Strategic Efficiency Enrolment – Gaining Efficiencies Without Reducing Headcount

In a downturn people are more important than ever. The challenge for 09? How to make your business efficient whilst looking after your people. In previous downturns, many employers focussed heavily on reducing labour costs as a way of maintaining bottom line performance. Some of these labour reduction strategies lacked dignity and were in retrospect poorly managed. As a result, when the economy recovered, the organisation was left with a major labour problem. Existing employees left as the job market picked up, and the company having developed a reputation as an employer who had failed to look after their employees, found it difficult to attract good people. But of course we can learn from this experience. Reducing head count is not the only, or even often the best way, to reduce expenses. There is a new way – it is called Strategic Efficiency

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Mohammed Younis Talks about the Importance of Banking in Reducing Poverty

Mohammed Younis, Nobel Prize winner, has a uniquely creative way of looking at how financing and banking should be structured in emerging economies to reduce poverty. His model might not only apply to emerging economies> We could certainly adapt some of his thinking to first world economies given the current state of affairs. Worth reflecting on this when you listen to this interview.

The End with Michael Lewis

Michael Lewis first came to attention in 1989 with his best seller Liars Poker about his life as a bond saleman with Saloman Bros on Wall Street and their role in developing a market for mortguage bonds. An art historian with an economics degree from the London School of Economics, his writing has always been about identifying and exploring the emergence of trends and their implications - Moneyball, (baseball) the Next Next Thing (the internet); Next: The Future Just Happened (the digital world) and the Blind Side (American football) are all impeccibly researched and shine as works by a writer for an eye for the nuances of the history of business and markets. So it was a delight to catch from one of my Twitter followers (@ripkungler) a link to his latest article - the End.

At last, an essay that makes sense of the incomprehensibility of what has occurred on Wall Street and the role the investment banks and their leaders have played in this period of unmitigated greed and as Lewis says in play English - lying to themselves, their associates and anybody who was willing listen. I am sure this article will be the first of many exploring the circumstances we find ourselves in. However Lewis plain English  brings home the enormity of the fraud perpetrated by the investment bankers of Wall Street and their associates the rating agencies. Do yourself a favour and read the article and wonder how it could all happen.

Insights in Times of Turmoil

At its inception in Nov 2005, the Creative Leadership Forum presented a philosophy for creative leadership based on these principles. * Numbers are considered the measure for business success. * It is not the financial and performance targets that produce the outcomes or value. * It is the relationships and actions among people, clients, suppliers and their patterns of working and thinking together that produce the outcomes and the value. * A successful creative leader understands that to nurture the relationships between all stakeholders in order to satisfy customer needs is what produces immediate value and long term viability. When we presented these principles we generally received grudging acknowledgement spiced with a degree of cynicism around the numbers proposition. Still, the numbers have to work was often the parting comment!! When measured against the current backdrop in the world financial markets, this philosophy with its four principles not only holds up strongly, it proposes a way forward. Right now all the major financial media commentators agree on one thing - nobody knows where the world economy is going. It is in the area of paradox, ambiguity and uncertainty and there is no way out!! The most insightful commentary I have read on the current situation is George Soros' new book

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