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8. A key task for leaders in service firms is to recruit and retain ideas generators - that is, those people who can invent new revenue streams, and get them to market quickly.
Brand differentiation is a real issue for service firms - what's the real difference between KPMG and PricewaterhouseCoopers, or Mallesons and Allens, or Saatchi & Saatchi and John Singleton, say? The only sustainable competitive advantage for any service firm is the quality of its people - most particularly, those people who generate ideas. These people are usually intellectually curious, easily bored, and prone to wandering off. They need to be stimulated, challenged and amused, and they can be profoundly irritating to their more prosaic colleagues. A good leader makes heroes of ideas generators - although she rarely puts them in charge!
If you're not sure about how to tell if someone is a good ideas generator, look for people who can talk about abstract ideas. Who can describe a gap, and imagine what might go there. At Saatchi & Saatchi we call that elusive quality intuition - it's a little more than that, of course, but the best ideas generators are people with skills and experience in their particular discipline who can then apply an overlay of imagination and intuition to a particular problem, and come up with a solution.
9. A diverse work-force is the wellspring of ideas. A group of people schooled and socialized in similar ways will produce similar ideas, whether they're running the school tuck-shop or BHP. If everyone on your floor looks like you, you've got a problem. Look for diversity in generations, gender, sexual orientation, cultural and religious affiliations, indigenous and non-indigenous backgrounds.
Perhaps while we wait for Generation Y to come to their senses, we might contemplate Generation Y squared. (say, 45 and over).
Australia's attitudes to age are quite remarkable. Americans can work for as long as they want (and they do). I recall being roundly chastised for daring to ask the International Director of Hearst Magazines when Helen Gurley Brown, the founding editor of Cosmopolitan magazine, was contemplating retirement (she was 72 at the time), and the International Director, who was himself 78, was genuinely bewildered by the question. Perhaps it's our strong industrial heritage that led us to believe that everyone should have the right to retire at 65 whether they want to or not. If you're a partner, of course, your chances of making it to 65 are slight. Why are we so anxious to throw away all that experience - ostensibly we did it to make way for young people coming through.
It makes you wonder why we ever thought a lack of experience was a qualification for anything, but given Generation Y's reluctance to saddle up for the long haul to management, maybe we need to start thinking about more flexible ways of utilizing the skills of aging professionals.
Part-time work, and job sharing, have much to offer to older workers, and those with family responsibilities, and leaders need to be far more flexible in their thinking about how to exploit these under-utilized resources.
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