At Lincoln Search & Selection, we are proud to bring you the Lincoln Insights Quarterly Breakfast Briefings. In this series of inspiring briefings, we bring you industry leaders and speakers who can provide positive insight in to business and career success.
Our next event will be held on Friday June 8th, with our guest speaker Irish full-back and Harlequins’ Director of Rugby, Conor O’Shea, discussing “What can your organisation learn from Professional Sports Management?”. To register for this complementary event, please click here.
february 10th 2012
Thriving in a networked age: Kingsley Aikins
Speaking at our Spring Lincoln Insights Breakfast Briefing, Kingsley Aikins discusses Thriving in a Networked Age.
Kingsley Aikins is a prolific and lifetime networker. He was until 2009 the President and CEO of The Ireland Funds, based in Sydney and Boston among 10 other cities around the world, facilitating the funding of over 1200 projects in Ireland worth over a quarter of a billion dollars. These projects were as diverse as Peace and Reconciliation, Arts and Culture, Education and Community development. The Funds are now active in 39 cities in 13 countries around the world. Aikins is now involved with the Hireland initiative, which is aiming to encourage businesses to hire one person each this year in an effort to kick-start job creation across Ireland.
“Ireland is something quite extraordinary”, says Kingsley Aikins. Our reputation and population has spread worldwide and we have developed communities of Irish descendants in all corners of the world. This is similar to many nationalities – over 215 million people live in a country that is not the one they were born in, which is a three-fold increase in the last 25 years. “In the United States, 12% of the population were born elsewhere. Over 80 million people in the world claim to be of Irish heritage, 40 million of these are based in the US. The UK has nearly 1 million first generation Irish-born people, compared to 127,000 in the United States. 5 million people in the UK have a direct relative who is Irish. Our widespread nationality is simply staggering.”
Utilizing These Networks of Irish Around the World
In Ireland between the 1950’s to 1970′s, remittances from Britain were so important that they were a line in our National Exchequer Accounts. In the 60’s in particular, these remittances exceeded the amount of money the State spent on education. The money sent home to families in Ireland was spent on sending children to school and purchasing consumer goods. This kept businesses going, and it enabled a generation of Irish people to get a university education and create the basis for Ireland’s success in the Celtic Tiger era and beyond.
When Aikins arrived in Sydney to head up the Australia Ireland Fund, he didn’t know anyone in the city. Eager to formulate relationships and get investment opportunities going for Ireland, he set up the Landsdown Club, a business network of Irish or Irish-Descendant business people in Australia that now meets regularly and hosts the largest networking event in the world every St Patricks Day, attended by over 2500 members and members of Parliament.
It was his experience in Australia that led Aikins to believe that emigration can be a great thing – so good in fact that we should actively prepare and educate our children for it. In Australia, more than 25% of the population has an Irish heritage. It’s so commonplace that Irish names have become mainstream. On an official visit to Ireland, former Australian Prime Minister Paul Keating quipped, “The funny thing about Ireland is that so many people look Australian!”
Emigrating to far-flung places around the world only expands our horizons, our experiences and our perspective, said Aikins. When Irish people travel abroad, we create connections and networks in those countries.
United States of Ireland
After Australia, Aikins then moved to Boston to the American Ireland Funds, working for Irish businessman Tony O’Reilly and Pittsburgh-born Dan Rooney (now the US Ambassador to Ireland). The vast population of Irish-heritage Americans, particularly those now considered of the “Baby Boomers” generation, have ties to Ireland that influence their decisions in investment and philanthropy. Ireland, says Aikins, is perfectly poised to take advantage of the Baby Boomers’ desire to travel the world and explore their roots, spending money in Ireland in both tourism and investing in businesses.
Utilizing the Diaspora – who does it better?
The Economist in November wrote about the Magic of Diaspora, and how Immigrant Diaspora Business networks are reshaping the world.
According to Aikins, there are four countries that do Diaspora-networking better than Ireland. These are Israel, India, China and Taiwan. There are four key questions that should be asked around the Diaspora networks in these countries:
- What makes China the greatest manufacturing power?
- What makes Israel the second largest country in the world for Venture Capital?
- What makes India a global technology hub?
- What brought peace to Northern Ireland?
The answer to all these questions, says Aikins, is networking with the diaspora, particularly those in the United States.
The term Diaspora was generally associated with the Jews in Israel, as the Jewish people of Israel began to spread abroad from the 1950′s. Many emigrated to the United States and Canada, and some to the United Kingdom, but Israel has maintained contact with these Israeli-descendants and actively encourage Israeli Jews to return to Israel to learn about the history, culture and religion that has shaped their lives.
After research carried out by Canadian department store Friemans discovered that over 50% of Jews were marrying non-Jews, and only 10% of those Jewish parents were planning on bringing up their children as Jewish, this prompted Israel to launch an annual programme that invited 40,000 Israeli-descendant Jews back to Israel for 10 days of immersion in Israeli culture (for free). This programme has been so successful in linking members of its Diaspora that Israeli companies have gained considerable success. 127 Israeli companies are listed on the NASDAQ (there were none as recently as 1990. Only 6 European companies are NASDAQ listed, in comparison).
China and Taiwan have utilized their Diaspora so that they could improve their competitiveness and businesses on an international scale. Chinese parents, since instilling their Single Child policy, pumped money and effort in to their single heir to get a world-class education. Some 500,000 of these “sea turtles”, as they’re known, went to US universities, gained a top-class education and then returned to China to develop businesses with a worldwide perspective.
In Taiwan, they did precisely the same, sending their youngsters to the likes of Stanford, Harvard and Georgetown Universities. Many technology firms, who have established links with these Chinese and Taiwanese ex-pats, have set up factories and R&D hubs in China and Taiwan. The Taiwanese semi-conductor sector is booming, and more and more complex consumer electronics are made in China that once originated in the United States.
India is another brilliant example of Diaspora networking. 27 million Indians have emigrated overseas. 1.7 million of these are living in the United States. This intensely educated and smart Indian population living away from India are worth two thirds of the Indian GDP. 1 in 4 start-ups in Palo Alto California are headed up by Indians. In the last ten years, Indian CEOs have made a major breakthrough in international organizations. The CEO of PepsiCo is Indra Nooyi, considered one of the most influential women in Business today. The CEO of Mastercard, Ajay Banga, CEO of Citigroup Vikram Pandit, Booz & Company CEO Shumeet Banerji, and Vodafone’s Vittorio Colao, are all Indian.
Peace Missions and Networking
In 1997, Aikins was asked to bring the warring parties of Northern Ireland to South Africa to meet Nelson Mandela. Using his connections and networks with the likes of Tony O’Reilly, this plan quickly came to fruition. However, these parties were not officially talking together, and so would not fly to South Africa together or stay at the same hotel, nor would they meet with Nelson Mandela together. However, bringing these parties together and listening to the wise advice of Nelson Mandela, as well as meeting in quiet corners of bars and darkened corridors on that visit to South Africa, are remembered by Northern Ireland parliamentary leaders as the key steps that led to peace and signing the legendary Good Friday Agreement the following Easter.
DDI – “Diaspora-Direct Investment”
Diaspora-Direct Investment, coined by Aikins, is a worthwhile subset of FDI. Investments in Ireland have a common thread – they all are based on connections with Ireland, and decisions to invest in our little island are based on that connection and affinity with Ireland.
Like Intel’s operations in Israel, who decided to open another Fab in Israel simply because they didn’t want to lose their top engineer, Mooly Eden, who wanted to “return home” to Israel. Intel’s Haifa, Israel, base is now one of their largest plants, with over 6500 employees.
Diaspora-Direct Investment in Ireland has a lot to answer for with the vast number of corporations from all over the world who set up base here. Dan Tully, CEO of Merrill Lynch, was asked by Aikins why he chose Ireland when choosing where to set up base in Europe. In a toss-up between Switzerland and Ireland, Tully’s response was that there weren’t any Tullys in the Zurich phone book.
MBNA were the same. Their European operations are based in Carrick an Shannon, a small town in the west of Ireland with a population of about 4,000. MBNA’s decision to move to not just Ireland, but the tiny town of Carrick an Shannon, was based purely out of affinity to the place. Charles Cawley, founding member of MBNA, said his decision to move was because all four of his grandparents came from there.
The Nudge Factor
Aikins says that “Life is a game of inches, the margin between success and failure is so tight. We need everything we can get in this game. We need to know the tipping agents and the people who can nudge a deal forward in to realisation. We achieve this through networking.”
Former Director of Policy Planning for the US State Department Anne-Marie Slaughter said, “we live in a networked world. The power of connectedness is above all else.” With, as Aikins describes, “creative clusters of smart people” the likes of Palo Alto, Shanghai and Dublin Docklands have more in common with one another than their next-door towns and cities. The whole economic model has changed, because of technology, communications and education.
According to Kingsley, who says he’s really optimistic about Ireland, “I believe we’re in a pre-boom period. As Albert Reynolds once said, ‘when business is down is when you paint the shop’. US former President Bill Clinton, in the Clinton-Kenny meeting last week, said there are trillions of US dollars in companies waiting to be invested. The US has already invested over 1 trillion dollars in Dublin. That money is not really in Dublin, it’s booked through Dublin. More importantly where it’s not is in the United States. Within a few years, that money will find a home in investment in Irish businesses and Irish jobs.
Networking: Building Social Capital and Trust
Social Capital is the real differentiating factor for success in this century, says Aikins. “It’s not who you know, or what you know – it’s who knows you. We live in a bizarre world where we have this electronic dimension of thousands of connections in our computers and several hundred in our phones, and this has fundamentally changed how we do business. But our heads haven’t changed for 25,000 years.” With the theory of Dunbar’s number in mind (where we can only sustain 150 relationships at any one time), this clashes with the power of weak connections. We know that having a large number of weak connections can mean that we can find the one relationship to do a specific deal and focus on that relationship to carry the deal through. “Social capital is a measure of your engaged-ness.”
There are two elements of Social Capital:
- Can you move your mind-set from one which is transactional driven to one that is relationship-driven, and
- What is the process to build relationships?
To move your mind-set from transactional to relational is essential. During the Boom years, so many organizations focused on transactional exchanges, but it is only now that we have gleaned perspective of a harsh recession that relationships show themselves to be of upmost importance.
In developing a process for the journey of building relationships, an idea was established by the 800-strong development team at Harvard. They reached a 4-phase Relationship process that is proven to work.
Doing Research (identifying who to contact). What is research? What role does it play in the relationship process? How do you measure its success? What does it mean to ‘rate and screen’ prospects by their ‘capacity’ and ‘propensity’ to do business with you?
Doing Cultivation (making the connection). What is cultivation? What role does it play in the relationships process? How do you measure its success? How do you take your prospects on a cultivation journey? What kind of cultivation initiatives can you take?
Step 3: Involve (solicitation)
Doing Solicitation (asking for the business)? What is solicitation? What role does it play in the relationship process? How do you measure its success? What does it mean to ask for the business? When do you know you are ready and how do you ask?
Doing Stewardship (evolving the relationship).What is stewardship? What role does it play in the relationship process? How do you measure its success? How important is it in moving from a “transactional” to a “relationship” mindset? Who makes the first move?
This journey is there to develop one thing: trust. “Trust is not an event”, says Aikins. “You don’t meet someone today and trust them tomorrow. Trust is not even deserved. Trust is earned. It’s earned over a long period of time, and can be lost in a nanosecond. That’s the world we live in. Build relationships – hearts and minds relationships. Change the mind-set from transactional to relational, have a process to do it, and move up in to the engagement line, which is the most effective spot in social capital.
Integrity and mutuality are essential to building trust and trust is at the basis of sustainable relationships. Few relationships and or networks of relationships, other than those created by force or coercion, survive without trust.
Given however the increasingly short-term context within which business operates, how do you build long-term and sustainable trusting relationships?
Key to answering this is suspending what you want and being able to listen to what your network needs.
People with social capital are most successful. They are leaders, their companies are the most successful, and they’re generally successful in life.”
Networking Nuggets
- Networking is not an event but a process in which you contact, connect, involve and evolve a relationship over time.
- Networking is not about your personality. Certain personality types are better at selling. All personality types can have good and bad relationships.
- Networking is not about what you know or who you know but is about who knows you and what they think of you.
- Networking is not about your ability to compete competing but is about your ability to listen.
- Networking is about knowing the extent of your capacity to network (see Dunbar’s 150)
- Networking is also about knowing The value of weak connections.
- Networking is also easier for those with more Social capital as it acts a measure of trust and reciprocity in your network
October 14th 2011
Is money the chief motivator in an organisation?
That was the question addressed by guest speaker Shane Mulhall at Lincoln Search & Selection’s Breakfast Briefing on Dublin’s Pearse Street this morning.
To listen to Shane Mulhall’s inspiring briefing, click the play button below:
Mulhall is the former chairman of Irish food tech firm Odenberg and was present at Chartered Accountants House to offer an alternative to what they say makes the world go round.
“Morale has fallen in more than half of the companies in the world,” according to Mulhall, who said that “correct motivation” was key to a successful organisation.
Mulhall drew attention to two important motivational areas – “reward” and “recognition”. However, he was quick to add that a correct balance must be found.
“Money alone does not satisfy a man” according to Mulhall and he used Oscar Wilde, to illustrate the point, “If you marry a woman for her money you will earn every penny of it”.
“Those just interested in money” are “small minded” according to Mulhall and if companies continue to opt for such blinkered employees, problems will ensue as too much money makes people greedy, reason is overturned and stupid decisions follow.
“Not many people really drive company value” so companies should adopt the principal whereby each person who does is rewarded while giving “due attention” to “recognition motivators”.
A lot of the ideas associated with running a company are quite simple, such as “people do business with people they like” and “if they love you there is no practical limit to what they will do for you”. This can apply to both their customers and to their fellow employees and managers.
So how do you make yourself likable? Mulhall explained it was about integrity, and urged that there be “no gap between what you say and what you do”. All great motivational leaders, i.e Gandhi and Martin Luther King, had no gap in their integrity and people were motivated to support their dreams despite obvious hardship and strife.
The same dynamic can be established and implemented in any company but a few things have to be put in place first. Namely, recognising what a person has to offer to the organisation, understanding what their needs are and realising that the simplest way to bring out the best in anyone is to praise them – “all praise and gratitude felt must be spoken”, when the person in question is alive, Mulhall joked. It’s all too often left to a eulogy to praise someone’s achievements.
Mulhall said that in “an excellent relationship, measurement does not come into it” and that “recognition motivators are even more important now given the current economic climate”. A relationship will develop instead in to a deal between employee and employer if it’s only about money, measuring output against input and refusing to do any more without financial compensation.
So why do companies not use recognition motivators more often? There are a number of factors. Those with influence in companies the world over still believe an “employee can be bought”. This is not true stressed Mulhall.
Furthermore, “recognition motivators require more time and care” but deep down managers do not really know what motivates their staff. The simplest way to find out? Ask them!
Motivation is an “inside job”. Employees are not looking for exorbitant rewards but a justified one, aswell as people they can relate to and work alongside.
A third factor that influences people to work most productively is when they have an “abundant energy” that facilitates an organisation becoming an exceptional one.
The aforementioned Martin Luther King famously said that “If you serve a cause greater than yourself, you will never be alone” and Mulhall agrees.
“Vision always lends energy” and an abundance of energy is vital as it gives employees a cause greater than themselves. They will strive to achieve this higher vision, not pay lip service to an unworkable mission statement, and so feel proud of their organisation. Mulhall’s own company, Odenberg, sold at the beginning of the year for €64 million (thirteen times its valuation in 2003) strove to achieve its vision that it would become the number 1 in food production manufacturing. With strong competition from Holland and Germany, over a period of 7 years, including the “horror years” of 2008-2010, the whole Odenberg team achieved this goal. If you’re eating french fries in the US, chances are 9 times out of 10, they were prepared using an Odenberg machine.
Mulhall finished off with another question, “If your employees are not willing to go the extra mile you have to ask, what ideal you are asking them to serve?”
How do you motivate your employees to drive the success of your business? Do you pay them handsomely against the competition so as to retain them, or have you already adopted Mulhall’s recognition motivator ideals?
