The unedited transcript of Phalana Tiller's interviews with Justin Menkes and Paul Adler for the August 2011 episode of Drucker on the Dial entitled "From Top to Bottom: What Makes an Effective Organization?" First, Justin Menkes, author of Better Under Pressure: How Great Leaders Bring Out the Best in Themselves and Others, discusses his succession work identifying chief executives. Menkes explains that realistic optimism, subservience to purpose, and finding order in chaos, are the three key components of being a successful executive. He shares that he began working with Spencer Stuart when he became interested in understanding what made people successful, in terms that actually helped them do it in a practical way. Menkes says that if you are going to understand human beings, you are going to have to understand their emotional lives, you are going to have to understand what drives them, and that subjects such as art and history are components that drive human behavior. He goes on to share stories of potential chief executives. Next, Paul Adler, a University of Southern California management professor, talks about his efforts to discern what is so distinctive about organizations that combine the knowledge of diverse specialists called collaborative communities. He believes that the kind of innovation organizations need to generate, are typically larger in scale, more complex, and more reliant on these multiple specialties. Adler says that unless you can find a way to bring them all together like a symphony orchestra, rather than as small teams of relatively unspecialized generalists, you will not get the kind of innovation performance you need. He explains that collaborative communities invest in T-shaped skill sets, where the vertical segment of the T represents the deep skills that people have in their specialized areas, and the horizontal bar across the top represents some modicum of knowledge that they have of their co-workers expertise areas. Adler discusses an article he co-wrote about a Kaiser Permanente performance improvement team, and the company's value compass. He describes the difference between a collaborative community and a charismatic community, and talks about the importance of creating a shared purpose across the organization. Adler believes that senior executives, middle managers, and front line workers need to recognize each others' participation, and that they will need to share some kind of common destiny so that they can work together to improve the way the organization functions. He goes on to say that when senior executives live in a world so remote from the material conditions and existence of their workers, it is immensely corrosive to the efforts of organizations and that no community is possible.
Interviews Menkes, Justin Adler, Paul S Authorship Chief executive officers Spencer Stuart & Associates Globalization Boards of directors Leadership Executive succession Management Knowledge workers Teams in the workplace Kaiser Permanente Communities
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