Nano Tools for Leaders XXVII

Self-Design: A Tool for Positive Change

Nano Tools for Leaders® are fast, effective leadership tools that you can learn and start using in less than 15 minutes — with the potential to significantly impact your success as a leader and the engagement and productivity of the people you lead.

Contributor: Charles E. Dwyer, PhD, Associate Professor, Educational Leadership Division, Graduate School of Education, University of Pennsylvania

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The Goal:

Replace beliefs, behaviors, and emotions that are holding you back with ones that will better help you achieve your goals.

Nano Tool:

A leader’s effectiveness is a direct function of his or her behavior as interpreted by others. While it might be tempting to blame those you lead for their unwillingness to follow, it is your behavior that builds trust, motivation, and influence — or it creates suspicion, apprehension, and discouragement.

Nano Tools for Leaders XXVI

Global Brands, Local Presence: Striking a Balance

Nano Tools for Leaders® are fast, effective leadership tools that you can learn and start using in less than 15 minutes — with the potential to significantly impact your success as a leader and the engagement and productivity of the people you lead.

Contributor: George Day, PhD, The Geoffrey T. Boisi Professor, Professor of Marketing; Co-Director, Mack Center for Technological Innovation; Director, Emerging Technologies Management Research Program, The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania

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The Goal:

Find the right balance between central and local control to gain the best of both for your global brand.

Nano Tool:

One of the most hotly debated issues companies face as they build a global presence or enter a new market is ‘Who gets control of the brand?’ Are the key decisions made centrally by corporate headquarters, or does each local market get to chart their own course for marketing, advertising, pricing, positioning, and perhaps even decisions about naming and branding their own products or services?

Nano Tools for Leaders XXV

Negotiation Advantage: Make the First Move

Nano Tools for Leaders® are fast, effective leadership tools that you can learn and start using in less than 15 minutes — with the potential to significantly impact your success as a leader and the engagement and productivity of the people you lead.

Contributor: Adam Grant, PhD, management professor, The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania

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The Goal:

Capture powerful negotiation advantages by knowing whether to make the first offer.

Nano Tool:

Most people believe that you gain a strong advantage in negotiations by letting the other party put an offer on the table first. By waiting for an offer, you receive valuable information about the other side’s bargaining position. But the overwhelming evidence actually favors the opposite strategy: there is usually much more to gain by making the first move yourself.

Nano Tools for Leaders XXIV

Shifting Mindsets: Questions That Lead To Results

Nano Tools for Leaders® are fast, effective leadership tools that you can learn and start using in less than 15 minutes — with the potential to significantly impact your success as a leader and the engagement and productivity of the people you lead.

Contributor: Marilee Adams, PhD; President and founder of the Inquiry Institute; Adjunct Professor at American University, School of Public Affairs, in the Key Executive Leadership Program; and author of Change Your Questions, Change Your Life: 10 Powerful Tools for Life and Work.

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The Goal:

Quickly change the mindset of your team — or yourself — from being “stuck” to finding possibilities and solutions.

Nano Tool:

Our mindsets are determined by the questions we ask. Some questions have the potential to catalyze breakthroughs and inspire transformations. Others lead to stagnation and demoralization. The difference lies in whether you ask Learner Questions or Judger Questions.

Nano Tools for Leaders XXIII

The Attribute Map: A Tool for Creating Competitive Advantage, Part II

Nano Tools for Leaders® are fast, effective leadership tools that you can learn and start using in less than 15 minutes — with the potential to significantly impact your success as a leader and the engagement and productivity of the people you lead.

Contributor: Ian MacMillan, The Dhirubhai Ambani Professor of Innovation and Entrepreneurship; Professor of Management; Director, Sol C. Snider Entrepreneurial Research Center, The Wharton School

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The Goal:

Build ongoing competitive advantage by knowing what your customers care about most.

Nano Tool:

An Attribute Map is a highly effective tool for assessing your customers’ real needs and desires. It simplifies the complexity of your customers’ reactions to your product or service and your position with respect to competitors. Attribute maps let you clearly see where additional resources could have the greatest impact and give you objective information about the likely consequences of a move.

Part 1 of this Nano Tool offered steps for creating an Attribute Map. Here, we explore three specific ways to mine your attribute map for a “marketbuster” — an exceptional opportunity for growth.

Nano Tools for Leaders XXII

The Attribute Map: A Tool for Creating Competitive Advantage, Part I

Nano Tools for Leaders® are fast, effective leadership tools that you can learn and start using in less than 15 minutes — with the potential to significantly impact your success as a leader and the engagement and productivity of the people you lead.

Contributor: Ian MacMillan, The Dhirubhai Ambani Professor of Innovation and Entrepreneurship; Professor of Management; Director, Sol C. Snider Entrepreneurial Research Center, The Wharton School

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The Goal:

Build ongoing competitive advantage by knowing what your customers care about most.

Nano Tool:

Creating value for customers is dynamic: yesterday’s differentiators become tomorrow’s taken-for-granted norms. To stay competitive, you need a simple way to assess what matters most to each of your customer segments. Armed with this knowledge, you can optimize your innovation investments by focusing on the areas with the highest perceived value for your customers.

Nano Tools for Leaders XXI

Drive Your Initatives With Sponsors

Nano Tools for Leaders® are fast, effective leadership tools that you can learn and start using in less than 15 minutes — with the potential to significantly impact your success as a leader and the engagement and productivity of the people you lead.

Contributor: Cameron J. Brooks, PhD, Director, Government Healthcare, IBM Global Public Sector

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The Goal:

Build a strong network of influential sponsors for your initiatives to ensure that they are supported and protected throughout their life cycles.

Nano Tool:

Inertia is the enemy of growth: for every great idea, there are those who prefer the status quo. This can be true in companies large and small, because inertia is self-perpetuating. Even if you get a new initiative off the ground, you can lose the resources you need to complete it. The success of your projects can’t be left to you and your team alone. Instead, you need to build a network of support inside and outside the organization — your own set of “corporate sponsors” — to help you develop your initiatives, protect them as they grow, and transition them into the wider organization.

JOIN THE LIPMAN FAMILY PRIZE PARTNERSHIP: MedShare’s Challenge of Expansion

Contributed by Kristi Ringen, WG ’01

On Friday, April 13, 2012 the Wharton School and the University of Pennsylvania hosted the inaugural Lipman Family Prize Un-Conference.  This event represented the beginning of Penn’s partnership with the three 2012 Lipman Family Prize finalists:  iDE ,the 2012 Prize winner recognized for its market-based approach to improving sanitation in developing countries;  KOMAZA, a social enterprise that works with rural dryland families in Kenya to grow trees as a cash crop; and MedShare, a US based organization that collects medical surplus supplies and equipment and redistributes them for use in developing countries.  

Each organization posed a specific challenge they currently face to the Un-Conference attendees and the majority of the day was spent in small group discussions further exploring these issues.   In addition to brainstorming potential solutions, each small group also explored a different framework to use when approaching social and organizational challenges of this magnitude.   

The following post is the third in a set of three and provides more detail regarding MedShare’s social challenge and the techniques used to approach the problem in a small group. 

JOIN THE LIPMAN FAMILY PRIZE PARTNERSHIP: KOMAZA’s Challenge of Horizontal Diversification

Contributed by Kristi Ringen, WG ’01

On Friday, April 13, 2012 the Wharton School and the University of Pennsylvania hosted the inaugural Lipman Family Prize Un-Conference.  This event represented the beginning of Penn’s partnership with the three 2012 Lipman Family Prize finalists:  iDE ,the 2012 Prize winner recognized for its market-based approach to improving sanitation in developing countries;  KOMAZA, a social enterprise that works with rural dryland families in Kenya to grow trees as a cash crop; and MedShare, a US based organization that collects medical surplus supplies and equipment and redistributes them for use in developing countries. 

Each organization posed a specific challenge that they currently face to the Un-Conference attendees and the majority of the day was spent in small group discussions further exploring these issues.   In addition to brainstorming potential solutions, each small group also explored a different framework to use when approaching social and organizational challenges of this magnitude.   

The following post is the second in a set of three and provides more detail regarding KOMAZA’s social challenge and the techniques used to approach the problem in a small group. 

JOIN THE LIPMAN FAMILY PRIZE PARTNERSHIP: iDE’s Last Mile Challenge

Contributed by Kristi Ringen, WG ’01

On Friday, April 13, 2012 the Wharton School and the University of Pennsylvania hosted the inaugural Lipman Family Prize Un-Conference.  This event represented the beginning of Penn’s partnership with the three 2012 Lipman Family Prize finalists:  iDE ,the 2012 Prize winner recognized for its market-based approach to improving sanitation in developing countries;  KOMAZA, a social enterprise that works with rural dryland families in Kenya to grow trees as a cash crop; and MedShare, a US based organization that collects medical surplus supplies and equipment and redistributes them for use in developing countries. 

Each organization posed a specific challenge that they currently face to the Un-Conference attendees and the majority of the day was spent in small group discussions further exploring these issues.   In addition to brainstorming potential solutions, each small group also explored a different framework to use when approaching social and organizational challenges of this magnitude.   

The following post is the first in a set of three and provides more detail regarding iDE’s social challenge and the techniques used to approach the problem in a small group.