Tribal Business School

More from the CMI convention. And I was in a session by Jo Owen where he was talking about his discoveries in researching his book, Tribal Business School. There’s a lickle video where he explains what its all about:

http://www.meettheauthor.co.uk/bookbites/1527.html

The way he described it to us was that there are Five Pillars:

1. The Art of Unfair Competition

Tribes survive and thrive because they get fool-proof advantages – they don’t have a bare-knuckle fist fight with a lion to kill it, they shoot it from a distance with a poisoned arrow when its unaware that it is under attack. Jo says that we need to think about how we apply this to our businesses. What are our foolproof advantages? Do we even have any? If not, how do we get them? There is a line of thinking that might say as a Students’ Union in many ways our foolproof advantages are that we have more opportunities than other businesses to impress our customers. In Student Activities, we tend to be the sole provider of activities and therefore new friendship groups – and if we’re not the only people doing that activity, we’re actually the easiest for people to discover. Because we are right on their doorsteps. In a way, the laziness of our students could be considered an unfair advantage to anyone who doesn’t have the ease of access that we have – if they have to search very hard for something, they are unlikely to bother.

An interesting point Jo brought up with this was the idea of picking the right battles. You might not be able to win all of your battles, but don’t make that worse by picking ones that you definitely aren’t going to win. Be pragmatic, sensible. I think of conflict I’ve had in the past, whether inter-departmental, between our office and a student group, or even at home with my girlfriend and I think about the wasted energy and the potential damage to reputation that has occurred unnecessarily. 

2. The Secrets of Leadership

And the main secret seems to be that the perfect leader doesn’t exist. Some of the terms used to describe the perfect leader are in polar opposition to each other. The perfect leader would implode under the weight of the contradictions. But what was noticed was that “perfect” leadership changed dependent on the situation and that at each level of leadership, the expectation of the followers (and of the leader themselves) was different. 

This didn’t feel like it was massively new news – I’ve read and practiced situational leadership so I’m already a convert to the idea of doing different things to be the best in any particular situation. But it was interesting seeing it expressed in a different context. It was also interesting when he said that followers look for 3 key things when they look to their role model leader: Courage, Contribution and Responsibility. That’s interesting because those are three concepts that can be readily applied to the workplace environment. I can think of times when I’ve seen colleagues show great courage (and also when I’ve seen them be incredibly cowardly) and how I’ve felt about them because of that. Contributing to the overall success of a project is vital, often in terms of simply making the thing happen, but it also shows the people you work with that you are not afraid to muck in to create success and that you are not asking them to do something you wouldn’t be willing to do. 

Responsibility is something which I have a major issue about. I look around and I see a culture of blame shifting, a culture where people are afraid to admit to their mistakes. When at work I tell my team – I don’t mind people making mistakes, because with the best will in the world mistakes will happen. What I want you to do is say, yes that was my mistake, and this is how I solve it. A major problem that we have in Student Activities at Leeds is where the committee members of our groups won’t own up to the mistakes they’ve made, sometimes outright lying when the evidence is right in front of them. The problem is that by trying to protect themselves, they create a blame culture and affect people’s perception of them. I think this has a clear link to Jo’s next point…

3. The Respect Agenda

In tribal societies, the emphasis is on the community. These people live and die together. Therefore, there has to be a respect for the community – the individual cannot survive without it. There is a stark comparison to be drawn with Students’ Unions here – the community as a whole supports the activities of the smaller groupings by drinking in the bars and buying things from our shops. Collectivism is at the heart of our model – this isn’t rock science. But the next bit was more like it.

In talking to a tribal leader, Jo was told that before you can respect your peers and your community, you have to respect yourself. This is particularly true if you are the leader. Now think about a society demanding funding from a Union. What is at the bottom of this request? Many would argue that there is no problem with self-respect as they often have a very high opinion of their own importance and how good their are. But does it come from deserving this because they are good or is it something else? I suspect that the main reason societies get demanding about money is because of fear. They fear that they won’t be able to run their activities, that their events won’t be very good, that their members will vote with their feet, and that as the organiser, they will look bad. However, if they are comfortable with what they provide, if they know that it really is a high quality product, they don’t have to worry about the money as people will pay the price. We’re seeing this more and more at Leeds – insecurity is removed not by providing shedloads of cash as a buffer, but through groups understanding their worth, and the worth of other groups. They look outwards at the effect they have on each other now. This is a stella leap from where we used to be. And its due to the fact that they don’t have to talk a big game any more, their activities back them up. The output backs them up.

4. The Search for Fit

The essence of survival and success is perfectly adapting to your environment. The search for excellence is an exercise in futility – stop trying to be like someone else and find out what works for your environment.

I want to take those words and tattoo them onto the foreheads of everyone who works in Students’ Unions. We talk about sharing best practice to not reinvent the wheel. What we mean is, I can’t be bothered to think of an idea, your’s works so gimme that. Every time you put something on a mailbase, take the principle and adapt it to fit your area, don’t just ape it or change the logos. To fit your environment you need to understand your environment. Get out and hear what your students are saying. Create a vision for your area and work to that. We do things differently here and people say “oh well, that’s because you’re Leeds and you can afford to”. So we can. But what can you do with your resources? What are your natural advantages? Work to them and stop thinking you’re in my shadow!

5. Change or Die

I don’t think I need to explain this one. At least I hope I don’t. We’re on a road and the only direction is forward. Don’t change for change’s sake, but keep yourself current, appropriate, interesting. Adapt to your challenges and change for the better. There’s an exercise about future thinking where you think about what it was like 10 years ago compared to now and then project what 10 years in the future will be like. Its actually pretty impossible. Here’s a list of things that didn’t exist or weren’t so ubiquitous in 1998:

iPod, Facebook, Myspace, Youtube, Sky+, Zoo & Nuts magazine, Pear Cider, etc, etc, etc.

Things that are everyday parts of your life (or maybe just my life) weren’t in existence. Now think about your union. What are you still doing that you did 10 years ago? How has that changed? Has it changed? If not, why not? 

Overall, Jo Owen presented a number of interesting conclusions, conclusions that can be readily adapted and implemented in a Union environment. That is, if you’re willing to take up that challenge.

Club & Society Sustainability

I went to the Chartered Management’s Annual Convention down in Birmingham last week and jolly good it was as well too. I’ve realised that the thing I like about conferences these days is that they often give you an opportunity to look at your own work from a distant, removed point of view. You might not necessarily learn any new skills but you always come away with a new idea or a new way of approaching a particular subject.

The opening speaker was from a company called Johnson Matthey – they work mainly with precious metal and using them as catalysts in chemical processes. So far, so ho hum. But it was less his background and more the concepts he was talking about that interested me. The subject of his talk was Sustainability and how as a principle it should be embedded into the planning and operations of any business. He outlined that it wasn’t simply an additional initiative outside of the day to day running of any business that could be tossed away when, like now, economic times were not so great. Instead, he stated that sustainability, if used as a key process, could lead to more efficiency and cost savings. Therefore, there was never actually a better time to focus on it.

It got me thinking – for a club or society, what does sustainability look like? Its funny because we have an award in our annual award ceremony but I don’t know if we’ve ever bottomed out exactly what we mean. Is it from an environmental point of view? Or looking simply from the direction of ongoing financial stability? Furthermore, its not a concept that we raise at any point with our committee volunteers – it doesn’t form any part of either the initial induction or the mid-term review meeting. We seem to be therefore expecting that our volunteers both understand what the concept means and that they can take this concept and from it form initiatives that affect the way their activity runs improving it for the future.

It seems to me that before we can get volunteer buy-in, we need to make sure they understand what we are saying. And I think the way that we make them understand what we are talking about is to give them clear examples of what a sustainability initiative or goal looks like. The speaker gave a couple of good examples: “Achieve zero waste to landfill” & “Halve the key resources we consume (per unit of output)”. Whilst these are clear in a commercial environment, how would this translate to the football club?

Sport is a clear area where sustainability needs to be considered but is probably furthest from people’s thinking. We calculated that last year we produced 3.1 tonnes of CO2 from the volume of travelling that our sports teams did getting to their various fixtures. We’ve tried to reduce the amount of travelling we do, the number and size of the vehicles we use, and where possible we try to put teams together in buses. We’re not doing this because we are concerned about the amount of environmental damage we are doing – its purely a cost-saving exercise. In the end, we could only reduce it to a certain level so we chose to offset our production by donating to a tree planting project. I’d like to think we’ll also be looking to use hybrid and electric vehicles when more come onto the market in the coming years.

But we are only one institution who plays sport in the UK. BUCS (British Universities & Colleges Sport) is the governing body that covers over x institutions who take part in sport. Some of them are smaller than us in terms of their programmes, some are larger. It would be unfair to simply take our carbon total and multiple it by the number of institutions as this might over state the amount of CO2 produced by competitive sport at University level. Some interesting stats you can find though are if you search for “sustainability” on the BUCS website, it yields one result – a link to a HEFCE event on wellbeing which is running in Newcastle at the start of next year. A similar search for “environment” yields more results (40), but none of these articles refer to any kind of policy about sustainability considerations – instead the search software is simply finding the world out of context in other articles or, in 12 instances, in job adverts.

I’m not stating this to pick on BUCS or try to embarrass them – mainly because I doubt they read this blog, but also because if they did I suspect not many of them would actually give a toss. And that to me is the major problem. How do you engage someone in this debate when they don’t see it as being an important consideration of their work?

There’s a step that we can take and a step that they can take. We need to brief our committees about this and get them to understand the importance of it. As the man at the conference said, “Long term the resources are going to become more scarce and therefore, more expensive”. We need to provide them with opportunities to think about how they current run their activities and how they can do it in a more sustainable way in the future. Another quote from the man, “As soon as cost-saving was called sustainability, the team had six times as many ideas.” There has to be a way to translate this into a language that makes sense for our committee volunteers.

But we also need big groups like BUCS to take a stand and start to lead this agenda. I know its going to be difficult because it doesn’t seem particularly sexy – but this is an organisation where people will volunteer to set fixtures and change league structures. Surely amongst the mechanics there’s someone with an interest in sustainability issues and how this relates to sport.

The more people who are talking about this, the more our students are likely to pick up on it and make the changes that they need to make to their groups.

Growing Up and Taking Responsibility

I read this article:

Helicopter Parents

and whilst it scared me, it didn’t at all surprise me. It did massively worry me though.

Working in the Students’ Union as I have done for the past few years, I been reliant upon a culture of responsibility – where young adults take control of activities and mature through leading these activities in new and often exciting directions. And maybe its just a think about me getting older. But I find it depressing not only that parents would take such an active role in handling their children’s lives, but that their children would actually let them.

More and more people are choosing to live at home with their families for longer and longer periods. People hang on to their childhood obsessions late into their adult lives – see here for a cracking rant. But is this right? Does our fear of being grown up and taking responsibility lead us to a rejection of adult lifestyles?

It could also be partly due to the fact that if you take responsibility for something, there’s a chance that it might go wrong and you might end up getting hit with a hefty dose of blame. Or worse. We live in a society where mistakes are rarely tolerated and where those who make mistakes are publicly flogged by our media. But we also live in a society where the shifting of blame is endemic and where people don’t see that there’s anything wrong with lying in order to avoid holding your hand up and owning up to your own error.

Helicopter parenting and the continuing infantilisation of ourselves, our friends and our families doesn’t help us in any way as a society and it continues to prove a fake cloak of protection from reality. We need to be strong enough to take responsibility, to admit to mistakes and then make them right, to stand on our own two feet and venture into the world.

Stalking Torres

So, after a nice night in the pub tonight, my good friend Dr Pearce revealed to me that, although its a bit dirty, she’s a bit of a thing for fernando. So we thought was could start a stalk blog here. Write your Torres sightings in the comment. If they are actual sightings, then all the better.

Videoblog 10 – Balloon Popping

Gareth Barry

I am a Liverpool fan.

I think its only fair to get that out in the open before I write the following blog because I know that any comments that I have here could be immediately dismissed as “well, you would say that, wouldn’t you”. But I do want to comment on the Gareth Barry situation and particularly the response he got from the Villa fans last night.

I don’t think its at all surprising that you’re going to get booed when you publicly announce that you intend to leave your club for a rival. I can’t agree with those people who use the line of reasoning that, “well, its their career. You wouldn’t expect to be told to stay in your job if you had a better opportunity elsewhere”, because, whilst that is logical, logic plays very little role in football generally and even less of a role when it comes to supporting a team.

But what I can’t agree with on this is some of the shouts he received. In particular, “You’re not fit to wear the shirt”.

Let’s look at Gareth Barry’s career shall we? Since moving from Brighton as a trainee in 1997, he has made over 330 starting appearances for Villa scoring a total of 35 goals. In April of this year he became the longest serving player at the club as well as the youngest player ever to reach 300 premier league games. He has been voted Fans’ Player and Players’ Player of the year. He has also been Villa’s captain.

If there’s any player fit to wear that shirt then surely it is him. But because he has decided that he needs to move on, he’s now a disgrace. I’m sorry but its not right. Feel upset about him wanting to leave and by all means boo if you want. But give the man some respect for the decade of loyal service he has given your club. There are many total mercenaries in football (we can all name them), but he clearly isn’t one of them.

I’m not happy about the way the deal has been conducted. We’ve certainly not covered ourselves in glory by allowing it to be dragged out in the press for so long. But don’t blame Gareth Barry for that either. The fault here lies with Rafa Benitez and Martin O’Neill. Equally.

It may be that he doesn’t move. I doubt it but it may be. And if he doesn’t and he has to stay I’m sure he will give his all for yet another year. But if he does move, feel hurt. And then thank him for what he has given to your club.

Sepp Blatter is a total imbecile

People who know me will know that I’m no fan of Manchester United. Frankly, I find the whole Ronaldo to Real Madrid story pretty funny – its nice when they are in the position that many other clubs find themselves in once they express an interest in one of their players. That said, the comments of Fifa president Sepp Blatter this week did make me feel a pang of sympathy. A pang that was quickly overwhelmed by a tidal wave of anger. I was going to write a long rant about it, but I found this blog from the Guardian’s Paul Doyle and thought, “Well he’s said it much better than I ever could.” I urge you to read it.

This is What a Student Looks Like

Whilst I said a while ago I wasn’t going to ever write anything work related on here, I’ve decided to change that rule. I won’t write about any that is a current ongoing issue or detail current successes, but ideas related to SU’s and management will appear here. At least until we get the AMSU ideas blog sorted.

So, onto business. Whilst I was at AMSU conference this week I went to a great session by NUS’ Sarah Wayman about Students in the Community and one of the issues that came up was about the image of “students”. I’ve put it that way because I think (and it was backed up by other people in the session) that when concerned members of the community talk about students, they mean the stereotypical, 18-22 year old, white, middle class student.

Over the past ten, fifteen years there has been an explosion in student numbers and along with that has come an explosion in the diversity of students. I think the time has come for someone (maybe NUS, maybe individual unions) to run a campaign aimed at those local communities that surround university areas, that explains in simple terms with clear statistics that there is this diversity of students. It can be as simple as postcards that we post through doors - the front of which is a picture of one of the many types of students that now populate that our institutions. There could be different cards with different pictures on the front and on the back, all of the individual student models together as a group with links to further information.

People might think “Well, what’s the point in doing this? It won’t stop the problems some students cause in the community”, and that is of course slightly true. However, what I’ve come to know is that in order to build a productive relationship with concerned residents and local people, you need to start from an honest position and make available as much information as you can. It doesn’t cloud the issue, it clarifies it.

There’s a further reason though. The stereotypical image of what a student looks like is something which is reinforced through the cultural cues we receive - through TV shows, through newspapers, etc. It is our job as people who work with students on a regular basis to challenge this stereotype - accepting that, yes some of our members are 18-22, white, and middle class. But not all of them. And more and more, its actually less of them.

Unless you work at Leeds obviously….

Here endth today’s sermon.

Photos from Glasgow Gallery of Modern Art

As promised in the previous post. Not the same as being there so get yourself along!

Glasgow Gallery of Modern Art

Had a free hour so I thought I’d leave the conference for a bit and pop over to the Gallery of Modern Art. And very glad am I that I did so.

Jim Lambie had an exhibition of new work in the main gallery called “Forever Changes”. It was eight new sculptures on a floor installation – a load of curved lines called “The Strokes”. Keeping up the music theme, my favourite work was a sculture called “Sonic Reduced” – eight concrete squares with records embedded into them so you could see the edge of the sleeves. Not only were they visually impressive in the way that they have been placed so as to look embedded into the gallery floor, it was pretty good fun looking at the sleeves to spot which records my parents had when I was growing up. It was also quite a shock to find out that Lambie has used collaged eyes in his work for years. Although, its always nice when I can set an element of my work into some kind of real art world setting.

What else was good? Well, I really liked Chad McCails paintings that were designed to look like illustrations from children’s books – although i thought they looked more like those 80’s posters you’d get in school telling you to use the Green Cross Code. I was also surprised to find that I liked Martin Boyce’s “Our Love is Like the Earth, the Sun, the Trees and the Birth”. I say surprised because its got a number of things I’m normally unmoved by in artistic work – sculptures using light bars, installation placement, etc – but I found it to actually be quite moving. Good god, I’m a ponce.

Anyway, there was some other stuff in there but it didn’t appeal to me in the same way. Jo Spence’s photographs are probably worth seeing, although there was only a couple that I found either emotionally moving or ironically funny (although that said I did laugh out loud at one of them).

I took some photos so I’ll post them on the blog when I get home from the conference. Anyway, better get back to it. Got to write up some stuff from an earlier session and then help prep a presentation for the AGM on Wednesday. No rest for the wicked.