Yesterday featured a talk by the ever-effervescent Carlos Ghosn at the Sasin Graduate School of Management.

As we have come to expect from Mr Ghosn, it was a great talk, lively,  with some probing questions from the floor. Titled Managing in a Time of Crisis the good news for those of you who missed the talk is that we have the main points for you here:

1. Great managers get people to do what they don’t want to do with enthusiasm. This is especially true during a crisis.

2. Going through crisis or change, the key is to have limited priorities and objectives. Too often management bombards its people with numerous, often conflicting, priorities. The more priorities you have, the less impact they will have.

3. Don’t have a plan B. Plan Bs tend to invite complacency as the workforce fails to commit wholeheartedly to plan A, because it may hope there is a fallback option. Instead, says Ghosn, say There is no plan B!

4. Crisis is a great opportunity to transform your organisation. And always remember: every crisis has an end. In the middle of a crisis we often forget that.

5. In a crisis, conflict is not the worst thing: indifference is. With conflict, at least people are buying in emotionally. With indifference, they have not!

6. The more complex the change is, the more simple you need to be, leading to the key point that…

7. A manager’s job is ‘out of complexity to make things simple, and out of chaos to make things clear’.

Our Take

Ghosn’s management philosophy chimes closely to the approach we like to take with our clients, which includes the ’3 S’s’ of:

• Simple. Any initiative, message or change you are trying to deliver must be as easy for a front-liner to grasp as for the CEO
• Specific. Any initiative, message or change must also be specific to each role or individual for which it is intended, and concepts must clearly relate to the contexts those individuals are in (as opposed to the contexts the CEO or strategist finds themself in!)
• Strategic. The initiative must, of course, deliver the strategy and that must ideally be measurable. Too many initiatives have elements that are not  strategic!

We hope the above is a useful summary for those of you who missed the talk, and strongly recommend you seeing Carlos Ghosn the next time he comes to Bangkok!

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Talent Technologies :: Management Training Programmes in Thailand and South-East Asia

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