meetings can be incredibly leveraged occasions that become mar-
kets for talent and ideas. Mike Zafirovski joined Motorola as the
general manager of the mobile phone division of GE. Taking his
knowledge of the operating “cadence” of GE, he quickly took
charge of the calendar and divided the year into three trimesters:
T1 (January through April), T2 (May through July), and T3
(August through December). In T1, he pulled all of the HR dis-
cussions into focused Talent Management meetings together. T2 is
about strategy, and T3 is about next year’s plan. In these meetings,
his top team visits, or is visited by, operating units in a focused way.
Following each meeting, Mike, with the help of his team, drafts a
personal letter that is sent to each business leader summarizing key
actions and learning. At senior leadership team meetings following
T1, T2, and T3 meetings, Mike asks each business leader to share
with colleagues a best practice that he or she is proud of. In fact, all
the major meetings Mike runs are opportunities for sharing great
ideas and reinforcing the organization’s operating cadence.
Reducing Resistance Through Infrastructure
It is essential to get the infrastructure right to create efficient mar-
kets for ideas. This means “digitizing” key knowledge-sharing tools
with good information technologies. We all know that technology
is necessary but not sufficient. It is important to connect people in
order to establish the relationships and trust necessary to create
meaning and a context for ideas to be shared. Technology facili-
tates and leverages the sharing. During the rollout of a Web tool at
Motorola, Carey Dassatti, corporate vice president for human
resources, established a weekly conference-call regimen that was
frequently attended by forty or more individuals. This global team
jointly invented each screen shot of the Web tool and discussed the
various issues surrounding implementation. These somewhat for-
mal conference calls went on for over a year and built an informal
network of HR professionals who could be leveraged as new appli-
cations were introduced.
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