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Creating a Long Term Winning Culture in Your Organization: Lessons from Barcelona and Real Madrid.

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I have done extensive research on organization development this year. I am researching two major questions. 1. How are effective organizations built? 2. How do organizations manage change in a world where data and information is doubling every minute.? The performance of Real Madrid in recent years inspires another question. How do you create a long term winning culture? This long term winning culture starts with instruction, then it becomes established as a mentality using resources and other factors I will highlight and discuss later. You see this in teams like Barcelona and Real Madrid. The major factors that help in building a long term winning culture are 1. Resources 2. Brand leadership 3. An emphasis on winning 4. Community Ownership 5. High talent management strategy. 1. Resources. No team or organization can create a sustainable culture of winning without resources. In times of shortfalls it must have the ability to reorganize by investing
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The Role of the Strategic Information Officer in the Information and Data Economy.

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These are interesting times, we currently live in the age of learning machines. In the information economy, organizations that gather so much data and that can learn from that data will have the competitive edge. We now need more literature from strategy scholars and practitioners. The new literature must show how data is impacting organizational strategy. Organizational functions and projects that generate most data will be the ones that will receive the best improvement. Organizations for competitive reasons must be designed and structured such that decisions will be taken at the point where data is generated. Departments, functions or teams that generate the most data will be different from other parts of the organization. They will have different group dynamics and their culture will be at little or significant variance with the other departments. We can see that data differentiates. This is not ideal for organizational health and internal strategic identity-
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Why Smart People Need to Learn

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In many organizations smart people find it difficult to learn or contribute to learning. This is usually caused by a culture that does natural selection, where people who seem not to have answers are instantly seen as less intelligent. Intelligence is good, but the winning formula in the information age is a first class temperament and the ability to discard your previous assumptions. Performance metrics that use intelligence must be reviewed to ensure that intelligence becomes more useful. People then assume that their performance metric is being intelligent. Ideally, in a world where there is so much information available to your competition, "sharing" should be the major performance metric. A sharing organization is a learning organization. A learning organization must also be a doing organization. But you must learn before you do. At Google people who keep knowledge to themselves and try to gain personal advantage are called "knaves". While people
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Market Leadership in the Information Economy

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I think about  the 90's a lot.  Especially the music. I once organized a 90's themed party at work. I dressed like Notorious BIG- Da Notorious. We didn't have internet, but there was so much originality. I guess we are living in the age of full blown mass production. Culture is mass produced. People are blowing the reality of their life's out of proportion. People act funny because they need to put content out there. Rebellion has become pop attitude. It hardly serves a useful purpose. It took TV 15 years to be a mass medium. That is TV hit 50million viewers in 15 years. Today, the internet took 3 years to be a mass medium. It took 3 years for the internet to reach 50million people. Obviously, Mass Medium is becoming Mass Rubbish. There is a yearning for quality, but quantity matters more in satisfying emotional demand. Today, account planners and brands are competing on an emotional turf. The era of function is dead. The winners in the infor
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Humility: The Value of Organizational Interaction

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We currently live in a period where machines and software is taking over many things that required manual labour. Artificial intelligence is making humans redefine their role in their current jobs. Estimations have been made about job losses and many people have caught the luddite syndrome (This means people are afraid about technology making their labour obsolete). I don’t think their fear is in order. Technology will always make life easier and better. That has been the traditional role of technology. The traditional roles of humans lie in leading the process of value creation. Yuval Harari in his book; Homo Deus talks about how mountains of data and manipulation of same is giving technology firms a chance to improve longevity for humans. At the end of the day, the good we can derive from technology must outweigh the downsides provided we lead the process using our soft skills. . The Homo Sapiens (Thinking Man) is leading the earth and other planets because of the abil
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Leadership and Culture: Why Leaders Should Destroy Obsolete Cultures

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Leadership has many definitions and perspectives. To understand leadership many scholars and managers have tried to contrast it with management. The popular distinction is that, while management is concerned with order and stability, leadership must be heavily focused on helping organizations adapt to their environment (business operational, economic, political) etc. The role of leadership has gained more prominence in a world where technical skills abounds and where worthy captains that can lead organizations are in short supply. Leadership itself is not a function that exists in a silo from where it directs the activities of organizations and nations. Leadership operates through a mediating concept called culture.\ What is culture? Here in Nigeria, many people will agree that culture “is a way of life”. I will share a definition of culture from renowned social psychologist- Hofstede. ”Culture according to him is a collective programming that makes members of one
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Coffee for the Week

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Dear Manager, Today is Monday, kindly take note of the following. They will be useful in the course of your week.   1.        Share all information that you have. This will help your team to function efficiently. However, an exception can be applied if your legal department is against sharing such information.    2.        It is not enough to wish that people have the right environment to take on opportunities. You must create that environment for your team to thrive, innovate and drive revenue.    3.        Don’t get used to saying NO. No is for fearful managers. However, It is useful when it goes against core values. But ensure there is an environment for people to say more YES to creativity and great work.   If you hear NO all the time, study the situation- fear is being established. .       4.  80% of your attention must be focused on your core business. The proof of great work is revenues. 5.        While the health of the business is important today,
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