Leaders in Need of a Good Idea

From the Financial Times, German Edition, by Lucy Kellaway

"It's all very well using buzz-words and slogans like "thought leader" to describe new innovations, but what do they actually mean? After a bit of investigation, the concept seems to boil down to this: "thought leader' is simply a new and unhelpful way of saying successful.

First we were employees, plain and simple. Then we were knowledge workers. After that came "Brand Me" and the notion that we were all CEOs of Me, Inc. Now our taste for hyperbole in describing our place in the economic order has become still more rarefied: what every modern worker aspires to be is a thought leader.

The blame for this latest craze rests with the editor of Strategy and Business, a management magazine. In 1994, he needed a name for a new interview slot and came up with "Thought Leader'. Back then it seemed a forgivably pompous title for the pompous thoughts of management gurus. Thirteen years on, it has come to be a much less forgivable name for any old fool in possession of an ego and a blog.

The title offends for three reasons, and pomposity is the least of them. It is inappropriately Orwellian: in free societies, thoughts can be provoked or stimulated or gathered. But not led. Worse still, no one seems quite sure what "thought leader' means. You might think that to qualify as a thought leader you needed to have a thought (preferably a new one) and be able to influence other people with it. Yet mostly when the term is used there is no sign of any thinking or leading going on at all."

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Connecting employees to create value in investment banks

From the McKinsey Quarterly, by Vijay D’Silva and Osman N. Nalbantoglu

Record profits. Ever-larger deals. Relentless expansion into new geographies. In many ways we live in a golden age of investment banking and securities trading.

Yet many institutions find the going tough as clients demand - and increasingly expect - integrated services, including (among other things) advice, the raising of capital, and risk-management solutions. In this environment, banks often struggle to leverage the potential of their talented and highly compensated professionals. Many banks blame their size and complexity, the pace of work, and, above all, “silo thinking” for this problem. Opportunities to build on the success of a particular product in one territory are therefore often overlooked elsewhere, while sales teams serving specific clients largely ignore the possibility of cross-selling products from other groups.

Fortunately, help is at hand in the form of network-mapping tools that identify and encourage value-creating connections across organizations. Companies in a variety of sectors, from biotechnology to construction, have been using these well-established techniques to track and replicate high-performing networks, to help employees emulate the collaborative behavior of other colleagues, and to serve customers more effectively. But investment banks have only recently started to learn the power of that approach.

Banks should carefully tailor their use of such ideas to the industry’s context and circumstances. Collaboration is as hard as it is desirable in all knowledge-intensive businesses - and investment banking is a knowledge industry par excellence. Yet the rewards for looking beyond the organizational chart to unlock value can be considerable.

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