Lets Talk Leadership

Councillor Hermann Vorster represents Division 11 on the City Council of the Gold Coast, Queensland, Australia. He also chairs the Council’s Economic Development and Major Events Committee.  He also serves on the City Planning and City Infrastructure committees.

Just before Christmas 2016 Cr Vorster was the guest speaker at the end of year event hosted by the IT Forum Gold Coast. I was very impressed with his vision of the economic development potential of this local region and seized the opportunity to invite him on to the Let’s Talk Leadership show. Happily, he agreed!

With 38 kilometers of white, sandy beaches, ancient rainforest and hinterland, the city has great lifestyle appeal and on that basis has had extraordinary growth in a relatively short period: it’s now Australia’s 6th largest city and in area the second largest local government area in Australia.

Historically the economy has depended on construction and tourism, both subject – positively and negatively – to fluctuations in the economy.

The Council’s aim is to position the city to embrace the digital economy, in a way that adds value.

Download the Council’s Economic Development Strategy at this link.

We’re a city that has that entrepreneurial, “have a go” spirit.

Having gained experience in “the crucible of family business”, Cr Vorster became involved in public policy and the media.

Like a lot of people, I got a little bit frustrated with the decisions that were being made around me and decided – foolheartedly, I think – to enter public life.

We talked about the Council’s decision to make a major investment in telecommunications infrastructure – historically in Australia the preserve of the Federal Government (with some partial involvement at times by State governments). So this was being done in the clear knowledge that there was an element of political risk involved.

Cr Vorster commented that when investment decisions are made for specific economic development projects, some may not see the benefit for them and may feel left out. It’s essential to communicate openly with them and, for instance, point to spillover benefits for other areas of the community.

To bring the community with you on big decisions, it’s necessary to:

He gave the example of a street with schoolteacher residents but no broadband. People understand when the need to remedy that is explained in terms of enabling those teachers to prepare better to teach the community’s children.

The upcoming Commonwealth Games, to be held on the Gold Coast, is a major event, which, like an Olympic Games, is over in a short period of time. What people want is a legacy, so there are key decisions about how to achieve that.

There have been global success stories for businesses built on the Gold Coast.

Important to get those who have success to stick around and thus encourage others.

The Council’s role is to do what it can at a public policy level to create a supportive environment for that.

People do not like change and there is a challenge in how to talk to people about change.

A former Bond University Vice-Chancellor’s Scholar, he has degree qualifications in accounting, corporate strategy and business information systems.

Elected in 2016, Councillor Vorster became the City of Gold Coast’s youngest ever Councillor at age 30. He has had a number of leadership roles in community groups including Gold Coast District Neighbourhood Watch Incorporated and the Chamber of Commerce & Industry Queensland (CCIQ) Regional Policy Board.

Email: [email protected]

Phone (mobile/cell): In Australia – 0405 414 931 From outside Australia – 61 405414931

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Dr Larry Cornett is a business advisor and career consultant and Founder of Brilliant Forge. He helps people redefine their career, regain their freedom, and reclaim their life.

Prior to founding Brilliant Forge, Larry was a product and design executive with over 18 years of experience designing, defining, and building consumer products at a number of technology and internet companies in Silicon Valley; including Apple Computer, Yahoo, eBay, and IBM. Most recently, he was the Vice President of Consumer Products for Yahoo! Search, leading a team of product managers, designers, and developers who were focused on creating world-class Search experiences to compete with Google and Bing.

The style of leadership you need to use varies with the type of people that you’re managing.

Also with a global team there are different cultural considerations, with varying expectations about leadership and differences in the practice of leadership. And with different levels of seniority there are different issues to consider.

In 1993, some of the change we are looking at now was deemed “just around the corner”.

Now, with processing power and the miniaturization of components we have reached a point where what was dreamed of can now become a reality.

I think we’re right on the edge of a big transformation. It’s got some really good points, I think. There’s a lot of concern as well.

On the theme of concerns about impact, Larry mentioned the acquisition this year by Uber of the company Otto with its autonomous (“self-driving”) trucks.

So the fear is – I don’t know how long it’s going to take – that’s going to put over two and a half million people out of work. That’s kind of the flipside of the promise. Every time you do this – you automate something – somebody loses a job.

Education – we need to educate children to teach themselves: learn how to learn.

Leadership for global teams – a different style of leadership; requires practice; a whole new style people are going to have to learn.

Transaction-thinking vs Relationship-building and the lifetime value of a customer (LVC).

The increasing necessity for business leaders to become active on social media and deal with the challenge of committing the necessary time (some practical advice here).

The velocity required for execution and growth.

Hungry competitors – other startups.

Giant companies with deep pockets – uneven contest.

VoiceKick is a micropodcasting app for IOS. Their Pearl app combines voice with photos you have on your phone and allows you to make a 60 sec video with narration. Search for these on the App Store using VoiceKick for the search term.

As well as being part of those larger corporations, Larry has founded his own small businesses and tech startups.

He received his Ph.D. in Psychology from Rice University with an emphasis on Human Factors and Human-Computer Interaction.

On Twitter, he is @cornett

On his Brilliant Forge website there is Contact page.

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Annalie Killian’s passion is combining humans and machines in ways that maximise creativity and grow performance and engagement.

She is currently curating a “cloud of human creativity” for sparks & honey, a cultural insights and innovation agency in New York, experimenting with exponential organizational design and reciprocal networks.

From 2000-2015 she was SVP of Innovation & Communication at AMP – an iconic Australian Financial Services brand. She founded the Amplify Festival of Innovation & Thought Leadership and over 10 years grew it into a globally-recognized engine for systemic and culture change across a business eco-system, and a vehicle for accelerating learning and organizational agility.

We discussed a range of topics, including:

Plus a special invitation to people in or visiting New York

Having researched the various formal definitions of innovation, Annalie found and liked this:

You’re innovative when other people say you’re innovative.

And added:

When people think you’re innovative, that’s when your brand has shifted.

Implicit in this part of the conversation was a shared surprise, as in, who would ever have thought we would be talking about Microsoft stealing a march on Apple in the innovation stakes?

(Microsoft) have sort of captured the imagination of the makers and the creators and those are the people at the edge.

It’s about leadership being open and curious and understanding that the context has shifted.

Leadership fundamentally starts with listening and not talking.

The biggest barriers to innovation in large corporations are leaders who are threatened by admitting that they don’t know the answers.

Iconic brands are brands that stay in tune with cultural shifts.

The biggest danger for leadership is not to be plugged into the edge.

We shared a memory of an exemplary moment of servant leadership by Peter Mason AM, former Chairman of AMP, who in a workshop Des led at an early Amplify festival was the first and only volunteer for an online experiment with a personal data aggregator. Annalie spoke very eloquently of his leadership and his support for innovation.

Don’t do it if you need popularity.

…if you’re going to be good at your job you’re going to get up people’s nose.

I paid tribute to the fact that Annalie had achieved so much in some very traditionally male dominated industries – mining, financial services and now, as she reminded me in terms of industry traditions, advertising. That led to a discussion about pay equity and a strong call by Annalie for those in a position to change the injustice of any current situation to take action to change that. I recalled that some 55 years ago my late mother had made a speech to a State conference of her political party on this very subject – such a long and unjustifiable time to fix what is wrong!

Going back to our earlier conversation about leadership for the digital age, a big problem for some leaders is feeling they have to know everything, be in total command of everything, which is no longer feasible.

Annalie’s surefire remedy for leaderly sleeplessness:

Be a learner

And a related paraphrase of a comment by systems scientist Peter Senge:

The only sustainable advantage in the long run is to outlearn the competition.

Annalie is a Fellow of the Aspen Institute’s First Movers Programme and in 2013 the Hargraves Institute for Innovation recognized her contribution to the Innovation Agenda in Australia.

Annalie is @Maverickwoman on Twitter. You can find her also on LinkedIn and Facebook.

You can subscribe to the Let’s Talk Leadership podcast show via iTunes, Android, Stitcher, RSS, or via email.

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Sheila Scarborough is a speaker and trainer specializing in tourism, travel, and social media. She’s written for many blogs and print publications and is also a certified Navy Master Training Specialist, with years of experience as an instructor.

Along with Leslie McLellan, she’s part of the Tourism Currents team, offering an online course and in-person training in social media for tourism and hospitality.

Or you can subscribe via Stitcher Radio or via email

Surprisingly, sometimes depth of knowledge is not as important as the ability to ask the right questions.

Does the experience of military leadership translate easily into the business world?

The greatest struggle can be in having been used to being on a team. As a solo entrepreneur “there’s no one to turn to, until you can hire someone you trust enough”. This is especially challenging for people who’ve been in very senior military positions.

It’s a constant learning process, as a leader. If you ever think you have it all figured out, that means you think you have human beings all figured out. And you’re wrong.

A key issue for leaders is keeping up with change – which means continuous learning

You’ve got to be educating yourself and letting yourself be foolish and letting yourself go and learn things and do things that maybe mean being a little uncomfortable and silly, but that’s how you learn.

Tourism Currents’ primary client group is the larger tourism organizations, but those organizations ask for help with social media training for tourism partners (hospitality, destinations…), so Tourism Currents have been doing quite a bit of partner training.

Some observations on that:

You don’t have to be on every social channel. You need to be on the ones where your market is.

Key advice they provide for these tourism partners – two essential steps

Do those two things well and you’ll probably survive…

It’s a long game: needs patience.

A number of things are the same everywhere.

One of the challenges – everywhere – is in getting people to understand that using social media effectively has to go beyond “pumping out the updates”. There has to be interaction.

Some say they hadn’t been told there was an expectation for interaction.

Are virtual reality/augmented reality a threat to tourism destinations? Sheila does not believe so. She used the example of experiencing a virtual tour of the Canadian Museum for Human Rights, in Winnipeg. Far from feeling she had seen enough, the experience made her want to visit the actual museum.

People still want to go and visit the Grand Canyon in person.

Sheila is on the National Professional Development Committee for the AWC (Association for Women in Communications,) co-founded and still writes for the award-winning Perceptive Travel blog, helps run #tourismchat on Twitter, and serves on the Programming Committee for SXSWi, the South by Southwest Interactive tech conference.

A U.S. Navy veteran, Sheila is an NHRA drag racing fan “because there is one winner, one loser, and no whining”.

You can contact Sheila via the Tourism Currents site, which includes a blog and various resources.

You can subscribe to the Let’s Talk Leadership podcast show via iTunes, Android, Stitcher, RSS, or via email.

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In this podcast episode I talk about how Business leaders need to be able to fit expectations and demands about social media into a strategic framework that is a good fit with their overall business strategy and I share a link to my Social Media Strategy Checklist.

Whether you are a beginner in using social media for business, or an active or even advanced user, this checklist is for you. You can use it to guide your own thinking and as a basis for a strategy review session with your team.

The checklist is based on my Simple Social Media Strategy Template, which has been used effectively for a range of organizations, from small business through to a very large organization, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). It’s scaleable!

To download your free copy of the checklist, just click here to go to the Home Page on this site, drop your name and email address into the box there, confirm that when requested and you will get an email with the link to download the checklist.

There are nine key areas requiring our attention for a comprehensive strategy:

(Each of these is explained in detail on the podcast.)

(Note: the pricing structures of these services vary – the figures I quoted on the podcast and the figures here are as good as I can work out – open to correction/improvement)

Agorapulse | Jollor | MavSocial | Oktopost (especially for B2B) | Sendible | Friends+Me (for Google+). TweetDeck is just for Twitter and seems not to be getting much care from Twitter.

You can subscribe to the Let’s Talk Leadership podcast show via iTunes, Android, Stitcher, RSS, or via email.

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Becky McCray is a small town business owner; she and her husband Joe own a retail liquor store and a cattle ranch in the United States. She shares insights from this real-world experience at her highly-ranked website, Small Biz Survival, and in her award-winning book, Small Town Rules.

As always when Becky and I have a good old chat, we both find ourselves surprised and delighted at how much the concerns of small communities are not dissimilar, even thousands of miles apart across the wide Pacific.

There has been a sea change in how leadership works in small towns.

The time when a group of just a few people could sit in a room and run your town are over. The center of power has shifted.

More collaborative now, more project-focused.

Becky illustrated with the story of a playground in her town that was in serious need of restoration and upgrading of equipment.

The entire project was driven by people getting involved and not by a few people telling everyone what to do.

The Coffee and Calendars process – simple and effective.

There are still small towns where various groups operate independently of one another – a kind of silo effect.

Becky shows them how to deal with this by encouraging them to just start by getting together, a couple of people at a time. Two people, each from a different group or organization, bring their group’s calendar, meet for coffee and compare calendars. Then they meet others and repeat the process. People gradually find ways to collaborate.

We also talked about the importance of being proactive if you want to engage groups who are not usually involved and may actually feel uncomfortable at events, even where the existing group wants them involved. Ask about their concerns, about ways the existing group might be able to support them.

A big problem in trying to get young people involved in volunteer activity is the old committee structures.

Story of Marci Penner of the Kansas Sampler Foundation and a guided process of listening to young people.

If the community is interested in bringing young people in, the first thing is to abolish your existing formal structures and leadership roles. Make it much more informal, much more project-based, with shorter timeframes.

And then listen to them.

Social media is extremely important in small communities. It’s the new informal center of information dissemination and actually faster than the old town gossip was at getting the information out.

It’s crucial for people to use the social media tools to get good stories about their community shared.

Do not wait until the most negative, hateful person in town decides to start using online tools, such as a blog, to run your community into the ground, … Start by setting up ways to share positive information about your community.

Knowing that Becky is a fund of information and ideas about how to develop and promote tourism for local communities and knowing how important that is for some communities’ very survival, I asked her for some thoughts on this.

Key points:

I shared an experience of visiting a very poor village in Java years ago and the way they had been helped to use the resources they had to create objects for tourists – my clay elephant story.

What keeps local leaders in this new world awake at night?  Resistance to new ideas. Through their SaveYour.town initiative, Becky and her colleague Deb Brown have developed the “Idea Friendly” concept to help people deal with that resistance.

Becky’s practical perspective is often featured in a wide range of media, from The New York Times to The High Plains Journal. She makes her home base in Hopeton, Oklahoma, a community of 30 people. Her goal is to deliver practical steps you can put into action right away to shape the future of your town.

On Twitter at @BeckyMcCray

Project with Deb Brown for small towns – SaveYour.town

Lots of good reading in Becky’s articles at SmallBizSurvival.com

You can subscribe to the Let’s Talk Leadership podcast show via iTunes, Android, Stitcher, RSS, or via email.

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According to a World Bank report, if the global nonprofit sector were a country, it would have the sixteenth largest economy in the world. In 2012 alone, the nonprofit sector contributed $878 billion to the US economy, about 5.4 percent of the nation’s GDP.

With stakes that high, we could be forgiven for thinking there would be some serious research and discussion about leadership for nonprofit organizations. But evidently the research is quite limited at best: most of the research on leadership is in the for-profit and government sectors.

“Non Profit” or “Not for Profit”? There is a message in the use of the term “not for profit” rather than “non profit”, namely that organizations in that sector often make profits and at times quite substantially, but the profits are not distributed to shareholders, owners, or founders. Or should not be! Profits are used to maintain and grow the organization or maybe contributed to the sector in some way. From my reading, in practice the terms are used interchangeably.

Generalization alert!

Various qualities/skills/behaviors common to leadership for both sectors.

Some attitudes/skills/behaviors characterizing nonprofit:

Ideal skill/competence set: combine private sector business acumen with competence in traditional nonprofit culture (For this insight/formulation, acknowledging the paper Understanding leadership in successful non-profit organizations).

Business acumen

Includes financial competence, mission-definition, strategic thinking/planning, ability to scale, environment awareness, technological capacity, entrepreneurship, social media literacy and competency, attention to governance (transparency and accountability).

Traditional nonprofit culture

Democratic decision-making, respect for organization’s history, founders, respect for volunteers.

Also – listening, patience, valuing diversity – including age

Ability to work with boards of diverse backgrounds, including business people who are often not taking the role seriously enough and/or are less than rigorous in their service. There for the kudos or to do a favor. (“Give, get or get off”)

Many but not all nonprofits are volunteer based or rely extensively on volunteers (e.g. animal rescue organizations, sporting clubs, public galleries and museums).

Need to understand volunteers – why they join, why they stay, how to engage, how to reward, how to respect and engage skillsets and enthusiasm, what annoys or disappoints, how to recruit more.

Theatre directors, actors, dancers, musicians pride themselves on not being money-driven. Leader has to champion and represent their passion and at the same time balance the books.

Support, communication, attentive listening, and to others effective lobbying and acknowledgement.

Story of Arts Council of Great Britain’s man’s comment about what makes a good arts administrator – have “bowels of compassion for the artist” and be a good administrator. You need to listen to get the full dimensions of this. Reference is biblical – ? 1 John 17 in the King James Version.

“A strong nonprofit leader drives a sense of mission down through the organization, upward into the board and outward in to the community. He or she is willing to do whatever it takes to enable the organization to follow their mission effectively.”

You can subscribe to the Let’s Talk Leadership podcast show via iTunes, Android, Stitcher, RSS, or via email.

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