Before you read my next sentence, please click here and watch for 10 seconds.
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What you just watched gives you some idea of my life with my employer SAS – now approaching almost 200 cities visited since 2005 (and 41 in 2008). Am I a wanderer or an adventurer? No, I am simply a careful observer of what I see, and then I intensely focus on trying to make sense of what I learn.
So, what am I? Like a bee in the big garden of the world, I’m a pollinator. I pick up what I see in one place and drop it along with my prior insights from elsewhere into another place – to people. That is, I share my observations with others. I share them in seminars, in meetings with customers and consulting partners of SAS, with media journalists, and with my co-workers. And I’m about to share an observation with you.
As I write this blog, I am flying from Budapest, Romania to Istanbul, Turkey. I am reflecting on my past 72 hours of interacting with Romanian business and government executives and managers. Here is my observation. People and organizations are far more similar than dissimilar. The differences between how well organizations perform are minimally influenced by which nation they reside in.
The major factor influencing high or low performance is the quality and competence of executive leadership. It’s about leaders’ recognition that their organizations need to be both smart (e.g., using business analytics for discovery and decision making) and healthy (e.g., involving managers and employee teams with its strategy management).
I will end this blog here. If you care to read more about my observations of executive leaders, read my previous post, “An Interview with a CEO You Might Want to Work For.”
