us, it's time to get inspired by amazing people who are doing amazing things. 

Be part of an awards programme that values difference and celebrates what is at the heart of every successful organisation – its people. For more information about the awards, how to enter or attend please click here: http://www.diversityawards.org.nz/

The New Zealand government has approved new measures to strengthen the enforcement of employment standards, it was announced late last week. The changes will be included in an Employment Standards Bill, which is due to be introduced to Parliament this year. Before the legislation comes into force, the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment (MBIE) will develop an information and education plan to inform both businesses and workers of the changes.

The new law will include:

Tougher sanctions

• For the most serious breaches, such as exploitation, cases will be heard at the Employment Court and carry maximum penalties of $50,000 for an individual and at least $100,000 for a company.
  
• Employers will be publically named if the Employment Relations Authority (ERA) or Employment Court finds they have breached minimum standards.
  
• Individuals will also face the possibility of being banned as employers if they commit serious or persistent breaches of employment standards.
  
• Persons other than the employer – such as directors, senior managers, legal advisors and other corporate entities – will also be held accountable for breaches of employment standards if they are knowingly and intentionally involved when an employer breaks the law. These cases can be pursued even if the employer ceases to exist.
  
• The penalties at the ERA for minor to moderate breaches will remain at $10,000 for an individual and $20,000 for a company.
  

Clearer record keeping requirements

• Record keeping requirements for wages, time, holidays and leave will be made consistent across all employment legislation.
  
• There will be flexibility around the format for records, given that they comply with the law.
  
• Infringement notices will be introduced for clear-cut breaches of these obligations with a maximum penalty of $1,000 per breach and a cap of $20,000 if there are multiple breaches.
  

Increased tools for labour inspectors

• Information sharing: There will be enhanced information sharing powers with other regulators such as Immigration New Zealand, the Companies Office and Inland Revenue to improve the ability of labour inspectors to identify and investigate alleged breaches.
  
• Information requests: Labour inspectors will be able to request any record or document from employers that they consider will help them determine whether a breach has occurred.
  

Changes to the ERA’s approach to employment standards cases

• More employment standards cases, particularly those that involve more serious or intentional breaches of employment standards will be resolved at the ERA Authority or Court, rather than being automatically directed to mediation services in the first instance as is currently the case.
  
• If it wishes, the ERA will continue to be able to send cases to mediation if they involve other employment relationship problems, or if it considers that mediation will contribute constructively to addressing the problem.
  
• Employees will be able to seek penalties at the ERA for any minimum entitlement breach.
  

“Employers are the backbone of our economy and most do a great job in meeting their employment obligations, but there are a number of serious breaches occurring,” said Workplace Relations and Safety Minister Michael Woodhouse. “Those who breach minimum employment standards have an unfair advantage over law abiding employers and it is unfair on employees who work hard to support their families. Stronger sanctions for serious breaches will send the message that this type of conduct is unacceptable.”

“The package targets the worst transgressions of employers without imposing unnecessary compliance costs on employers in general,” he added.

This article first appeared in HRM Online

The MFAA has partnered with three other leading associations to represent the industry as Treasury review key aspects of the SMSF sector.

For its submission on SMSF lending, the MFAA has sought support from the Financial Planning Association of Australia (FPA), the Association of Financial Advisers (AFA) and from the Commercial Asset Finance Brokers Association (CAFBA).

The MFAA says a joint response that engages with these industry bodies should significantly raise the impact of the submission.

"Where possible, it is important to provide the Government with a comprehensive submission from the broader industry, rather than multiple small submissions that the government then needs to decipher," said Siobhan Hayden CEO of the MFAA.

"The shared voice is critical to demonstrating industry unity and support for key initiatives currently under review."

The MFAA will also make a submission to the government on three key FSI recommendations which impact upon members:

• a prohibition on direct borrowing by SMSFs for limited recourse borrowing arrangements (LRBAs);
  
• protecting small business borrowers; and
  
• enhanced competition in the lending sector.
  

“This is an important initiative to ensure that the industry has input to this joint submission so we are opening it up to input from the broader industry community. MFAA has supported all brokers in this issue and so give us your feedback even if you are not part of the association,” Hayden said.

Click here for the joint industry submission and here for the MFAA submission and email info@mfaa.com.au with your comments.

When one association offered lapsed members a “pay what you want” reinstatement deal, it won back some members and learned a lot about why they left.

Unless you’re Rob from High Fidelity, this probably sounds like a terrible idea: Invite a bunch of your exes to call you up and explain both why they left you and what they think you’re “worth” today.

You might call this an exercise in self-loathing. Or, if you’re strong willed, an exercise in self-improvement. Or, if you’re Charles M. Cohon, CPMR, CEO and president of the Manufacturers’ Agents National Association (MANA), you might call it an experimental member-reinstatement effort.

In my post last month about “pay what you want” business models, I briefly mentioned a commenter in ASAE’s Collaborate discussion forum [login required] who said he’d used PWYW as a limited offer to bring back lapsed members. That was Cohon. MANA emailed about 350 ex-members in 2014 with an offer to come back, for a full 12-month membership, at whatever price they thought was appropriate.

It certainly caught people’s attention, Cohon says. The emails got an open rate of roughly 35 percent—rather good for a message going out to people who hadn’t heard from MANA in more than a year. In the end, MANA got 15 to 20 members back, Cohon says, at prices ranging from $50 to $199. (MANA’s dues rate at the time was $259.) Winning back those members was nice, of course, but the truth is that the offer was mostly an exit survey in disguise.

“Certainly it was good to get them back, but perhaps the greatest value from it was the opportunity to have one-on-one conversations with people who had lapsed,” Cohon says.

To take advantage of the offer, lapsed members had to call Cohon directly and name their price. Their was no online form to fill out. This was crucial, because the ensuing conversations gave Cohon insights he likely wouldn’t have gotten otherwise. Some said the benefits weren’t valuable enough to their companies. Others said they’d had a bad customer-service experience. And in many cases it became clear to Cohon just how difficult it can be for messaging about benefits and value propositions to penetrate. Cohon says it was a “lesson in humility,” but it didn’t reveal any major miscalculations about the right dues amount for the bulk of MANA’s market.

He wanted to know: “Do they not know what the value proposition is, or do they know what the value proposition is but they don’t think it’s worth the dues?” he says. “And, if they do know what the value proposition is and don’t think it’s worth the dues, is there some other dues number that would be so compelling that [if adopted broadly] the increased members would offset the decreased revenue per member? The message that we got was no. The numbers were scattered.”

Because the offer was limited to a small audience, Cohon says he wasn’t worried about the marginal costs of serving the reinstated members, even if they joined for a minimal amount, and logging a few “special sales” in MANA’s association management system wasn’t much trouble either. The offer was only good for the coming year, so if any of the reinstated members renew again this year, it will be at MANA’s current dues rate, $299. “The goal for this was not to set up a permanent lower-cost membership for a selected few members,” he says.

Spending time pursuing a pool of people who have already come and gone might seem counterintuitive—”We already know they’ve tried us and don’t like us!”—but association marketers will tell you that former members are nonetheless more likely to respond to offers than “never members,” simply due their shared history with your association. In fact, chances are you have more former members in your database than current members, and likely only a small portion of them left for genuinely negative reasons. Some may be open to rejoining, and others may still see your association as a resource for products and services, just as a customer rather than as a full member.

In MANA’s case, the PWYW offer was an attention-grabbing mechanism to bring back those former members already predisposed to consider rejoining. Cohon says he preferred the results of the PWYW offer to those of past efforts to reach lapsed members with outbound calls.

“I’m not sure outbound telephone calls to people always necessarily tease out the truth,” he says. “In this case, we’re taking the opposite tack. We’re making an offer that people can contact us to accept, and I feel like we’re probably getting communications from people who want to be in communication with us as opposed to people we just catch who answered their calls.”

Of course, that meant being ready to back up the PWYW offer when people actually took it. It has to be more than just a gimmick. When one former member called and said he’d pay $50, Cohon didn’t blink. “He may have just been testing me to see if I would stand by my word—’Oh, call him up and say 50 bucks and see what happens’— but I made a commitment and certainly I was going to stick with it,” he says.

MANA won’t know until May whether it won back any of these reinstated members for good (or for at least another year), but it already has plans to redeploy PWYW in other ways. It will soon roll out a membership for retired members, Cohon says, and the initial outreach campaign will offer lapsed members a chance to come back at the retired-member rate if they have in fact retired. If not, a follow-up campaign will offer a chance to return at a price of their own choosing.

The retired-member category is born of the same desire as the original PWYW offer: to re-engage members who have left MANA. Cohon says he thinks such an effort is promising, because organizations typically put so little energy into restoring those relationships. When he spoke with lapsed members who received the PWYW offer, “there was a certain appreciation that we’d reached out to them at all,” he says.

This article first appeared on Associations Now and is written by Joe Rominiecki

One of the least discussed components of success is failure and the crucial role it plays in turning loss into achievement.

Flearning – failing + learning – may not exactly be the new black, but it’s definitely in fashion. So what’s the value in organisations sharing the details of when things go wrong, and how do you fail smart, not dumb?

When Ben Rennie’s multimillion dollar clothing business failed in 2004, he didn’t speak about it with anyone for two and a half years, not even close family and friends. “I no longer had something cool and interesting that people wanted. I thought, if I don’t have that, what do I have?” says Rennie.

Fast forward to 2012 and Rennie is organising and taking the stage at Australia’s first “FailCon” in Sydney. To an audience of 300, he shares how he woke up one morning to an email telling him his company had lost its distribution rights, sending his business from an A$5 million to an A$1.2 million per annum venture overnight. FailCons, where conference speakers share their business stuff-ups and what they learned from them, are enjoying international popularity. “Since we went global in 2012, we’ve produced more than 25 events in more than 15 cities around the world,” says Cass Phillips, FailCon’s San Francisco-based founder.

So why all the fuss about failure?

“When the global financial crisis hit it forced people to be more entrepreneurial, to create jobs for themselves,” says Rennie, now managing director and co-founder of 6.2, a digital strategy and design firm. “That involves much more risk than being an employee, so you need to embrace the idea it might not work.” In addition, while innovation is celebrated, any creative process involves risk-taking and failure. And “failure” is still an uncomfortable proposition in many workplaces. But rebranding failure with a positive spin can help.

The term “flearning” (failing + learning) aims at just such a rebranding. The term was coined after the 2012 FailCon, in a brainstorming session led by Mick Liubinskas, co-founder of business incubator Pollenizer. Now it’s a Twitter hash tag and web domain name, and even a syllabus title in some entrepreneur training courses, and you’ll find Liubinskas’s “proud #flearns” publicly listed on his LinkedIn profile.

While a positive reframe is important, it will take more than clever catchphrases before the average senior manager – with objectives to deliver on – feels comfortable allowing his people to fail. “People know that you have to let people fail to increase innovation, but there’s a knowing-doing gap,” says Doug Sundheim, a New York-based executive coach and author of Taking Smart Risks (McGraw-Hill).

Alex Malley, chief executive of CPA Australia, doesn’t shy away from giving people permission to fail. In the process of trying to achieve great things some things may go wrong, says Malley, who actively recruits people who can be open about their mistakes. “If someone claims to be mistake free, I’d rather they work for someone else,” he writes in his recently released book The Naked CEO (Wiley).

Alex Malley will be the opening keynote address at AuSAE Conference and Exhibition. Early bird pricing for this two day event ends on March 31. To see the full program please click here.

This article first appeared on INTHEBLACK.

Australia's leading chief executive officers still don't understand the power and influence of social media according to the latest available numbers for two key social platforms, LinkedIn and Twitter. The failure of Australia's top CEOs to engage with social media raises questions about their understanding of one of the most powerful business-related paradigm shifts in the 21st century.

The fact that Australian business leaders are bypassing social media is clear from the results of a survey of the CEOs of the top 20 publicly listed companies and their relationships with LinkedIn and Twitter, conducted by The Australian Financial Review's Chanticleer. The two leading executives in terms of social-platform connections are Telstra CEO David Thodey and ANZ Banking Group CEO Mike Smith. Thodey was one of the first executives in Australia to appoint a chief social media officer. Mike Smith embraced social media after a trip to Silicon Valley in 2010.

Thodey is a LinkedIn influencer with 33,323 followers, while Smith is a LinkedIn influencer with 100,438 followers. Thodey is on Twitter and has about 4150 followers. Smith is on Twitter but his account is protected. Thodey has taken social media seriously for several years. He is a big user of the internal social media network called Yammer. Telstra has the largest Yammer community in the Asia-Pacific region and the 14th-largest globally, according to Yammer.

Eleven of the top 20 CEOs are not on LinkedIn and 13 of them are not on Twitter. However, several of the top 20 CEOs are doing better when using another measure of LinkedIn engagement, and that is the number of connections. The following CEOs have more than 500 connections on LinkedIn: BHP Billiton's Andre Mackenzie, Westpac Banking Corp's Brian Hartzer and Grant O'Brien at Woolworths. Insurance Australia Group CEO Mike Wilkins has one connection on LinkedIn, while Brambles CEO Tom Gorman has 26.

Some CEOs outside the top 20 are active on LinkedIn and Twitter, including Alan Joyce from Qantas Airways and Richard Goyder from Wesfarmers. But they are the exception to the rule. James Griffin, a director of KPMG and a specialist in social media, says the most common excuse from CEOs for not being on Twitter or becoming an influencer on LinkedIn is they see it as being narcissistic. "They don't want to put themselves forward as they fear it will look as though it is all about their own vanity," he says. "In some respects this shows that social media is not part of the way they tackle their day. But they are missing the opportunity to not only follow leading thought leaders and experts in different fields around the world but also engage with a variety of stakeholders."

Amanda Gome, who is head of digital and social media at ANZ, says Smith has made it clear he wants ANZ to be the leading social bank in the region. Social is an important tool for engaging with customers. "This is not about having 100 likes on Facebook," she says. "It is about the business value, the value to our customers from doing this." ANZ has recently stepped up its use of social media to promote women within the organisation and give them a platform for sharing their expertise with customers and potential customers.

Twitter and LinkedIn are increasingly being seen as part of a "New Power" in business and government, which was recently defined in an article in Harvard Business Review by Australian Jeremy Heimans, the co-founder of social media group Purpose and one of the founders of GetUp!, and Henry Timms, executive director of 92nd Street Y, a community centre in New York. Their article, published in December 2014 described the attributes of new power and old power. "Old powerworks like a currency. It is held by few. Once gained, it is jealously guarded, and the powerful have a substantial store of it to spend. It is closed, inaccessible, and leader-driven. It downloads, and it captures," wrote Heimans and Timms.

"New poweroperates differently,like a current. It is made by many. It is open, participatory, and peer-driven. It uploads, and it distributes. Like water or electricity, it's most forceful when it surges. The goal with new power is not to hoard it but to channel it." The attributes of new power include social media because it includes collaboration, crowd wisdom and sharing.

Article written by Tony Boyd and sourced directly from:

http://www.afr.com/p/business/chanticleer/ceos_fail_to_embrace_linkedin_twitter_CnLqtqRIsbguxUC6vAqm2M

If, as the saying goes, hell is other people, then there is probably a circle of that hell reserved for work groups. When a team gets hijacked by an alpha member’s quest for world domination, and people stop contributing ideas for fear of being shut down, the work climate can quickly become toxic.

It might be time to call in the actors. Business schools like Harvard and MIT Sloan, and companies like Google and Nokia, routinely bring in improvisational theatre practitioners, to give students and employees a jolt of mindfulness.
Improv is a powerful way for team members to re-examine and change how they relate to each other, say Russell Fletcher and Sarah Kinsella, the actor duo behind the Melbourne corporate training outfit The Decent People. You don’t need to be an actor to get the most out of improv; it’s for anyone who has to communicate with others.

In their work with organisations such as ANZ and Victoria Police, they have seen how improv helps people start to see past rank and role to relate to each other more authentically.

‘Many people wear a mask at work,’ Fletcher says. ‘Many are aware of it, but they stay in that groove because it’s worked for them: it’s kept them in the organisation or in a particular type of role.’ Kinsella adds that pressure-cooker environments take their toll on communication. ‘That’s when you get people sending emails instead of talking to each other – no hello and no goodbye. These subtleties build up over time.’

The duo often use an exercise called ‘yes, but/ yes, and’, a role play in which participants organise a work function, and every exchange begins with ‘yes, but’. Fletcher and Kinsella demonstrate vividly just how defensive and even hostile an exchange can become, because of those two words. ‘Let’s organise the Christmas party’; ‘Yes, but I have a meeting in five minutes’; ‘Yes, but I am the 2IC’.

When workshop participants replace ‘yes, but’ with ‘yes, and’, the difference is startling. The negotiation blossoms into a free flow of ideas and collaborations.

‘Of course, organisations do have to say, “yes, but”,’ Kinsella explains. However, ‘You can say the same thing by saying “yes, and” — “Yes, and we’ve done that before, how do you see this being done differently?”; “Yes, and can I see the budget for that?”. That allows people to contribute and feel valued for their contributions. “Yes, but” closes people down. And after a while apathy sets in: I’m not even going to bother.’

More important than the actual words, powerful as they are, is the mindset the pair are trying to instil. Fletcher says many of the principles of improv are now espoused by many firms: team behaviours, being brave, being creative, backing your own ideas and those of other people. Creativity and innovation depend on being able to play, take risks and bounce back from failure. Improv does not work if you are shooting the other person down to make yourself look good.

‘A lot of organisations are trying to round out their people to be more creative or sales focused,’ Fletcher says. ‘And employees in departments that have not traditionally been customer-facing, such as IT, now have to present and sell.’

A lot of organisations are trying to round out their people to be more creative or sales focused. And employees in departments such as IT now have to present and sell.

Kinsella adds: ‘Tools of improvisation work brilliantly. Even if you are introverted, if you’re passionate about a topic or an idea and you need to sell something, whether it’s a new process or yourself, you need to be able to turn your ideas and thoughts into language and communicate at a human level.’

One common reaction at the start of a workshop is fear of ridicule. ‘We can see them tighten up, ‘ Kinsella says. ‘They think, Oh my god, I’m going to have to act. People are really frightened of losing face: what if they’re not a good actor and everyone else is really good at this activity?’

They warn participants that they will fail. ‘These are just improv exercises, but if you’ve never done them before, why should you get it right? It’s really important to fail,’ Kinsella says. ‘We need to be able to take that risk and, if we do fail, to stay good-natured and not be that person who punishes themselves. We all punish each other enough.’

This post originally appeared on Inside Small Business and was written by Russell Fletcher and Sarah Kinsella