Speed Lead: Faster, Simpler Ways to Manage People, Projects and Teams in Complex Companies Review

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Speed Lead: Faster, Simpler Ways to Manage People, Projects and Teams in Complex Companies ReviewThis week I did a speed read of Speed Lead. Sometimes it is important to turn things on their heads to see them better--it is much easier than doing handstands to get a different perspective--and this is exactly what Kevan Hall, CEO of Global Integration does. It astounds me how quickly new insights become boilerplate, that heavy stuff that keeps us grounded when we need to fly off in new directions. So it is refreshing when we are challenged by someone other than airport security about the baggage we carry with us.
Within less than a generation, concepts of teamwork, community, buy-in, and communication have become the dogma of contemporary management practice and panaceas for what ails us organizationally. The merit of Hall's essay is that he dares to ask when, how, and why these concepts are applicable and above all, when are they NOT! Hall clearly identifies when these best intended and highly valued work concepts not only do not work but cause hemorrhages of time, money and above all, motivation. In essence, he is telling us, "Take a closer look!"
The author writes in a simple and straightforward manner without excess jargon. This does not keep him from articulating significant concepts and distinctions with sound bites that give the book its power to influence our practice. Interspersed worksheets assist the reader to reflect on his or her organizational realities as the key concepts are introduced. Rather than listing the chapters, now that anyone can read a table of contents by googling up Amazon, I would like to highlight a few hotspots.
Take, for example, Hall's treatment of "community decay." This is in fact an examination of the cycle of motivation that is often unmanaged to the detriment of both projects and people. Hall tells us how to kick off a community involvement, how to sustain energies when people are working remotely, and, finally how to finish. "Unfinished business" is a psychological drain that is the bread and butter of therapists but hardly ever identified or dealt with as an energy drain in organizations.
Much of the book depends on the clear distinction between a "spaghetti team" (intense interdependency needed to achieve goals--hence many connections of each team member with each other) vs. a group or "star team" (independent efforts produce most of the results, so only central coordination is usually required). This distinction seriously affects both the functional size of the team and the amount and kind of communication that is necessary and NOT necessary.
Not all of Hall's suggestions are new, but it is the focus that he puts on them that adds value. For example, having people at a training program or meeting identify their wants and offers, i.e., what they are looking to have or to learn, and what they are willing to share or provide. My colleague and friend Walt Hopkins introduced me to this way of starting a session over 20 years ago. However, Hall's insight is that instead of having long boring presentations of what people see as their "best practices"--common in many meetings, they simple use wants and offers data to network with each other and come away what they hunger for rather than a carryout menu of seemingly good things to do.
The big middle of this book rightly deals with remote working and virtual teamwork, and rightly so. as most people I work with in large organizations confess that as much as 90% of their craft and communication are handled virtually. Here Hall goes into detail about how to trim out the unnecessary, build local capability, and manage distributed loyalties without paranoia.
A few gems from the pages of Speed Lead:
* "If there is no agenda, how do you know you need a meeting?"
* "A regular meeting is a bad meeting."
* "People are much more able and willing to adopt common practices than common values."
* "Loyalty is naturally local."
In the Cultural Detectivetm USA, my colleagues and I identified as core US values, "speed" and "speaking out." Clearly "speed" and "time is money" are the unexamined premises of Speed Lead. As Hall points out, "Values rarely change." However the exercise of values is highly relative to situations, circumstances and the Zeitgeist. Sometimes they are more ideal than real. So it is a challenge to become conscious of the shifts that occur in their relativity. For example, despite the US addiction to speed, I hear complaints from Asian managers that their US counterparts simply move too slowly! Despite the lip service paid to "speaking out" and "freedom of speech," fact is that in the US workplace "cover your backside" seems ascendant, while in the US public context "freedom of speech" is being severely limited by fear, invasion of privacy, and political correctness. Dealing with the cost of the intimidating legal and political climate in organizations as well as in the general US environment seems missing in these pages despite its growing impingement on global business.
While only the final chapter of Speed Lead is overtly about culture, the entire book is about the culture of organizations and, from the author's apparent experience as a practitioner around the world, what he speaks about is at the interface of culture and globalization. However, what starts out as practical forestry management deteriorates into clear cutting in its final moments. For a great majority of readers, I fear Hall essentially burns down the cultural rain forest with the assumption that, because what purport to be rule-oriented, individualistic, direct- and English-speaking meritocracies have succeeded in exploiting resources and marketplaces so successfully, they are de facto right or even know where they are going (other than after the next dollar). Capitalism has been good at creating a lot of wealth and very dodgy about where it comes from and where it goes.
Paradoxically the final chapter is titled, "Leave my cultural values alone," but suggests that this is done by ignoring values in favor of adopting common practices, unless the values involved turn out to be locally useful or cause trouble. This is frightening and suggests that the future of most cultures will belong to museum curators. While there may be a practical balance to be found here, this reviewer suspects that Chapter 8 will be, more often than not, understood as giving the reader all the expert permission he or she needs to ignore, if not flout the cultural values and practices of collaborators with different backgrounds or on other parts of the globe. Freedom of culture, like freedom of religion, is relegated to the ever diminishing area of private discourse as the unconscious and unexamined culture and religion of global business are given free reign. The rise of hackers and terrorists should not surprise us.
Bottom line: lots of challenging and useful ideas, many helpful applications, especially salient for virtual collaboration, but let your values give you the framework in which to achieve your Speed Lead.
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