Photo credit: Andy Carvin, flickr

There are people designated as 'leaders' in organizations - the CEO and the top bosses usually. There's the politician as 'leader'. And then there are people out there, in the culture, without a formal position in a hierarchy, who never call themselves a 'leader' but people follow them. They set agendas, make us think differently.

The actress Emily Blunt was working with Alan Alda on a new film recently and said in a newspaper article last week, "He is infectious and wise and impossible not to follow around." She and her co-star Amy Adams, says Blunt, just loved to be near him, so much so that he would look up and see them following him and call out: "Leave me alone, I wanna eat my lunch."

I have an Alan Alda quote on my wall. It goes:

"Be brave enough to live creatively.
The creative is the place where no-one else has ever been.
You have to leave the city of your comfort and go into the wilderness of your intuition.
You cannot get there by bus; only by hard work, risking and by not quite knowing what you are doing."

Yes, that Alan Alda - Hawkeye from Mash. But, you see, he's also the co-founder of the annual World Science Festival, author of 'Dear Albert', a play about Einstein, and when I switched on BBC Radio 4 recently someone was explaining how particle physics works and I thought "Why does that guy sound like Alan Alda?" Because it was Alan Alda, of course.

He also hosts and facilitates major seminars on subjects like 'What it is to be human?'

Natural leaders just attract and hold our attention with new thoughts, new ideas, a clarity of explanation, a warmth and enthusiasm in Alda's case, that almost defy analysis. It's a form of leadership by curiosity, by asking questions, by wanting to learn.

People like Alda are rare natural leaders. They are, as Blunt says,"infectious" or, as Richard Dawkins would say, "memetic". They are like a human equivalent of the internet - medium, message and amplifier all at the same time. They kind of get your molecules to vibrate a little faster.

Different people need or are attracted to different forms of leadership, I think. All I know is that when I hear Alda's voice or see him on TV, I want to stop what I'm doing and see what he has to say next.

I can't say that happens when I see an official 'leader' on the TV or hear them on the radio.

Labels: Alan Alda, cultural leadership, science and leadership

Apparently, US consumers are bored with the recession and out in force wanting to spend. (I'm not so sure about that. I think it's the ones who still have their jobs. But, anyway, that's what some US commentators are saying...) But 71% of US CEOs are stuck in last month's or last quarter's mindset and are too timid to take advantage of it. In fact, 71% of American CEOs are helping the recession continue, as they plan more layoffs and to horde cash.



The suggestion that CEOs are holding us back from recovery by being over-cautious shows a marked lack of leadership if it's true. Slipping into 'hunker down recession' mode prolongs the downturn. The argument is put by Forbes' publisher on the company's talkback video site. The link is below. It's an interesting point, weakened, unfortunately by a flying bunch of bananas.

I used to be a press officer many moons ago. And one of the things we always told interviewees going in front of the camera was - beware 'flying bunch of banana syndrome'. That's when your hand suddenly appears on the screen and completely distracts the viewer from what you are saying, as they are instead thinking "Whoa: looks just like a bunch of bananas flying across the bottom of the screen".

Forbes' media advisor needs to have a quiet word with the publisher before he does the next one of these talkback 'to camera' pieces. Those bananas are flying all over the place.

Here's a link to the clip.

Labels: leading in a downturn, leading through a recession

Well, excuse the interruption to this blog yet again. I juggle work with managing a care team that looks after my wife, who has Huntington's Disease, and with raising a teenager. My wife's illness has taken a nose dive the last couple of months and the care team has struggled to keep up with it. So, I've been frantically trying to reconfigure the care system we have to get back on top of that situation. 24-hour live-in carers look like the option, so I'm pursuing that and should be able to blog more often as that situation gets under control again. That plus a major contract has kept me stretched and away from this blog. Apologies.

Interesting article in the Sunday Times, drawing partly on Roger Edwards Jones book 'What Can Chief Executives Learn From Standup Comedians?' It's not about introducing comedy to the workplace - though there is a role for humour that is too often ignored or seen as 'not serious' and therefore unconfident leaders and managers avoid it.

The learning points don't just apply to chief executives. They include:

Preparation. Good stand-up performances appear totally spontaneous, but the reality is quite different. Comedians spend hours honing those routines. The harder you work on a presentation, the more relaxed it sounds.

Less is more. A comic’s messages are not long-winded, but tight and concise. Presentations benefit from fewer, more focused, words.

Confidence. Although they may suffer horribly from nerves, a comedian must exude a natural authority or die. Equally, bosses need to think about the impression they give and may have to project an air of confidence.

Responsibility. The stage is a lonely place. When they bomb in front of an audience, comics know there is nobody to blame but themselves. It’s the same for bosses – but they may not always realise that they have to take the flak for failures as well as the rewards for success.

Courage. Comedians are constantly pushing themselves further from their comfort zone as they progress to bigger performances and new material. All executives can benefit from re-examining their comfort zones and pushing outside it now and again.

You can read the full article here

Roger's pocket book (It's 64 pages) on Amazon.co.uk is here

Labels: business and comedy, humor in the workplace, humour in the workplace, Roger Edward Jones

Well, that's what my Californian friend Janice tells me is the Republican mantra at the moment. Since unfettered free market economics with its unhidden hand - greed - brought us a global market collapse, it's a shame people still line up in opposing camps - pro or anti Keynes. With people choosing a position based entirely on their political dogma.

We're in a different place now, it seems to me. The imagination of the financial idiots savants who came up with derivatives and other complex financial instruments was the equivalent of the warped imagination behind the 9/11 attacks. The unreal, unimaginable, became real. The old rules don't seem to apply. If they ever did.

What theories of economics - including Keynes's General Theory - fail to recognize is that capitalism evolves. We've never been at this stage of capitalism before. Consumer and what might be called post-consumer behaviour isn't predictable. But, some things - on the supply side of the equation - are. It just suits us to look the other way or not believe.

There is massive over-supply in the car industry globally, for example. And there has been for years. I used to write about the car industry and couldn't understand how on earth it could continue disguising the fact that it was making more cars than the world would want to buy.

The big US car giants have been heading towards a cliff for at least five years. Now they've fallen off it. Their business models and plans for continuous growth in the face of too much supply were faulty because they were backward-looking, based on what worked before, patterns of demand and growth that existed before. Where's the surprise that denial failed and reality bit them hard?

Similarly, those who label the public sector pumping money into the private sector as 'communist' are walking backwards into the future: their view of how the world works is shaped by patterns from the past that no longer apply.

Having said that, there is a smart piece in Forbes on 'Why Keynes was Wrong'. I don't agree with it. It still has an 'Obama is a communist' sub-plot lurking in the distant background. But, at least it's smartly argued. And doesn't caricature Keynesian economics. Here it is:

Forbes Magazine: Why Keynes Was Wrong

Labels: Keynes, Obama