Sherpa Alliance

Mike Richardson

A Sense of Void and Filling It

As an Executive and then CEO of small-to-medium sized and fast-moving businesses, I experienced an ever increasing sense-of-void of support.  As the pace of business and change accelerated, my experience of most coaches, consultants and trainers, coming into my office offering to help, was that they didn’t really understand the nature of the seat I sat in every day.  On top of that, I was also increasingly frustrated with the expanding universe of books from the guru’s of leadership and management, cluttered with faddish concepts, how-to principles and celebrity my-way formulas.  None of this was very helpful to me in navigating my inescapable responsibility-for-results on a never ending road of expectations for profitability and growth.

With my need to learn, apply and achieve in parallel accelerating exponentially, I realized I might have to wait a long time for others to fill this void.  So I decided to fill it myself, taking the leap from the corporate world in 2002 and pursuing this as my passionate purpose. 

I started Sherpa Alliance with a mission of “changing the world of support for CEOs and Executives”.  Our work is about filling the void with an understanding of the whole problem and solution of being in the driving seat of a small-to-medium sized and fast-moving business.  It's our evolving body of work and work-in-progress.  What you will find here is a unifying architecture of execution for organizational agility, leading the way in recognizing and teaching this as a discipline and a system of accumulating knowledge, tools and techniques. 

At that time, in 2002, I had never heard of Vistage International (Other Opportunities to Engage with Mike), formerly TEC (The Executive Committee) and was delighted to learn that their mission resonated very strongly with mine – Vistage is “dedicated to increasing the effectiveness and enhancing the lives of CEOs”.  I was shocked to learn that Vistage had been in business for 45 years at that time (our 50th anniversary was in 2007) with membership increasing exponentially around the world (14,000 in 15 counties in 2007).  I started as a Vistage Chair in 2003 and now run a number of groups, which gives me a rich experience base with businesses, CEOs and Executives of diverse types.

I am filling the void of support by:
 

Interpreting leading edge research and authors, combined withh drawing from my own real-world experiences and those of my Vistage members and clients;

Translating this insight into pragmatic concepts, models and tools which can have a practical impact at ground level;

Facilitating the application of these with CEOs and their teams to make a sustained difference to their journey as an organization and a business.

In the words of Gary Hamel, my commitment is as a Management Innvoator (Is Your Management Model Out of Date?) and it’s a journey for me too.  I welcome every opportunity to learn, and for some more pieces of the puzzle to become clearer.  One of my favorite quotations is from Ken Wilber:

“Any competent person is capable of bearing problems in mind until they yield their secrets; what not everybody possesses is the requisite will, passion, or insane obsession that will let them hold the problem long enough or fiercely enough.”  (A Theory of Everything, Ken Wilber, 2000)

The whole problem and solution of being “in the driving seat” is one I am holding in mind long enough and fiercely enough, with the requisite will, passion and, I’ll admit, insane obsession.

I seem to be filling a void which resonates with CEOs and Executives, consciously or unconsciously.  Of course, not all are up for travelling the learning curve to the winning side of dynamic complexity .  Not all are serious about taking their leadership teams on that same journey, tolerating a lack of accountability for “long-range culture” and “strategic productivity” (see Strateg’ems article:  “Execution Excellence: Missing In Action” ).  Not all are committed to the long haul of cascading this down through their organization and the several annual cycles which it takes for it to become second nature. From those that are, I often hear testimonials like, “I have been through a lot of strategy processes and this is the best yet”, “why didn’t we always work like this”, “we are becoming so much more agile as a whole organization” and ”my job is so much more enjoyable and fun”.  In general, people feel so much more composed, confident and courageous, with less stress, more balance and better perspective.  How Serious are You?

When you feel like you are on the scent of something good which you won’t give up on, it’s great how stuff crosses your path to help verify, inform and inspire.  Some key books, organizations and people have crossed my path over recent years and have been influential in my thinking, which I reference throughout my materials.  Long may that continue.  Now that you have crossed our path, I would love for you to join us in our quest, by following our work, experimenting with some of our concepts, models and tools, and engaging in the conversation by interacting with us.  We look forward to it.  Travel well.