I don’t know about you, but I find listening in on other people’s conversations interesting - intriguing even. A few days ago I witnessed one of these conversations (sort of a conversation!) during a train journey. It was a table of four and the guy sitting directly opposite me was buried in a door-stopper of a novel.

Sitting next to the novel-reading passenger was a business type whose fellow traveller sat next to me. The one next to me made a lethal mistake; he asked the other guy how things were going. The response was a range of almost involuntary statements and explanations which altogether lasted for nearly ninety minutes. Had this been a telephone conversation, the listener (hostage really!) could conceivably have gone away to do some gardening and then rejoined the pretend dialogue.

If I could have talked to the out-of-control speaker, I might have suggested ‘Always stop speaking before you feel ready’. To keep it really practical and measurable, I might have added some wise advice given to me many years ago. The person said,

“Try to double your impact by: (a) reducing your interventions by two thirds and then (b) reducing the duration of each ’speech’ or intervention by two thirds”.

What practical advice have you come across for passing on to someone like the ‘talker’ on the train?

It seems so fluffy this thing called trust. Perhaps it is fluffy until such time as the P&L or the Reputation of a business takes a hit because of alleged or actual wrongdoing. Such has been the fate of Lee Kun-hee the Chairman of Samsung which is South Korea’s largest conglomerate turning over $150bn. So, Mr Lee and three other top executives suddenly resigned two days ago following a year of allegations of financial wrongdoing - he was indicted on charges of tax evasion and breach of trust.

Commenting on the resignations, the Financial Times said, “The move is unprecedented in corporate Korea, where tycoons usually continue to run business groups even after being convicted of serious white-collar crimes. It comes as Samsung faces rising competition from emerging Chinese rivals”.

Breach of trust? Mr Lee’s father established the company 70 years ago. He’s run it since the 1980’s.

This charge comes at a time when a number of elements are combining to create a possible perfect storm for South Korea:

• a global market turmoil
• a new government which only came into power two months ago
• rising competition from emerging Chinese rivals

Curious isn’t it that while good governance is never a guarantee of business success, bad governance can really be bad news with huge implications.

Back to the FT. “After months of investigating, a special prosecutor last week concluded that Mr Lee, the chairman, had breached his financial duty by letting his children buy bonds of Samsung’s affiliates through irregular financial transactions, incurring losses at the companies”.

Perhaps, even in hard-nosed business, trust is not such a fluffy thing after all. What do you think?

See also:

EnGadget

3gweek.net

RJ Koehler

I’m a fan of the RSA, not least for the breadth of conversations that take place through this rejuvenated 250 year old institution. Matthew Taylor writes in this blog post about one of this week’s events: Stan Cohen talking on his book States of Denial.

Stan uses his experience in South Africa for what Matthew describes as an:

“exploration of how it is people deny their responsibility for terrible things happening in the society around them. Stan’s analysis is based on a library of sociological and psychological research but also his own experiences as someone who was brought up in apartheid South Africa and lived for many years in Israel.

Stan sees denial as a necessary human capacity to enable us to cope with suffering in the world. The question is less why deny, but what shakes us out of this state: ‘Why people don’t shut out is more interesting than why they shut out’ he says.

Stan described four ways in which we deny responsibility; obedience to superiors, conformity with society, necessity and splitting of the personality.”

Stan is writing predominantly about denial of cruelty on a terrifying scale. But those reasons why we give ourself permission to deny apply at many levels. It is common for team members to deny that change is coming or perhaps that their approaches to work are flawed. So what Stan’s comment remind me of is that leaders need to think about how prone they are to remain obedient to superiors at the wrong time, or conform to the prevailing culture when it’s become a barrier to progress.

When the housing market is sliding, the banking business model is based on a lax understanding of risk, the businesses that are mature enough to spot denial early will be the ones that thrive.

Image courtesy of narek781.

“When there’s a gap between someone doing her job and doing the right thing, then management has failed”.

Seth Godin