Power of Tribes - Clash of Cultures - Consumer Groups

Clash of cultures, religious tribes, brands create tribes, every corporation is many tribes. Tribal inequality of wealth risks global instability, protest movements and new terrorist groups. Tribes give music, language, poetry, literature, teams, friends, neighbourhood, family, teams, communities and nations. Most businesses are tribes of tribes. Niche markets and tribalism. Tribal leadership -- leading thousands of people, motivation, inspired workers, higher productivity, people movements. Clients and customer segmentation. Political tribes, campaigns and protest groups, activists. Conference keynote speaker and Futurist Dr Patrick Dixon

Motivation at Work - how to increase workplace motivation

Motivation at work. People don't get passionate about shareholder value or business profits or excel spreadsheets. They get passionate and motivated about challenge, great teams, vision, important goals, having fun, about family and friends, about the community and world they live in. Connect with passion and you will motivate teams to change organisation, business and world. Work-life balance, family, children. Conference keynote speaker and Futurist Dr Patrick Dixon. Business productivity and motivating teams. Team leadership, targets, bottom line profit, increasing shareholder value. CEO speeches, annual general meetings. Publicly listed corporations. Attracting talent, retaining talent, winning the war for talent. Human resources and making a difference. Why workplace motivation depends on corporate vision, workplace passion and clear purpose. Connectedness and engagement at work. Business priorities, strategy and objectives must connect with individual passion - key to business success.

Get passion in your business - motivation at work

Motivation at work. Leadership. Leadership purpose, aims, strategy and objectives. Profits and profitability. Motivation to succeed and secrets of business success. Productivity and efficiency key. Workplace morale. Team dynamics and leadership styles. Business mission and vision. Business values and office culture. Conference keynote speaker and Futurist Dr Patrick Dixon.

Managing uncertainty -- strategy and innovation -- ...

When world changes -- how long does it take to develop new business strategy? Scenario planning vital to business success, contingencies, risk management, disruption of business, disaster planning, terrorist attacks. Global trends. September 11 and impact on aviation industry / British Airways business models. Rapid response to changes, currency crisis, political crisis. Multiple plans, dynamic leadership, flat leadership structures. Banks and insurance industry planning. Innovative thinking. Keeping business options open. Innovation in Google, experiments. Oil industry risk, fixed infrastructure investment.
Strategy, leadership, management, risk, change, trends, scenarios, planning, business, leaders, managers, Patrick, Dixon

Why teaching is such an important calling

All education has values. But often those values are hidden. Preparing students for future life. Motivation, leadership, purpose, meaning, spirituality, what people want out of life, personal fulfilment and happiness. Definition of real success. How do we measure student success. More than wealth and "achievement". Success in private life -- family, marriage, children, friendship, inner contentment. Helping students connect with their own passion to make a difference. Why young adults are rejecting work patterns of older generation. Rise of concern about getting a life, work-life balance. Career ambitions and life goals changing -- impact on education. Volunteering is booming, why volunteer work is sign of future. Why teaching is a noble calling. Importance of teaching. Video on future of education, high schools, colleges, universities, curriculum, trends, syllabus, exams, assessments, business schools, MBAs, degree courses - by Dr Patrick Dixon, Futurist conference keynote speaker for NAIS.

How to Double Your Productivity -- Leadership -- ...

How to double your productivity as a leader. Leadership development, output, efficiency and team effectiveness. How to make things happen. Secrets of change management. Leadership styles. The 80 20 rule or 80:20 rule. How small things have huge impact. Focus effort, cut least productive things. Leaders waste huge efforts, money and time doing things with little impact. Examples of 80:20 rule in leadership development. Leadership training video. Management training video. How to save costs and improve bottom line profit, shareholder value and return on equity. Why productivity gains really matter and how to achieve greater efficiency. Secrets of leadership success. Video by keynote conference speaker Dr Patrick Dixon, Futurist and author of 12 books on global trends including Futurewise and Building a Better Business.
Leadership, styles, productivity, success, change management, team impact, efficiency, cost reduction, profitability, business success, leaders, focus, customer, productivity, Patrick dixon

Globalisation -- educating students for a global future

Most colleges and high schools teach a narrow view of world. Globalisation of economy, job market, outsourcing, impact of mobility of workforce. Preparing students for virtual offices, teams and corporations. Pressures on personal lives and work life balance from international travel. Teaching third millennial skills for virtual communication and virtual team leadership, motivation and winning the war for talent. Increasing productivity. Video on future of education, high schools, colleges, universities, curriculum, trends, syllabus, exams, assessments, business schools, MBAs, degree courses - by Dr Patrick Dixon, Futurist conference keynote speaker for NAIS.

Leadership and motivation at work - conference speaker

How to lead people so they feel passionate about your corporate goals. Change management and business objectives. Connect with passion. Why people follow leaders. Leadership styles and effective leadership. Conference keynote speaker and Futurist Dr Patrick Dixon.

Risk management - wild cards - high impact, unlikely events

High impact unlikely events. Impact on future business strategy. Leadership and change management. Managing uncertainty and rapid change. Insuring risk and risk management in business. Contingency planning. Leadership styles and decisions. Web marketing. Online sales. Impatient consumers and consumer choices. Rapid innovation. Conference keynote speaker and Futurist Dr Patrick Dixon.

Managing speed of change - risk management - leadership

Speed of change. Change management. Leadership styles and decisions. Web marketing. Online sales. Impatient consumers and consumer choices. Rapid innovation. Business profit. Agility in teams. Contingencies. Managing uncertainty and risk management. Conference keynote speaker and Futurist Dr Patrick Dixon.

Motivation at Work - how to increase workplace motivation

Motivation at work. People don't get passionate about shareholder value or business profits or excel spreadsheets. They get passionate and motivated about challenge, great teams, vision, important goals, having fun, about family and friends, about the community and world they live in. Connect with passion and you will motivate teams to change organisation, business and world. Work-life balance, family, children. Conference keynote speaker and Futurist Dr Patrick Dixon. Business productivity and motivating teams. Team leadership, targets, bottom line profit, increasing shareholder value. CEO speeches, annual general meetings. Publicly listed corporations. Attracting talent, retaining talent, winning the war for talent. Human resources and making a difference. Why workplace motivation depends on corporate vision, workplace passion and clear purpose. Connectedness and engagement at work. Business priorities, strategy and objectives must connect with individual passion - key to business success.

Motivation, leadership business change management business

Enjoy more than 100 of my videos. Over 60,000 views already on my video about how to make things happen. Connect with passion. Managing uncertainty with rapid change. Leadership styles. Why people get out of bed in the morning. How to motivate teams at work to do great things. Business management. Secret of leadership and ultimate leadership speech. Business ethics and values in corporations. Secrets of business success and increased productivity. Cutting costs. Increasing output. Adding shareholder value. Sustainable business success. Work life balance and lessons from non profits / volunteering. Why building a better world is such a powerful motivation. Lecture by Dr Patrick Dixon for MTN, author of Building a Better Business, Futurewise and conference speaker.Motivation at work. Leadership. Leadership purpose, aims, strategy and objectives. Profits and profitability. Motivation to succeed and secrets of business success. Productivity and efficiency key. Workplace morale. Team dynamics and leadership styles. Business mission and vision. Business values and office culture.

Truth about Politics: they often pretend to disagree - Video

Most politicians in most democratic countries agree on most things. Just look at how rare it is for a new government to undo legislation passed by the previous administration. Despite all the political posturing, the real debates are not about differences in manifesto promises (often overtaken anyway by global events), but about who has the most competent and experienced leadership team. Most energy in politics today is about single issues such as Iraq, genetically modified food, stem cell research or global warming. Politicians will only have a chance of recovering respect if they start keeping to the truth which is that consensus rules and the opposition are on the whole sensible people with decent policies. Video comment.

Warren Buffett gives $37bn to Bill Gates' Foundation and Gates to leave Microsoft to run it all

The decision by Bill Gates to give all his time in future to his foundation, and then by Warren Buffett to add $37bn to the fund, will together trigger a series of events of truly lasting significance.

Firstly we can expect many more ultra-high net worth individuals to make similar decisions, giving both time and money to help change the future of our world for the better - albeit on a smaller scale, but the cumulative impact could well be even greater.

Building a better world is a powerful driving motivation behind the fact that almost all ultra-high net worth families have their own charitable foundations.

Warren Buffett is unusual in that he has left it comparatively late in wealth-making to begin his large-scale philanthropic activity.

It is easy to be cynical about such motivation but the fact is that 60% of all US citizens regularly give time to things they believe in and the average gift of time is 200 hours a year. Costed at the average hourly rate for earnings, this is a total gift worth the equivalent of 4.5% of US GDP. Similar proportions of the population give time in the UK and many other EU countries. People give time or money because they feel that in doing so they are able to make a positive difference in some small way to others.

Large-scale philanthropy is just an extension of this normal pattern of community involvement.

This whole area is much misunderstood by many corporations, who tend to regard corporate and social responsibility as a minor addition to the doctrine that companies exist only to make money for shareholders. The trouble is that it is very rare to meet anyone who gets out of bed in the morning passionate about making more shareholder value. Numbers-based leadership is a powerful turn-off to most executives - as I have seen in speaking with senior audiences in many different countries and corporations over the last decade.

It should be no surprise therefore that a recent UK survey showed that 90% of 35-45 year olds in business jobs want to leave, while 60% of 25-35 year olds cannot see any purpose in what they do, working each day for a corporation. Numbers cannot produce passion nor purpose, unless people see what the numbers actually mean in terms of making a difference in ways that they feel are important.

Thus we have a serious mismatch between the passions people have for what they do outside of formal employment - where they gladly work for nothing, and their almost complete lack of interest by contrast in what they are actually paid to do.

If corporations could tap into even 1% of the energy which people enthusiastically devote to "good causes" or which causes Bill Gates and Warren Buffet to give away tens of billions each, we would have a completely different situation in the workplace today.

This is one reason why so-called cause-related marketing has taken off so fast, linking products to things people feel passionate about. In an age where products and services tend to converge in price and quality, values are what makes all the difference.

The second thing we can expect from the Gates and Buffet decisions is that many more business leaders who also feel the same kinds of desires to make the world a better place, are going to feel added courage to use the business itself as a positive driver of change. Why wait until they leave?

And they will know that the majority of their shareholders, staff and customers who also give time and money to things they feel passionate about, are likely to react positively to their leadership, with added commitment and loyalty, so long as the business is well run in every respect.

The third impact of the new Gates - Buffet alliance will be a gathering momentum for radical improvements in Africa, India and other such parts of the world. It will not be easy, but the pressure will grow further to find practical ways to make a difference.

Because of the way the markets devalue currencies of failing nations, as I have discovered in my own AIDS foundation ACET, a single dollar is enough to pay the school fees for an orphan for three weeks in a country like Zimbabwe. A million dollars is enough to hire 5,000 men or women for 3 months. It is hard to grasp the scale of opportunity when many billions of dollars can be converted into currency in some of the poorest nations (sensitively or else it will distort the local economy), in order to invest in a wide range of community-based, sustainable development projects.

And of course health is a basic requirement. The poorest nations continue to suffer needlessly from easily preventable illnesses and terrible handicaps like the loss of site at early ages.

The Bill Gates Foundation has already had significant impact on a wide range of such conditions and we can look forward to far more in the future.

Feature in Financial Times by Dr Patrick Dixon on tribalism and ageing

Your company may have a reputation for brilliant leadership, outstanding innovation, clever branding and effective change management, but the business could fail if the world changes and you are unprepared.

Many debates about the future are about timing, such as the uptake of technology. But the future is also about emotion. Reactions to events such as bird flu are often more important than the events themselves.

Strategic Planning and Future of Business Strategy

Business school executive programme presentation. You can have the best strategy in the world, the best change management methods and the most talented teams but if your view of the future is wrong you will just go even faster in the wrong direction. We need future-vision, to be futurewise, and to understand what the prime drivers of strategic transformation will be for the next decade. A single four-word phrase will be the basis of all strategic transformation, all marketing and mission statements and all successful leadership...

Real Success - Future values, marketing, leadership, motivation and and corporate governance- Dr Patrick Dixon

Real Success - Future values, marketing, leadership, motivation and and corporate governance- Dr Patrick Dixon


Changing values affecting marketing, motivation, management, leadership and corporate governance. Find the ultimate generic slogan and mission statement and why hundreds of multinationals are using it.

Future of Insurance Industry - financial services trends (marketing, customers, products, services, strategy, leadership, change management, risk management) - by Dr Patrick Dixon for Aviva

Motivation

Motivation - The Reason for the Crisis

Surveys show there's a huge crisis of motivation in most large corporations, which is why they continue to spend billions of dollars each year on motivation courses, training in motivation, meetings to boost motivation, incentives to strengthen motivation, meetings to analyse problems in workforce motivation, tools to measure motivation, mission statements and so on. Problems in recruitment, productivity and retention, problems of commitment to teams and corporate agendas.

But the motivation gap is fundamental. People are passionate - but mainly about life outside of work. Indeed the very phrase "work-life balance" tells us that most people think that work is the opposite of life. So how did we get to be in such a motivational crisis?

Motivation has moved on and left most corporations behind

One thing is clear: motivation is changing. Just look at the current obsession with work-life balance, which is now a powerful force in every corporation, number one or two career priority for the majority of executives in the US, UK and Japan. Forget the old days when ambition meant rushing up the career ladder. Today the great dual ambition is to have a satisfying job and a fulfilling personal life.

Or take the growing motivation for community action: 60% of all US workers give time each year to work for causes they passionately believe in. The average time gift is 200 hours. If each hour given by a US citizen was charged out at the average industrial wage, you would be talking about an industry as large as 4.5% of GDP or 12% of the Federal budget.

And other countries are similar, whether people are rich or poor, in Western Europe or East Africa Despite all the gloomy pundits some years back, community motivation remains very much alive. But these motivation changes are rarely reflected in corporate policy - or if they are, in a very superficial way. That's because CEOs and senior teams are still over-influenced by last-century management ideology about efficiency, bottom-line profit, shareholder value, return on equity and other motivation - killing fixations.

Management Gurus – high priests of confusion ?

You’ll find that management theory is still mainly built on two things: psycho-theories from one or two centuries ago and also case histories of organisations. Both are rooted in the past, can be based on subjective interpretations of data, and rarely concentrate on motivation. Case histories rapidly date as our world changes – just look at old business books and count the case examples of companies that now don’t even exist, or are basket cases, or riddled with recent scandal - and the old psycho-theories raise many questions. Life in the third millennium has moved on a long way from unproveable nineteenth century introspections about unconscious motives and desires.

You’ll find great business ideas formed often many decades ago about the nature of organizations, team management, excellence at work and the rest. All vital and important things without which no business can survive, but very little that grabs you by the throat when it comes to passion, commitment and motivation.

Hey – if there was, we wouldn’t all be in this mess.

Without management experts we would all be the poorer, with lower productivity, inefficient structures, bad organizations and wasted resources. However it is a historical fact that management fads come and go faster than ever – often in less than a decade - leaving tens of thousands bruised, bashed and confused by each one that sweeps into their organization. You just have to look at a list of business titles published over the last five decades to see that. And these fads actually undermine motivation.

Bashed by all the latest fads

Core competencies, empowerment, balanced scorecard, adhocracy, action learning, 360 degree appraisals, the learning organization, career anchors, champions, decentralization, vertical integration, quality management, re-engineering, down-sizing, psychological contract, mission statement, portfolio working, management by objectives, managerial hierarchies, just-in-time, lateral thinking, emotional intelligence and work/life balance.

First are four top turn-of-the-century gurus: Peter Drucker, Tom Peters, Michael Porter and Gary Hamil. Each has had a huge impact on business thinking today but are not so strong on motivation..

Between them these giants of corporate thinking have contributed a huge amount to corporate efficiency, productivity and effectiveness, generating wealth for millions, contributing to the economy and to society.

What about passion for living?

Great leaders, great visionaries, passionate about their messages – but what do they tell us more generally about human passion for life?
What do they tell us about why people act as they do? The choices they make? The things they feel strongly about? The culture we live in and the changing lifestyles choices people are making?

Of course, all of them have addressed every topic under the sun at one time or another on platforms or in writings, but what happens when you look at the main thrust of their influence?

Peter Drucker

The problem is that Drucker says everything about managing a corporation but far less that captivates the human spirit. Almost nothing about managing personal life as a whole – or about work / life balance or broader motivation issues.

Tom Peters

Tom Peters talks of excellence in companies, and also talks about passion in leadership but says almost nothing about excellence of personal quality of life, why personal commitment to workplace goals is falling and why for most people, their strongest sense of motivation is for the work they are not paid to do, the things they do outside of work, simply because they believe those things are worthwhile.

Michael Porter

Michael Porter talks of being competitive, but people are more than links in a value chain. He has a good understanding of company survival, but a relatively poor understanding of personal survival and of what people are looking for in life. Motivation is hardly at the heart of what he writes or says.

Core competency has become a widely accepted concept, encouraging corporations to focus on strengths. However, finding a company’s core competency, or even changing future corporate history does nothing to motivate me to get out of bed in the morning.

The world’s leading management gurus, on whom hundreds of thousands of management consultants base their work, are relatively silent when it comes to motivation, and are nowhere when it comes to finding one single unifying factor that drives all human action.

And we find the same when we review dozens of other widely respected gurus of management theory. Here are a few more popular buzz-words:

Actions are not the same as understanding passion that drives these actions. Strategy does not necessarily provoke personal motivation. Leadership can encourage motivation but only if it understands what makes people passionate. What's the point of a balanced team if people can’t care less? Leaders doing the right thing is often not the same as having a fired-up workforce. Passion is based on more than mere ideas. Since when did anyone at work get really get excited about a structure? Quality of products and services is hardly the core motivation for individual life, for what we do or what we buy. Re-engineering of the corporation is not the same as re-engineering people’s motivation. Objectives do not provide people with meaning and ultimate sense of purpose. Team psychology is almost irrelevant to question of personal passion and aims in life. “Company-wide quality management” is not the same as connecting with what people feel strongly about. Global branding does nothing to motivate. There is more to motivating people than having great style.

Most recognised authorities on management score low on motivation with the exception of Charles Handy, Edward Schein, Elton Mayo, Elspeth Ross Kanter, and Douglas MacGregor. And most of those who scored high are dead, or retired, and most of their works were published decades ago.

Why corporations have been given such a narrow view of motivation

Why the problem? Well one obvious reason is that he who pays the piper calls the tune and management consultants by definition are asked in by corporations to improve their bottom line profitability, not to massage the inner needs and motivation of their employees, except as a profit-enhancing exercise.

So its hardly suprising that we get on the whole a very narrow view.

One thing is clear: there is one mega black-hole of fresh thinking about motivation, about what really makes people tick, about why people act as they do.

Harness all the passions people have and they will follow you to the ends of the earth.

Motivation