BCA

Five Leadership Skills You and Your Organization Cannot do Without…

Leaders today live in an age of remarkably complex challenges. They range from expanding into volatile international markets, to dealing with the fallout from natural disasters, to navigating their organizations through a broken global economy while preparing for future opportunities. Complex challenges, our research has shown, don’t yield to quick fixes. They don’t respond to standard approaches or conventional knowledge. In fact, 92 percent of executives surveyed by CCL said the challenges their organizations face are more complex than they were just five years ago. On average, they take two years to solve.

Our research also tells us this: you and your colleagues at every levelof your organization do not have all the skills needed to lead effectively in the future. CCL surveyed more than 2,000 leaders from15 companies in the U.S., India and Singapore. We asked these leaders to rate 20 leadership skills in terms of how important they are rightnow for success and how important they will be for success over the next five years.

The upshot: the four most important future skills – leading people, strategic planning, inspiring commitment and managing change – are weak points among today’s leaders. There exists, in other words, a glaring gap between the skills leaders have now and the ones they will need in just a few short years. At CCL, we call it the “leadership gap.”

In a world of increasingly complex challenges that demand leadership traits many of us do not yetfully have, there’s no time to waste in developing ourselves and the men and women in ourorganizations. Based on CCL’s research and practical experience over the past 40 years, we believethe leadership gap can be closed by focusing on these five areas:

Teamwork and collaboration

Managing change

Communication

Learning agility/growth mindset

Judgment

Printed with permission of Center for Creative Leadership. The complete white paper from which this Executive Summary is taken, is available in its entirity on the Center for Creative Leadership website… www.ccl.com.

One year after the depths of the worst financial crisis in half a century, Americans are more likely to say their financial institutions are doing what’s best for them, according to the seventh annual customer advocacy rankings by Forrester Research, Inc.. Based on a survey of more than 4,500 consumers, the customer advocacy rankings rate 46 banks, investment firms, and insurance companies in the US. As it has every year, USAA topped the Forrester rankings. And while consumer trust in financial firms has moved off the historic lows from last year, the positive sentiment is not evenly distributed: The largest US banks dominate the bottom of the rankings.

Underscoring the fact that customer trust is inching back up, 13 firms saw their scores go up by more than five percentage points in the past year. As a group, insurers bounced back higher than banks and investment firms. Customer rankings for super-regional banks also improved significantly from last year. Large banks took up the bottom seven spots in the rankings, and wealth management firms as a group had the worst customer advocacy ratings overall.

Here are the top 10 rated firms in Forrester’s 2010 customer advocacy rankings:

1. USAA (insurance)
2. A credit union
3. An independent insurance agent
4. USAA (banking)
5. An independent financial advisor
6. AAA
7. State Farm
8. A regional or local bank
9. Aflac
10. GEICO

By John Riley

 Does Spinternet mean anything to you? It didn’t to me until I visited the Forrester Research website recently and found a reference to it. Now I know and so should you.

 With all the excitement surrounding the introduction of Kindles, Androids, iPhones, tablets and FiOS TV’s,  you may be surprised to learn your site may not work right on these devices. You will notice the change when you try to use flash or mouse-based navigation. The Internet was created in a compatible format so that any computer, connection or browser would interface with it. That is no longer true.

 In the past, everything on the Internet was standard and connected. Today, much of the really valuable information and data is login and password protected. If you are a frequent user of the very popular Facebook, its applications won’t work anywhere else. Most importantly Google can’t access much of it. Furthermore, apps that function on the iPhone can’t work on the Android. Widgets designed for FiOS TV won’t work anywhere else.

 Google requires a standard format to operate as does search engine optimization, click-throughs, ad networks and analytics.

 Because these new devices will splinter the web as a standardized system, Forrester Research, following a study of this phenomenon, coined the term Splinternet to describe it. All of the new devices have their own format, ad networks and technology. As new social sites come online, they will have their own login and much of its content will be concealed from search engines.

 Since there will be no turning back, the study authors recommend the following:

1)     Choose your devices carefully as investments in one cannot be transferred easily to others if you make a mistake.

2)     Rethink analytics, links and measurement because they are just coming available in the new environments.

3)     Promote new channels since SEO won’t help you much here. Platforms like iPhone apps and Facebook are some of the most  exciting new channels out there.

4)     Just realize you are leaving the comfy environment of the Web behind… along with all the tools you’ve grown dependent on…as you embrace the new platforms.

 For marketers, its not too soon to start revising market plans. The rest of us will need to start doing our homework on the new devices.

Special from Gallup Management Journal

Keeping people productive and hopeful in tough times isn’t as complex — or as costly — as you might think

As economic conditions worsened during 2008, U.S. workers’ confidence in their economic futures declined, according to Gallup. In January 2008, 60% of employees felt that their standard of living was improving. By October, when the extent of the financial meltdown was becoming clear, that figure had dropped to 39%; in October and November 2008, employed Americans were more likely to say their standard of living was getting worse than to say it was getting better.

However, American workers’ optimism partially recovered between November 2008 and May 2009 before stabilizing. Since last May, about half of employed Americans have consistently said that their standard of living is improving, while about one-third have said it is getting worse.

These trends have been remarkably consistent across different job categories, reflecting the breadth of the economic downturn. It’s been called an “equal opportunity” recession in the sense that it affected the perceptions of all types of workers — including service workers, manufacturing workers, managers, and professional workers.

Refer to www.gallup.com for complete story.

New developments in nanotechnology tackle two biggest problems with chemotherapy

 As reported in the December 21, 2009, issue of the journal Small, He, Minko and their co-researchers, including investigators from Merck & Co. and Carl Zeiss SMT, a global nanotechnology firm, have designed nanomaterials that allow for the targeted and simultaneous delivery of a chemical drug to destroy cancer cells and a genetic drug to prevent drug resistance.

 ”We modified the surface of mesoporous silica nanoparticles so that an anticancer drug, doxorubicin, could be loaded into the pores of the silica nanoparticles. Also loaded onto the nanoparticles was a genetic drug designed to prevent or remove multidrug resistance outside the nanoparticles,” explained He.

 When administered to multidrug-resistant ovarian cancer cells, the nanoparticle treatment was more than 130 times more lethal than when doxorubicin was administrated alone . Most importantly, “the drug can only be released when it is inside the cancer cells. This controlled internal release mechanism can dramatically eliminate side effects associated with anticancer drugs to normal tissues,” He noted.

 New findings suggest new ways to diagnose and treat Alzheimers

 Until very recently, it was universally assumed by scientists that tau fluid is never secreted from or transferred between neurons, and that CSF-tau only appears after many neurons have died and irreversible harm has been done to the brain.

 ”That tau secretion can occur via two distinct mechanisms strongly indicates that it is biologically ‘real’ and is not just tau protein leaking out of dead neurons,” said Hall. “The fact that it occurs in a pattern that reproduces what is seen in the CSF of Alzheimer’s patients holds out hope that patients in early stages of the disease might someday be cured. If we can distinguish secreted tau from tau that is released from dying neurons in CSF samples, then maybe we can diagnose Alzheimer’s in time to stop the disease before the neurons

 Panasonic’s anode technology to offer 30% increase in battery capacity

 Si-alloy anodes could accelerate the rate of increase of battery capacity. Capacity has been increasing at about 11% annually until now, but this new development represents an annual increase of 18%. Credit: Panasonic.

 One promising modification to next-generation rechargeable Li-ion batteries involves using Si-alloy anodes instead of graphite, which is currently the most common anode material. Many battery manufacturers are developing Si-alloy anodes, with Hitachi Maxell having previously announced plans to begin volume production by the end of fiscal 2009. Now, with its announcement of beginning volume production in 2012, Panasonic is the first company to reveal specifications of its Si-alloy anode product.

 NASA and GM create cutting edge Robonaut2 technology

 Engineers and scientists from NASA and GM worked together through a Space Act Agreement at the agency’s Johnson Space Center in Houston to build a new humanoid robot capable of working side by side with people. Using leading edge control, sensor and vision technologies, future robots could assist astronauts during hazardous space missions and help GM build safer cars and plants.

 Survey: 26% of Americans get news via cell phone

 The survey results being released by the group Monday offer another sign of how people are changing they way they get information. Technology has been reshaping the news business and the way consumers relate to it for more than a decade. The latest shift is being driven by the exploding popularity of phones that can easily access the Internet.

 The new study found that 26 percent of Americans get news on their phones. Pew doesn’t have comparable data for say, two or three years ago. But evidence of the shift in habits can be seen in this finding: Younger cell phone owners are more likely to look for news on their phones. About 43 percent of those under 50 said they are mobile news consumers, compared with 15 percent of older respondents.

 Google’s Android on 26 mobile phone models says CEO

 Google’s mobile operating system Android is now being used on 26 phone models and 60,000 phones using Android are sold every day, the US Internet giant’s chief executive said on Tuesday.

 Study proves conclusively violent video game play makes more aggressive kids

 Iowa State University Distinguished Professor of Psychology Craig Anderson has made much of his life’s work studying how violent video game play affects youth behavior. And he says a new study he led, analyzing 130 research reports on more than 130,000 subjects worldwide, proves conclusively that exposure to violent video games makes more aggressive, less caring kids — regardless of their age, sex or culture.