Volume 20 IVolumessue 7 21 Issue 4 April 12, 2007 An Interview with Lynda Hot Spots Gratton Part 2 Although she Editor’s Note: The name Lynda Grat- is based at the ton is becoming ever more renowned London Business in management circles on both sides of School, Professor the Atlantic, and rightly so. The Financial Lynda Gratton’s Times raves about her new book Hot Spots: influence is global “Gratton has written a succinct and ut- and evident seem- terly compelling book. She is really a kind ingly wherever of one-woman businesses prac- hot spot in her- tice an enlight- self. To avoid the ened approach next business ice toward creativity age, try to make and human capital. sure you have a few hot spots of A visit to her website lyndagratton. your own burning com reveals her boundless energy: With within your walls.” Laura Tyson, she is academic lead at the Lehman Centre for Women in Business. A “hot spot” is a She has written five books, publishes place within an in Academic journals, and has an active enterprise where speaking schedule around the world, in- the energy is cluding keynoting the Human Resourc- flowing at a high es Planning Society global meeting this level. You know it when you see it. Hall- week. She teaches with the Concours marks include extreme creativity, spirited Group on both sides of the Atlantic, and collaboration, innovation, flawless team- consults with companies such as Nortel, work, friendship, and more often than not, Kraft, Philips, BP, Hewlett Packard, Unit- superb results. ed Technologies and Unilever. Based on empirical research with dozens Her take on management is efferves- of global corporations, Hot Spots tells us cent, optimistic, and deeply rooted in how to create the conditions for these loci empirical research. We hope you enjoy of high performance. time with Dr. Gratton as much as we did. The final installment begins on page 9. World Business Academy Could you place Hot Spots in the context of your previous work? I think that is a royally important question. I started life as a psycholo- gist. My interest was in what individuals do in organizations. When I went to business school I became much more interested in strategy. That’s what my first book, Living Strategy, was about. How do you work at the strategic level to make sure that people are placed right at the center, the heart of things? Then in The Democratic Enterprise my in- terest was more practices and processes. I became very interested in them because I think they really create the bones of an organization. Those are the routines, the things that you do. Democratic Enterprise was how you bring more flexibility into that. With Hot Spots I have been looking at the organization more as teams, some of which have been brought together because they have asked to be brought together. Others will be volunteers, like the Linux team or the Wikipedia people. These days I am much more focused on Hot Spots, and what it is to be a member of a team, particularly one where you are working virtually. It is highly complicated. That is where I am positioning Hot Spots. Was the book Hot Spots created inductively or deductively? It was a very, very detailed piece of work. We set up a set of hypotheses, and we looked at all the data, all the research that has been done on teams. We do have two academic papers from that research with the Academy of Management as we speak, and they have been accepted for their conference. We did a huge data search. We ended up with a set of hypotheses and the research that we did tested those hypotheses. But, of course, when I came to write something like Hot Spots, which was written for managers, I also had to use my own intuition and in- sights about companies. So I added and created a context in many ways as I have been advising and consulting to companies for 20 years. Do you find as you work in companies that there are certain industries or functions that are more conducive to Hot Spots? Historically, we have always said that the so-called creative industries are likely to have Hot Spots. We would have said that the advertising industry or the creative design industry would be examples. Actually, we didn’t really find that to be the case. Interestingly, one of the places where we found Hot Spots was in an oil company. Another was in a telecom. We realized that it had a lot more to do with the culture and the people than it has to do with the industry, which I think is good news for everyone who happens not to be working in a sexy, creative industry. 2 World Business Academy If you are going into a company that does not yet have Hot Spots, you are likely to find a culture that is inimical to Hot Spots, and that’s why they haven’t organically appeared. So you, Lynda, would have to work with some of the cultural preconditions… Absolutely. That’s why, when I wrote the book, I tried to make it really clear you have to have a cooperative mindset. Without that, the prob- ability of Hot Spots emerging is very slight. That is why I said these are some of the things you have got to do. I have been presenting the Hot Story quite a few times in the last few weeks, and in my presenta- tions I have really stressed that if you have a highly competitive cul- ture, where people don’t trust each other, you may be destroying the possibility of Hot Spots emerging. I absolutely agree with you. I have described some of the levers that create the cooperation. From an HR perspective, our research has shown that the most im- portant lever is the actual behavior and role modeling of the senior executives. Can you tell any stories about how, in your work, you have been able to bring some of them around? I cannot tell you that I have. That is not the sort of work that I do. There are people that can do that sort of work. There are HR directors who are very courageous about confronting their senior teams about their behavior. Senior executives have talked to me about how they have liked having a really good coach work with them, using 360 degree feedback. I think that sometimes, senior executives do not realize the impact their behavior has on other people. Marshall Goldsmith says to his clients, “Either you want to change or you don’t.” I am a great friend of Marshall’s and I absolutely agree with what he says, that people think that the most important job executives do is to set the vision and tell everybody what to do, but my feeling is that ac- tually the most important job they have is to model how they want the organization to behave. In a sense it they who personally are the living embodiment of what it is they want the company to be. Have you encountered Hot Spots that are skunkworks or guerilla operations within a company! Oh yes! Absolutely! It is perfectly possible, even within a company that is highly competitive, to find these sorts of eddies, as it were, of Hot Spots, where people have decided to cooperate with each other. They decide to meet the challenge of doing a difficult task. So it is not as if Hot Spots never arise in highly competitive places, but as you say they are more skunkworks. The culture itself is not supporting them. They have to be anti-cultural. 3 World Business Academy Looking longitudinally at your 20-plus years of work, do you see the tide shifting from the traditional, competitive, Darwinian capitalist approach that we’ve all grown up with to a more collaborative one? The timing of a book is the most important thing you have to get right. I haven’t been brilliant at that in the past. I honestly feel that the tim- ing is absolutely on the button. I was in America last week and I did a presentation to the Human Resource Planning Society group in Boston and in New York. In both cities the room was so full that people were standing in the back. In New York 50 percent of the people had never been to one of those meetings. I think that there is an actual yearning for a new language, a new way of doing business. I don’t want to start going crazy and talking about the Age of Aquarius, but I believe peo- ple understand that the old axioms are beginning to lose their excite- ment and strength. I think, on the side, there are a lot of macroeconomic statistics that say, at least in the States, our quality of life is diminishing and we are working harder for less. By the way, the same is true in the UK. I don’t know if you have seen the data, but we have been stunned that when UNICEF put out its rank of the quality of life of children in Europe, Britain came at the bottom. Wow… In fact, my sister is on the research team for UNICEF. They have had more press on that than any piece of research that she has ever done. I think that people were just horrified that while we may be earning more, actually, our kids are unhappy.