Behind the Scenes at Global-Roam

My twelve year journey with this company – seeing it grow its customer base, and product range, from nothing to be quite substantial – has been one of great learning for me.

Of my greatest areas of learning has been with respect to others within in the company.  I have struggled, at times, due to my lack of prior experience and preparation.

For some time I’ve been pondering the apparent paradoxes across a variety of books and other materials I’ve read – with respect to the concept of Strengths and Weaknesses.

Where I have read this, it has been with respect to an individual’s own strengths and weaknesses – however I believe that the pointers that I’ve learnt are also applicable at an organisational level (where a strength is more commonly termed “competitive advantage”).

After quite a bit of reflection, it currently* seems that to be truly strong, an individual (or a company) needs to have the right combination of all three of the following factors:

* I say “currently”, as it seems that the learning journey I am on almost guarantees that my view will become even more nuanced in future.

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As a brief PS to this recent post about people who are right for our bus, I saw this HBR interview with Heidi Grant Halvorson pop up on my iGoogle page.

Heidi references this earlier post about “Nine things successful people do differently” and promotes her new ebook of the same title.

These nine behaviours/beliefs are food for thought – both for us, as possible selection criteria for new recruits, and also as focal points for anyone interested in achieving better performance, over time.

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As a further note to Heidi’s point #5, have started reading Carol Dweck’s “Self Theories”, which expands on this concept.

Another pause for thought last week with respect to Jim Collin’s classic statement.

For those who have known us for a number of years, you might recognise that we’ve come a long way from our “wilderness years”  – we’ve taken some big steps in getting the right people on the bus, and (just as importantly) in the right seats.

However this year we’ve still made a couple mistakes – which has been costly and painful for all involved – and has not helped us in our goal of putting customers first:

In meeting these challenges, I found Jim’s “five things to consider” useful – along with the other materials on the site.

In more general terms, I have also found that there are sections in “Execution – the discipline of getting things done” (part-way through reading) that have been useful.

Looking forward, there are a number of things that we will be looking to do over the coming 12 months or so:

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Noticed this post from Shirlaws echoed through my Twitter account this evening, and it gave me pause for reflection on how far we’ve come in the 18+ months since Shirlaws first started helping us.

It’s a bit of a case of “half full, and half empty” in that we’ve come a long way – but still have so much further to go.

The Shirlaws post is pretty short, but does list the “7 Asset” framework that they use to describe the value of an enterprise.

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A whirlwind trip interstate this week to see some existing clients, and some potential new clients, provided a few hours on the plane to catch up on some reading.

Amongst the things I read was “What brain science tells us about how to excel” by Edward M Hallowell in the December 2010 issue of HBR.

Given we have set some ambitious goals in terms of where our bus is headed, and that I have learnt (the hard way) the value of getting the right people on the bus, and in the right seats, I read this article with great interest.

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Technically speaking, our recruitment process has not even begun yet.

However, back in January I did mention that we hoped to have our GM M&S in place before the end of the year.

As a result of the interest generated when we kicked off the process of recruiting Derrick as our GM for DDD WCW, a number of people contacted me about this second position.  Some of these have kept in touch with me to keep tabs on our progress with a view to being considered when the process begins.

In case there are other interested people out there, here are some details of our status.

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The June issue of Inc Magazine arrived recently.

Some issues don’t have much relevance to where we’re at, but this one had a few interesting articles.
1)  On this post, I’d like to comment on “Never read another Resume” by Jason Fried, co-founder of 37 Signals, specifically as it relates to us.
2) Perhaps I’ll also find time to post about the others at a later date …

Repeat visitors of this blog will understand how we’re investing quite a bit of time and effort, of late, in upgrading our capabilities – we’ve brought in a couple coaches (to bridge our skills gaps, short-term) and have started recruiting in a number of key people (starting with the software development team).

This article was relevant to these efforts.

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When you see a job advertised with a title like

General Manager for Discerning, Developing and Delivering
What the Customer Wants

it is hard not to be curious.  In particular, I’d never had a job title that needed an acronym before - “GM 3D WCW” has a sort of geeky attractiveness about it, so I had to come and have a look.

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As noted previously, we have recently appointed our General Manager for Discerning, Developing and Delivering what the Customer Wants.

As part of the process of getting our new GM up to speed in understanding who our customers are (and what keeps them awake at night), we are investing significantly in touring around Australia to meet with a diverse sample of our clients.  Others will be talked to via phone, Skype or WebEx – whilst we hope to visit clients in other countries later in the year.

On the plane out of Brisbane yesterday afternoon, I had the chance to read this article “Specialise yourself right out of a job” from the AFR.

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