Management Today - Volume 28, Issue 6, July 2010

I suppose comment on the World Cup can be divided into two sections: that what happen on the field and what happened off the field. There is little one can say, as someone who is no expert on the game, about what happened on the field because if you are a Bafana supporter, there is very little meaningful comment except it was a good start for a country which has never experienced play at such a high level.

''As the decades wore on I began to realise that the West's economies were driven on 'speculative' policies and procedures, controlled by a nation's bankers rather than systems and financial products that would ensure 'productive' outlooks that would create jobs enabling a nation's citizenry to earn money for themselves rather than leaning too heavily on the state and the work positions it could provide, for survival.''

Good leaders call on a full range of leadership styles. And the very best keep focused on what they must achieve, adapting their style where appropriate. Here is some practical advice on what leaders can do.

How do you coach a team of world beaters? In recent weeks the issue has been seen in purely footballing terms, but the question is just as pertinent in business where CEOs would do well to recognise the significance of their role as head coach of their leadership team.

Africa is in a strong position to be able to claim the century from China. While the developed world struggles with ballooning fiscal debts, Africa is ready to capitalise on its abundant resources.

It is this shift from machine to living system which marks the challenge and opportunity for a different kind of leadership in an evolving organisational context. The benefits of the Industrial Revolution which inspired the mechanistic efficiency of Taylorism have reached their limit and in certain ways are imploding. As a result, there's an increasing readiness among progressive thinkers and practitioners in the world to embrace a living systems view of organisations which is more compatible with the chaos and the rapid changes that mark the business environment of the 21st century.

By making innovation everybody's business and effectively managing the process to implementation - including commercialisation and venturing if that is what your business requires, you increase your overall innovative potential while recognising and valuing your staff.

Central to the psyche of every person, also the working person, is the search for identity. Or more correctly stated, the search for an authentic identity.

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The search for identity is the core existential question which each and every person is grappling with and has to find an answer to as he or she enters into and travels through life. This search pervades the totality and very essence, of a person's existence.

I submit that the desire for sustainability can be one of the deterrents of innovation in dying companies "a need to sustain the past and present has serious implications for designing the future. Such companies are, of course, designing their demise by default." It seems to me that a focus on 'perishability' could add as much value as determination for sustainability.

Could it be that encouraging employee innovation has more to do with an environment that allows for mastery and less with monetary rewards?

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Creating a platform for employees to innovate and improve their organisation is slowly becoming standard practice. Organisations are realising that employees have hands-on experience and, if allowed, they will generate solutions to cut costs, streamline processes and introduce new products and services.

Following the movement of crowd sourcing from a buzzword to a legitimate tool in any marketing professional's arsenal I will take a look at why using crowd sourcing for ideation makes so much sense.

It is a simple fact of life on earth that there is going to be no successful mitigation of the climate change problem without a truly global effort.

The business world is suffering from 'conference fatigue' and conferences - as we know them - have lost their value, In recognition of these realities, the Services SETA has decided to use a completely novel approach to their upcoming conference.

While much has been said about South African's skills shortages in key sectors in recent times more attention needs to be given to soft skills across all sectors if organisations are to leverage the full potential of their human resources - this according to Brian Kleinsmith, Programme Director of a new UCT Graduate School of Business short course called Critical Skills.

In the next few issues of this journal, we will publish a series of articles by TalentLine Consulting Group (TCG) on the theme of Fit for purpose organisational dimensions. The notion of fit for purpose is based on one of the key principles informing the work that TCG does with client organisations namely requisite organisation, the complete and unified system by the late Prof Elliott Jaques which stands as a beacon for a scientific approach to understanding the organisation of work systems.

There are many legendary businesses that started out as a dream in an entrepreneur's eye and that were built on little more than the owner's savings or a small line of credit from a bank, This is the principle of bootstrapping: starting up a business from scratch with minimum help and funding from external sources that were not really meant to gear up a business.

Did you know that the father of accounting, Lucca Paciolli, a 16th century Franciscan monk and mathematician, never defined the word 'wealth' and, to this day, accountants have no clear definition of this word?

This month's contribution is entitled Knowledge is Power, a Killer of Your Business. Yes, I'm still finding in organisations the attitude that knowledge is power and it doesn't matter if it's from the top of the organisation or somewhere down.

Is South Africa on track to a green economy?

The Manpower Employment Outlook Survey of hiring trends reveals cautious optimism in the pace of hiring in the third quarter of 2010. The Net Employment Outlook for South Africa declines by one percentage point from the second quarter of 2010 to a cautiously optimistic 7%. However. employer hiring intentions improve by 5% compared to the third quarter of 2009.