My apologies as I've been working hard and so haven't done a blog for a couple of days.

When I was starting out working in the Bank, I got to work with one of the best managers, I ever worked with. He was considered a hard man to work for. I got to work with this manager and yes he was a hard man to work through and a number of times he really gave me a hard time for the work I produced. However I realised one truth, he demanded a high standard of work and seemed to know that I was capable of more than I was producing both in terms of volume and intellectually. In the end my work did rise to his standard because he was a tough manager but a fair and consistent one.

So how do you work with them - Rod Kramer in the HBR - outlines some ways of dealing with a manager like that.

Do your homework
If you fail to prepare you prepare to fail. I learnt over time what worked for this manager and looked at his work to get an idea of what he wanted. Also be sure of your information and be prepared to defend your corner and

Call their bluff

An intimidating manager looks for people with inner steel who can make the hard decisions when they need to when under pressure and isn't a straw man.

It does mean that you do have to

Work harder

but some time putting in does show commitment to these managers and finally

Stick around

I was sorry when I left working with that manager and sometimes when faced with a difficult manager we can be tempted to fold our tent and leave the field. But the lesson he taught me was valuable in that it is easy to be mediocre as a manager - but always look at yourself in the mirror and stay committed to excellence at all times.

I also learnt that the biggest danger for a manager is to have people who become yes - men. The Romans had it right when at the hour of a successful generals triumph through the streets of Rome a slave stood in the chariot holding the wreath over his head and reminding the general - remember thou art a mortal man at regular intervals. Every hard manager needs a person providing a critical and dissenting view point to provide a check and balance.


Also the shouts and plaudits of the crowd can make you deaf and so like Julius Caesar on the ides of march you fail to listen to the warning of impending assasination from the enemies that this type of leaders do accumulate over time.

I saw this on the blog today and have placed it in full here - I leave it up to you the reader to see how true it is.

The classic fable:
The ant works all summer in withering heat to build his house. The grasshopper scoffs and lazes. Come winter, the ant is warm and well-fed inside, while the grasshopper dies cold and hungry outside.

The modern version:
Come winter, the grasshopper calls a press conference to show the injustice of the ant being warm and well-fed while he starves in the cold. BBC documentaries contrast the lives of emaciated grasshoppers with those of comfortably-off ants.

Parliamentarians call for an immediate tax on ants to provide social benefits for grasshoppers. The Insect Justice Bill soon becomes law, with retroactive effect, raising ants' taxes and fining them for not using grasshopper labour to build their houses. Unable to pay, the ant's home is confiscated, and he moves to France to set up a smallholding and live on EU farm subsidies.

Meanwhile the grasshopper has been moved into the ant's former home. Although summer is months away, he has consumed all the food and is again facing hunger. In response, the government sets up an Insect Inequality Commission, which says that more money is needed to tackle such social problems. By this time the grasshopper has turned to stealing food from other insects, and dies of a drug overdose while on remand in prison.

The moral:
Hard work never killed anyone, but too much government can.

If you want to see other interesting ideas then here is the link to the site

http://www.adamsmith.org/blog/

Less occasionally than I like, I get to read the Financial Times for their weekend edition. On the back page there was an article by Harry Eyres who sat in on a masterclass by a piano teacher called Ferenc Rados. Rados was commenting on a technically perfect rendition of a violin sonata by using this analogy.

In the second world war, the German soldiers had very precise and very tight weaponry. The Russian soldiers weaponry was loose. In the Russian winter at -30 degrees - the German guns froze up and the Russians ones worked. He used this to illustrate convex and concave playing. Eyres comments that the 2 players were looking a bit disturbed and felt that they were being asked to unlearn long cherished habits.

Now by coincidence on Friday I finished reading a book that deserves to be a modern classic by John Roberts called "The Modern Firm" and I strongly recommend managers go out and get this book. Roberts mentions the concept of loose and tight coupling in organisation design and mentions the problems that organisations have when they are tightly coupled.

So what is tight coupling? An organisation that is tightly coupled means that if there is change in any aspect of the organisations design or the environment will compromise the performance of an organisation dramatically unless other areas within the organisation can also adjust. If there is an unintended knock to alignment which makes previous choices impossible. Organisations can then find themselves struggling to adapt and even if they do so they may find the change difficult to implement,

He cites the example of Japan and how in the 1980's their organisations were characterised by a web of complementarities of cross shareholdings, culture, national policies to deliver growth and limited shareholder power.

However in the 1990's Japan came up against a technological buffer and (as regular readers of this blog will remember) started to suffer from a slow down in population growth and an aging population. The tight coupling in the meant that Japan has taken nearly 15 years to adjust to the changes.

The opposite of this is a loose coupling in organisational design.

As the design is more flexible and can adjust when changes in the environment mean a change in the organisation can take place without incurring the massive restructuring that may occur in a tight coupling situation.

Loose coupling can mean that it is easier to experiment with changes as different parts of the business can face different challenges and opportunities and timings. However one downside is that a change that works in one part of the organisation may not replicate well in another part of the organisation.

Success for any organisation involves delivering a strategy that is coherent intellectually and fits with it's environment and with the parts that make up the organisation. There isn't one perfect answer and that people within organisations need to understand that managers try to see change as a choice and like a successful trimmer may need to adjust. It is why I believe that an incrementalist approach to strategy is the way forward as the current business environment is too 'chaotic' in terms of the fluidity and consequences of change to allow for a fixed strategy.

Part of the training that all managers need is that of flexibility and the ability to sense their environment around them usiung for example as a basic the easy to understand STEEPLE model (Legal, political, social economic,environment, technological and a new one ethical) as a means of understanding environmental forces, this though is strategy 101 which is for beginners though there are more better and useful models that managers can use.

I've worked in organisations that found it difficult to change because they retained the same people who had got them into the problem in the first place and could not change their paradigm.

Many organisations don't remove managers and staff when a restructuring takes place on the grounds that they need to retain experience and whilst there is some merit in that, you have to ensure that the people retained have the ability to change otherwise you are left in a world of tight coupling when you need a loose and flexible coupling to survive.

This is why especially in public sector organisations, there is the problem in changing because they are still wedded to the tight coupling regime and are not fully exposed to the full winds that invigorate competitive enterprises which don't have the taxpayer as lender of last resort. this may also be what will happen in the legal market when the new reforms come in via the governments white paper

Whilst iPods are considered by managers to be disruptive for work whilst people are listening to their music at their desk, have they considered that they might be connecting their iPod into their PC's and downloading confidential information at a fast rate and walking out of the building with it.

A commentator has highlighted that in under two minutes you can take 100mbs of Word,Excel & Powerpoint slides onto an iPod. considering that an iPod can hold 60 gb's of information that is enough to take every business document in a small and medium sized law firm.

It is called podslurping and a number of IT administrators whilst concentrating on firewalls and anti viral software may not yet have cottoned on to this threat.

According to security experts there is little that can be done at this time and according to the FBI - the average cost of data theft is £200k to a firm.

Of course the danger has been there ever since the invention of the floppy disc - however, it is the volume of information that can be stored that may be problematic. I once read of a journalist disguised as a janitor who went round a major firm pod slurping on machines which had not been logged out of and downloading client files off the system

Maybe something for a Managing partner to be asking his head of IT to be thinking about you might think.

But an additional thought is this.....

Remember, that it is people who are downloading the information, so don't blame the technology, just wonder at the culture in your firm that makes people feel that they have to behave in this way.

Almost every wise saying has an opposite one, no less wise to balance it.

As readers of this blog will remember - in January 2006 I covered the concepts of quiet leadership. Well as the above quote by George Santayana highlights there are always two sides to the coin. So in this blog I'm going to look at the MBI school of management - which is Management by Intimidation and when it has it's place.

Management theorists and commentators have seen some very high profile and abrasive chief executives been toppled from their perch and have commented that the age of abrasion in Management is over.

However, I don't think that they are like the dinosaurs - however there is a place for them especially when the organisation is going through major and scary change - and sometimes we need some tough love to help us get there. There are advantages and disadvantages of having them. I think that they really do come into their own when an organisation is either stagnant or declining and it took a "Simon Cowell' to shake them up and clear the corporate arteries before they had a corporate heart attack. In their world these managers now that time is short, the stakes are the survival of the business and the measures that are required are drastic to break through the corporate nomenklatura that can frustrate any change.

They aren't bullies as such they see or believe that there is a way through the forest and like Alexander the great with the Gordian Knot they tend to be impatient to clear it and don't like the impediments be they structural or human in their way. Roderick Kramer in a recent article contends that these leader have political intelligence and use hard power and intimidation to exploit the anxieties and vulnerabilities they detect. They don't rely on empathy they have a dispassionate, clinical view of people and harness them as resources to be leveraged to achieve the ends that they are required to achieve.

As Richard Nixon once said - "People react to fear not love - they don't teach that in church but it's true" If you read some of the books about the Nixon presidency - it was apparent that to Nixon leadership isn't about being liked and inspiration - it was about achieving tangible results. Of course there is a fine dividing line as too much fear may induce corporate paralysis - too little complacency. the same i would contend was true with Margaret Thatcher.

The next blog will deal with working with a boss like this and where they can go off the rails.

This is not a Pre Valentines day blog, but it was interesting the symmetry.

Yesterday the EU released a paper on the free movement of workers across the continent to evaluate what had happened since the accession of the 10 new countries to the EU.

People may be aware that only Sweden, Ireland and the UK were the only countries that did not put up any/mimimal barriers to the new entrants workers coming into their countries. I'm sure that we can all remember the tabloids response to this in this country - that we would be swamped by Czech gypsies etc etc. Well in France it was the Polish plumber who not only dominated this area but also those who campaigned against the Euro constitution and feared - wait for it the 'ultra liberalism' of the EU - an oxymoronic concept at best.

The restrictions were as follows according to the EU.

When does the decision on whether to keep restrictions have to be made?

Member States have until April 30 2006 to communicate to the Commission whether they wish to retain restrictions. If a Member States chooses not to communicate any proposed restrictions before April 30, 2006, Community law comes into force for that Member State (in other words, no restrictions apply).

How long can restrictions remain in place?
If a State wishes to maintain restrictions on access to its labour market, this will apply for the period from May 2006 to 30 April 2009. Thereafter, they could be renewed for a further, final period of two years, but only if there is evidence that labour flows had disrupted (or were threatening to disrupt) a country's labour market.

The EU is urging countries to relax/remove it's restrictions and Peter Mandelson made a speech recently in which he urged the hold outs to resist the urge to go populist on this. time is also on his side as you can see from above all restrictions must be removed by 1 May 2011. (May day workers holiday!!)

Of course via the Schengen agreement people can travel fairly freely within continental europe and taking a fortress europe concept really is not going to work - just as Canute's exhortation to the tides didn't. People will travel to where they think that they can do the best for themselves and their families - and it is best that they are in the open market rather than going to the 'black market' where they will compete with the official market and undercut by not having to deal with taxes and worker protection.

Mandelson then said that Europe must judge "issues on the basis of transparent economic criteria and not getting carried away by the emotions of economic nationalism and self defence of vested interest."

This form of economic nationalism does seem to be more prevalent in countries that have fairly dirigiste regulated economies such as France and Germany. it is interesting to note that the services directive this week that would liberalise the market became a victim of the Polish plumber as the proposed deal being struck at the moment gives added scope to countries to block new entrants in the service markets.

Of course we also see problems with the bid for Arcelor which seems to being beset with governments getting involved. Of course the French are past masters at this game - anyone remember the furore when it was suggested that Danone which makes yoghurt might be bought by Pepsico. We too have used golden shares to protect our privatised companies from take over - but these seem to be fading in to the sunset in the UK - see the potential bid for BAA by a Spanish company.

Progress does seem to be being made - but it will take some serious mandelsonian machiaveliian machinations to breach the walls of continental Europe protectionist governments by the commission.

An article in the lawyer regarding the possibilities of law firms floating. All the more reason for better managerial training for current and prospective partners.

I'll comment on this later - here is the article:-

">Lawyer Article

Occasionally in life you can have strange synergies that get you thinking in new ways and seeing the boulders mentioned in my previous blog.

A work colleague at my old organisation on Friday the 3rd February had two twin boys safely delivered in to this wonderful and intriguing world that we live in. That afternoon, coincidentally I was reading an article on the Internet about the problems that they are having in Japan with the succession to the Japanese Emperor.

For more details, click on the link here

BBC Article

The Japanese government are trying to push a bill through Parliament to allow female succession to the chrysanthemum throne but there is deep conservative disquiet about this radical change. The crisis has occurred because no boys since 1965. The problem has become so intense to traditionalists, that a cousin of Emperor Akihito, has suggested that Crown Prince Naruhito take concubines in an attempt to produce a male heir.

Of course disquiet about the Japanese emperors succession issues masks a more disturbing trend not only in Japan but in other economies especially Russia ,Germany and Italy on the European continent.

At the recent Japanese census announced last year, deaths had outstripped births for the first time in piece time. If there is no change in the current fertility rate of 1.3 children per woman of child bearing age, then in 2800, the last Japanese person will die.

Japan's population by 2025 30% of the population will be 65 and above which means that fewer workers will support an expanding number of non-workers. It maybe that in order to survive that we will have to raise the mandatory retirement age not only to cover pensions but also the custodians of years of technical and managerial skills.

If we take Russia then it's population will decline by 22% over the next 45 years. By 2020, Germany will have the lowest proportion of young people in Europe and it's birth rate is 1.4 children per woman of child bearing age and the age that a woman has her first child has gone up by nearly 3 years to just under 30 in just under 20 years. Germany's population by the end of this century could be down from 80 million to about 50 million. Italy isn't much better, by 2050 the number of Italians may have reduced it's population from 57.5m in 2000 to around 45m.

Demographics are a bit like glaciers in the way that they move. However like glaciers although they move slowly they possess great power. They do tend to worry historians as in the past demographic reduction in population have presaged economic decline. Leaders of countries tend to shudder when they hear of shrinking populations because GDP growth tends to slow as domestic markets start to shrink. also it matters geo- politically also as the general rule of thumb as Paul Kennedy has pointed out - the bigger the economy, the bigger the military, the greater geo-political punching weight.

Though one article that I've read on the subject does point out there is some good news. When I was studying geography in the 1970's we were being taught that the earth couldn't sustain the impending population explosion and that the earth faced a neo Malthusian dilemma as resources ran out and that this is what countries would go to war over.

However , we may have broken the link and moved away from where countries had to have high birth rates to try and offset the high mortality rates and moved where death rates are lower and women have better control of their fertility is now more common. It maybe that new ways of working and new technologies will offset the decline in labour and that workers overall efficiencies will increase.

One advantage might be that the last acceptable discrimination might be finally abolished namely the use of age discrimination in job applications so that would be one big hooray from me for a start.

Before I start this piece for those of you who haven't used blogs much then, if you want to see previous blogs then click on the month link at the sidebar to read these articles.

The historian in me is always rather sceptical about paradigms and I've always been worried when everyone is running in the same direction as occasionally they can miss signals that can necessitate a change of requirements.

The Greeks and Shakespeare all believed in the concept of Hubris and this usually took place when everything seemed the most secure and safe - just look at M& S - once a market leader and lauded to the skies- now much shrunk and humbled

In businesses this can also be seen in the 'irrational exuberance' of the Dutch tulip boom, the South Sea bubble and at the turn of the century the dot.com bubble where a belief in the power of the new replacing the old took hold.

In fact as we have seen the old economy has adapted better and co-opted the new world of the internet- look at companies which have a physical and on-line presence to sell their products and services. I'll be considering in later blogs about what the Internet has meant to organisations over the last 5 years and how managers will need to change just to survive.

All businesses should beware the power of paradigms because situations can change - but if we look at the situation through current blinkers we are in danger of missing the large boulder coming towards us.