futurehub

The February issue of FAST COMPANY magazine gives us another hint that lots of so called knowledge workers do not focus on their main tasks. As a result of internal studies pharmaceutical company PFIZER found out: 20 – 40 % of the time is spent on support work. The senior director of organizational effectiveness, Jordan Cohen, is quoted: “ These are people we hired to develop strategies and innovate. Instead, they were Googling and making Power Points.” It was Cohan who found a way to outsource parts of the workload – he created OOF, which stands for Office Of the Future. Behind it PFIZER created a system with a simple interface, the magic “OOF button”, integrated into Microsoft Outlook. The knowledge worker of Pfizer can determine if he wants to outsource a certain support work to a company in India which in turn sends an offer, specifying the costs. Read the full text in FAST COMPANY here.

I have started my main project in 2008 on Self-Leadership and I have already finished eight interviews (till today), traveling to Milan, Frankfurt, and Waldkirch (Fabrik Sonntag, near Freiburg i.Br.) for dialogues with leaders.
As expected, there is a wide range of answers to my set of questions. Most important aspects are goal setting, discipline, self-motivation, and self-reflection. Looking at the methods and instruments for Self-Leadership I found the more “classic” approaches of planning on paper, as well as hybrid forms including digital media. And I found some validation for my skeptical view of PDAs such as the Blackberry.
Of course there are very creative approaches, too. For example, I heard a lot about the use of mind-maps for personal goal setting and visualizing tasks. Leonardo Previ, co-founder and co-owner of the Milan agency Trivioquadrivio shows how easy planning methods can be: he has a three-dimensional model of his goals right on his desk – made of LEGO bricks. This is no surprise for me – Leonardo is a certified facilitator for LEGO Serious Play.

Interview with Leonardo Previ (Milan, Feb. 04, 2008; photo: Pietro Storti)

I will quickly go on with the interviews. Although the focus lies mainly on Germany, there will be interviews with leaders from Italy, Great Britain, Poland, and the USA in the next months.

My project of the year for 2008 deals with the topic of Self-Leadership. In a row of interviews with leaders in Germany and abroad I want to find out how leaders lead themselves. There are numerous articles and books on this subject but I am interested in finding out what leaders actually do to stay on target.

The key questions for the interviews are:

1. How do you define leadership? What comes to mind?
2. Which methods and instruments do you use for self-leadership?
3. Which are your strengths in the field of self-leadership in your own view?
4. Which are your weaknesses in the field of self-leadership?
5. Are there any role models (present or past) of self-leadership for yourself?
6. How can someone improve his/her self-leadership? What can be learned?

As from the present point I will use the results of the interviews at least for the following purposes:

1. material for my lecture on leadership at the University of Applied Sciences, Osnabrück (Germany),
2. material for this BLOG (http://futurehub.com/),
3. as the base form y book (2009) on self-leadership and
4. for lectures and speeches.

I will post more information in this BLOG.