Tag: Leadership

Tip of the week— it’s the integrity

I recently watched an old video about Warren Buffett, wherein he described how he picks winners – that is people (company leaders) he will trust his investments with. It said he uses three criteria. He started with the second characteristic, which he called energy, then moved to a third which was intelligence. It was not just regular intelligence. It was what was termed adaptive intelligence. An example he gave was a person running towards a destination and on seeing a post in the way, taking measures to avoid the post or minimize its impact, so as to continue running towards the destination – rather simple but key. Now it was the first and most important criterion he cited, integrity that most impressed me. By integrity the Buffet meant knowing when to say no. Basically integrity meant knowing limits and not overcommitting. As an example he discussed how a child understands love. A child understands love to mean time, time spent. Integrity is therefore reflected in commitments made and time spend to correspond with the commitments. Saying no to things we claim are not as important and spending the resources on what we say is important.

As an auditor, I look for integrity in the budget figures and other similar governance documents. When I see no resources committed to a goal e.g. no full time staff or worse staff committed without awarding the needed resourcing or awarding unsteady (reactionary) resource levels, I immediately know and understand the business goal is not critical or prioritized.

Many leaders today regrettably pay lip service to goals around culture, compliance and internal controls, but they lack the resources to support it. Where is the culture budget, the compliance budget – how does our annual budget reflect commitment to stewardship. Particularly, in our nonprofit sectors, where the mission can become an easy cop out to making important business investments towards internal controls and compliance goals. Where stewardship is often about cutting cost rather than investing in robust cultures and infrastructure to support stewardship. Often it’s just that missing leadership quality called integrity and we should look for it our leaders and all our staff.

McDonald’s Starts Serving McTech to Survive in the Modern Age — Any lessons for Nonprofits?

What does it mean that Macdonald is serving McTech? And what can nonprofits learn from this iconic company that feeds 1% of the world’s population? There is much to learn in my view. And not the least of which of course is MacDonald’s ability to connect with people worldwide and deliver the same tasty big Mac!

Let’s see, Macdonald is going back to its roots, it’s not about the tech – that part is just presentation, it’s about customer intimacy, not to be confused with engagement, its intimacy. And what has reminded Macdonald’s management about intimacy, Amazon, it is the modern day wizard at it. Amazon knows their customers and the products/services intimately and matches the two to fit like a hand in a glove. They take the thinking and worry out of it and what you have left is called “delight”, which invariably translates to cha-ching! The feeling  builds trust and good brand loyalty, when supported by good delivery – customer journey.

At the height of its dominance, Macdonald understood what those tired parents, coming back from the school game with restless kids needed. It was something, simple, predictable, quick and able to satisfy everyone’s taste buds and to keep everyone happy. It was the “happy meal” together with toys, playgrounds, the homely feeling of eating together in the car. For a while though, Macdonald started focusing on costs, we know the “dollar menu” and on operational excellence, that is cost/quality, also known as “value for money”. That was good and it allowed them to expand worldwide but it started leaving “delight” behind, Five Guys, Chic-fil A and others moved in to take some of their customers.

I hear a lot of talk about nonprofit donors wanting “value for money”. Is that really true? Sometimes I have my doubts and wonder if they just want to be delighted. One of the challenges in nonprofit work is the distance between those paying for the services, the donors and those receiving the services, the clients (check my recent blog post on this). Often donors never get to know who received the services. For this reason, value for money is mostly just an abstract idea to donors, just a hedging mechanism. This is one reason why western donors ignore some of the worst crises around the world, until a western face decries it. Oh no, that is not a judgment on the donors, its just a reflection of the distance between donors and beneficiaries and the nonprofit challenge. Many nonprofits struggle and I know work their hearts out to bridge this distance everyday. It will be nice to see more nonprofits move away from formulating strategies entirely based on achieving value for money and more based on intimacy and doing so on the two ends of their value chain, the donors and the clients (beneficiaries). Digitization and the digital revolution is an opportunity for nonprofits to reframe their value proposition with donors and clients.

Below is a link to the article that discusses Macdonald serving “McTech”. It got me going. Please read and share your views. What is your opinion of nonprofit corporate strategy designs today? How can they leverage digitization and the digital revolution to explore other strategy dimensions?

McDonald’s Starts Serving McTech to Survive in the Modern Age

McDonald’s Starts Serving McTech to Survive in the Modern Age


— Read on longreads.com/2019/10/02/mcdonalds-starts-serving-mctech-to-survive-in-the-modern-age/

Disaster relief: How can AI improve humanitarian assistance?

The unique topic of artificial intelligence (AI) for humanitarian assistance and disaster relief (HA/DR) was in the spotlight last week, as leading minds from academia, industry and the federal government met to discuss how modern technology can help victims of disasters around the globe.

Source: Disaster relief: How can AI improve humanitarian assistance?

Internal audit contributes to the mission too – be positive

“Why, then, ’tis none to you, for there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so. To me it is a prison. Well, then it isn’t one to you, since nothing is really good or bad in itself—it’s all what a person thinks about it. And to me, Denmark is a prison.” – William Shakespeare

Throughout my career, I found that I did my best internal audit work when I had optimistic thoughts about the mission and about teaming up with management as a partner to make improvements. It is so important for internal auditors to bring optimism to the job. To think of possibilities and be balanced about the risks they observe.

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No doubt, we must remain objective in our assessments and exercise professional skepticism in our confirmations.  Nevertheless, I strongly believe that advancing the mission, being mission driven, in part means positive thoughts about the organization and the people. Taking a minute to see the good things and to appreciate management’s strengths can be just as important as the exceptions we point out in our audit report.

Such an attitude to audit work, to the audit team, has the added benefit of helping break communication barriers with auditees and encouraging the free flow of information.

Share your thoughts on positive thinking in audit engagement. Has it been helpful to you? How do you stay positive when everyone expects the “mean” auditor? How do you balance due professional skepticism with positive thoughts? Is audit organizational culture relevant to adding value?