Ndubuisi Ekekwe On “The Leadership Lessons of Ants”

Ndubuisi Ekekwe

Here is an excerpt from an article written by Ndubuisi Ekekwe for the Harvard Business Review blog. To read the complete article, check out other articles and resources, and/or sign up for a free subscription to Harvard Business Review’s Daily Alerts, please click here.

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A few years back, I planned to build a networked digital library where theses from African universities could be stored. I wanted to find a way to make these contributions visible to the whole world. It was a hobby, not a job, and I took the time to personally craft it to my taste. The project took weeks, then months, and years. Finally, I gave up: no time.

Then, driving to New York for an IEEE Leadership Workshop, a few weeks ago, I stopped at a rest area in Connecticut. As I was resting, I noticed some ants in action. I observed that when one finds food, others immediately gathered to help pull the food to their storage. I decided to disturb the pattern, which unfortunately, resulted in wounding one. Quickly, they came together and evacuated it. Then they re-organized and continued on the line they had created. I saw no form of supervision, yet they were accomplishing tremendous tasks, such as moving pieces of food that were about 30 times their individual sizes.

As I watched them, the theses project flashed to my mind. Wouldn’t it be good to trust others to help you? Right there, I made the following decisions on the project:

The ants worked as a team: I will form a team, bringing professionals together.

The ants trusted one another: I must do away with the notion that only by working alone can I ensure quality.

The ants were open: I will share the idea with like-minded people. I later got a Boston area professor to lead the design. When ants discovered food, they informed others, who came along and helped.

The ants were partners and of different sizes: I will bring help and make the task our project, not mine. As much as possible, each team member will get assignment based on his capability.

The ants were diligent and focused: The team must keep working, even slowly. Deadlines will give us focus.

The ants regrouped: I will be open to try new ideas if present ones are not working.

It is about a month later now and the project is progressing well. We hope to launch it in November, from Ethiopia, the seat of the African Union.

Peter Miller has written that swarming animals, like ants, can teach us a lot about planning, military strategy, and business management. They make decisions as a group and depend on one another to survive. Samuel Haldeman had already observed that these small creatures live in unity, are hard-working, prudent and disciplined. It is no wonder the Biblical Solomon rebuked the lazy man: “Go to the ant, you sluggard; consider its ways and be wise! For small business owners, especially, there is a major lesson here. By engaging everyone in the organization, and trusting people, you will have more success. You must not think that only you can close the sales, install the products, and fine-tune the design all by yourself. Give others the opportunities to fail or succeed, and always ask for help. I have learnt to forward emails on the projects to others, instead of hoarding them for days. I also share project progress and challenges to all team members.

The more people know where we are, the more they come up with solutions. You never know which member of your staff has information or networks that can unlock future growth opportunities unless you share and communicate with the team. It means understanding like my ancestors that “The ant-hills are not built by elephants, but by the collective efforts of the little rejected ants.”

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Ndubuisi Ekekwe holds two doctoral and four master’s degrees, including a PhD in electrical and computer engineering from the Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore and an MBA from University of Calabar, Nigeria. He founded the telphony and IT firm, Ultinet Systems in Nigeria, and later worked at the Diamond Bank in Lagos. Now he is the Founder/President of the non-profit African Institution of Technology, an organization he describes as “seeking to help diffuse emerging technologies such as microelectronics and nanotechnology into African economies.” He recently edited Nanotechnology and Microelectronics: Global Diffusion, Economics and Policy.

To check out Thomas Seeley’s HBR article,  The Five Habits of Highly Effective Hives, please click here.

David Smith and Susan M. Cantrell on how to craft a strategy to “customize” your workplace

David Smith

Here is an excerpt from an article featured in Accenture’s Outlook, its online journal for high-performance business, co-authored by David Smith and Susan M. Cantrell. To read the complete article, please visit: http://www.accenture.com/Global/Research_and_Insights/Outlook/outlook-journal-2010-workforce-of-one.htm.

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Here are some factors you might want to consider when crafting your own unique customization strategy.

Degree of customization versus degree of control. Whereas segmentation and modular choice allow for more control—because the specifics of the people practices are defined by HR—broad and simple rules and employee-defined personalization allow for less control, since the specifics of the people practices are defined more by employees with enabling guidelines and structure provided by HR. But less control means more customization—employees can create a greater variety of people practices that fit them using broad and simple rules and employee-defined personalization than with the other two approaches.

• Amount of change. Broad and simple rules and employee-defined personalization can be adapted more easily to change. For example, instead of waiting months for the company to centrally define new learning courses based on new needs, peer-to-peer learning through wikis, blogs and other means can help employees quickly adapt to changed conditions.

• Fairness. The modular choice approach to customization is perceived as being the fairest, since it clearly provides the same set of detailed options to everyone. Since segmentation creates different practices for different groups, some employees might view this approach as less egalitarian. Broad and simple rules and employee-defined personalization approaches fall somewhere in the middle—everyone is given the same opportunity to interpret or define their own people practices, but because HR doesn’t centrally define the details, these practices can vary significantly from one person to another.

Susan M. Cantrell

Although some employers are introducing choice and variation in such areas as employee benefits and job assignments in an effort to recognize the differing needs of individuals, most companies have not yet begun to tap into the depth of this opportunity.

Managing your company’s talent as a workforce of one involves creatively customizing your people practices and applying this principle to your entire workforce in a strategic, thoughtful, proactive way. Customization will transform your workforce—and the human resources team—into a strategic powerhouse and position your organization to win.

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To read the complete article, please visit: http://www.accenture.com/Global/Research_and_Insights/Outlook/outlook-journal-2010-workforce-of-one.htm.

Here’s a link to an video excerpt of an interview of Smith: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zzbSPHgX_vw

David Smith is the managing director of the Accenture Talent & Organization Performance service line. Mr. Smith specializes in designing and developing talent and organization performance strategies and solutions. He is a guest lecturer at Wharton Business School and Babson College and a frequent speaker at industry conferences and events. In addition, he has authored and co-authored several articles and papers, and has contributed his viewpoints on talent management to various business media and industry publications. Mr. Smith is based in Hartford, Connecticut.

Susan M. Cantrell is a fellow at the Accenture Institute for High Performance in Boston, Massachusetts, and CEO of The Cantrell Group, a research and consulting firm that focuses on topics related to improving human performance. Ms. Cantrell is a widely published author. Together with Accenture’s Talent & Organization Performance service line, she also developed an award-winning framework for measuring and managing human capital.

Cantrell and Smith co-authored Workforce of One: Revolutionizing Talent Management Through Customization, published in 2010 by Harvard Business Press.

Because one size does not fit all people, customize

Here is an excerpt from an article featured in Accenture’s Outlook, its online journal for high-performance business, co-authored by David Smith and Susan M. Cantrell. To read the complete article, please visit:

http://www.accenture.com/Global/Research_and_Insights/Outlook/outlook-journal-2010-workforce-of-one.htm.

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Given the realities of today’s complex business environment, it is no longer possible to satisfy a workforce with one broad, standard approach to managing talent. A perfect storm of events and trends is pushing organizations to abandon the traditional employment compact along with the one-size-fits-all approach to human resources.

Not only has technology finally advanced enough to make the customization of employment practices possible for the first time. People are now expecting—even demanding—an individualized experience at work based on their own encounters with customization as consumers; this is especially true of Millennials (people born from roughly the late-1970s to the early 2000s), who have never known anything different. For their part, organizations are facing their most diverse workforce yet—not only in terms of age, gender and ethnicity but in terms of life pursuits, cultural norms and key values as well. The same forces are having a similar impact on the makeup of senior management teams.

To be sure, standardization has played a critical role in employment in the recent past, enabling companies to achieve some important goals—consistency, efficiency and fairness, among them. In the last decade especially, as large companies implemented ambitious enterprise systems and globalized at the same time, most organizations standardized their people practices to achieve a global view of their employees and operate consistently as a unified organization.

But in an era of growing diversity, more complex knowledge work in which jobs are increasingly difficult to standardize, a shortage of qualified workers and talent-driven competitive advantages, today’s generic people practices will be quickly rendered obsolete—and increasingly detrimental to the bottom line.

Maximum performance


Instead, market leaders like Best Buy, Procter & Gamble, Google, The Container Store, and W. L. Gore & Associates are getting maximum performance from their employees by taking an individualized approach to talent management, treating each employee as a “workforce of one.”

Because everyone has different abilities, work styles and preferences, as well as different motivations for working, these companies know that no single way of treating all employees is ever likely to be the best way. As the economy begins to recover, they are achieving improved workforce performance and productivity, higher levels of engagement and lower turnover while recruiting top performers who produce outstanding results.

Most important, by using one or more of four workforce-of-one customization approaches, these organizations are achieving customization in a highly structured, coordinated and scalable way, thereby retaining control of the management of their organizations. Moreover, the hard work organizations have done standardizing people practices remains valid and relevant; it serves as the foundation enabling companies to take the next evolutionary step toward customization.

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To read the complete article, please visit:

http://www.accenture.com/Global/Research_and_Insights/Outlook/outlook-journal-2010-workforce-of-one.htm.

David Smith is the managing director of the Accenture Talent & Organization Performance service line. Mr. Smith specializes in designing and developing talent and organization performance strategies and solutions. He is a guest lecturer at Wharton Business School and Babson College and a frequent speaker at industry conferences and events. In addition, Mr. Smith has authored and coauthored several articles and papers, and has contributed his viewpoints on talent management to various business media and industry publications. Mr. Smith is based in Hartford, Connecticut.

Susan M. Cantrell is a fellow at the Accenture Institute for High Performance in Boston, Massachusetts, and CEO of The Cantrell Group, a research and consulting firm that focuses on topics related to improving human performance. Ms. Cantrell is a widely published author. Together with Accenture’s Talent & Organization Performance service line, she also developed an award-winning framework for measuring and managing human capital.

Cantrell and Smith co-authored Workforce of One: Revolutionizing Talent Management Through Customization, published in 2010 by Harvard Business Press.

The business wisdom of Jeffrey Fox

How to Be a Fierce Competitor

There are over 150 international editions of Fox’s ten books that have been published in 35 languages in more than 100 countries. They include Secrets of Great Rainmakers, The Dollarization Discipline, How To Become a Rainmaker, How to Become a Marketing Superstar, How to Become CEO,,How to Become a Great Boss, How To Get to the Top, and most recently, How to Be a Fierce Competitor: What Winning Companies and Great Managers Do in Tough Times, published by Jossey-Bass (March, 2010). His clients include some of the world’s most successful and most admired corporations and organizations. Fox graduated from Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, and earned his MBA from Harvard Business School.

Here are a few of his observations in How to Be a Fierce Competitor that caught my eye:

“The single biggest difference between leaders and managers is the tolerance for ambiguity. Leaders can deal with ambiguity, can deal with not having all the facts, not having all the data. Leaders make decisions, big decisions, midcrisis decisions, without certainty of the outcome. Managers don’t.”

“Invest your time with your highest-performing sales people, with your most creative marketing people, and with your most inventive innovators. Then watch your investment pay.”

“The father of modern venture capital, Georges Doriot, uttered the famous quote, ‘Someone, somewhere, is making a product that will make your product obsolete.’ The message: never stop I proving, adapting, innovating. Be ever fearful of the obsolescing technology, the vanishing market, the changing playing fields. Being ever fearful makes you ever watchful.”

Here’s an especially thoughtful passage:

“The ‘third shift’ is a metaphor for those people and groups of people who toil in relative anonymity in the organization. They may workers on the night shift; the scientists in distant labs, behind locked doors, working on the next breakthroughs; the customer service people dealing with the problems and one irate customer after another; the field repair people fixing critical customer machinery on the weekend or holiday; the caregivers that empty bed pans. These people may not be omnipresent, but they are critical to the continuing success of the company. Great managers recognize such people, give them credit, give sincere thank-yous.”

“Pay for knockouts, not for punches. Pay for sales revenues generated, not for sales calls made. Pay for packages delivered on time, not for miles driven. Pay for new products commercialized, not for new product ideas. Pay for games won, not for points scored. Pay fir good grades, not for hours studying. Pay for increased brand awareness, not for numbers of ads run. Pay for store sales, not for hours open.” In other words, pay for results…not efforts.