I've always had a problem with Harvard and other academic organizations' 'case studies' approach to learning how to lead and run a business. The problem is that people treat it as a blueprint. There's the other problem which is it takes them so long to produce the case studies that the company has changed a lot. And is producing a case study of a company now, at this moment, when you don't know how successful they will be seen to have been from the future (you still with me?) a valid thing to do? You know where I'm going here - Enron was a Harvard case study.

So, anyway, when I try explaining to colleagues that I have reservations about using case studies as training material because people get hung up in the particularities, the detail, which is non-transferable, and that we should tell stories, yes, about what companies do, but don't be naive enough to think that if you present enough facts, figures, analysis, charts, graphs, cobbled together as a case study then you have done something scientific.

You haven't.

As usual, Seth Godin explains it better than me. They're analogies (stories in other words), stoopid, he says.

Labels: case studies, Enron, Harvard Business Review, Seth Godin

Every day, President Obama reads ten letters from the public in order to stay in tune with America's issues and concerns. This clip reminded me of the importance of communicating, unmediated, with customers and employees to stay in touch with what's really happening. Yes, OK, from the clip you can see that there is some mediation going on in how the letters are selected. But, what I mean is that if all the customer information you receive comes in the form of market reports and all the employee insight you have comes in the form of employee survey results, then you aren't really in touch with what's really happening. Because it's only when your emotions and your feelings are engaged that you get real insight. And that comes from personal real stories, not from aggregated statistics.

Labels: customer voice, Obama

Ernest Hemingway was challenged to write a story in six words and eventually sent this in to the magazine that challenged him to do it:

For sale. Baby shoes. Never worn.

Isn't that evocative, sad, moving, all in just six words?

It's prompted a couple of people since then to use this 'six-word' exercise to focus you sharply on how you see yourself - who you are and how you lead.

The latest is John Baldoni, who in his Harvard Blog, says this:

"Clare Booth Luce once told President Kennedy that "a great man is one sentence." It may feel impossible to sum up your accomplishments in a handful of words but it's a good exercise in self-reflection. Ask yourself what you want to be remembered for, whether you left the organization or the world better than you found it, and how you influenced others. This exercise can guide your decisions about what you want to achieve and help you understand more clearly what work means to you."

I remember Dan Pink doing something similar on his blog recently, prompted by the book "Not quite what I was planning: six word memoirs by writers famous and obscure". He collected a whole load of comments from people summing up their life so far in six words or less.

How you apply it to distilling the essence of how you lead / how you live/ who you are is a neat challenge. What would yours be? Here are a couple of thoughts to start you off:

I'd like my legacy (though that sounds pompous) to be, maybe

"Brought out the best in others."

Or, phrased in terms of my purpose, to...

"Bring out the best in others".

Actually, I really like:

"Extraordinary performance levels from ordinary people"

...as I think that's what we are all here for - to inspire 'ordinary' people to realize they are capable of extraordinary things. That includes ourselves.

But, I also always want to bring out the best in myself (it's lurking in there somewhere), so those words aren't the complete picture. They are also a bit generic and could apply to anyone. Maybe that's the limit of a six-word thing - it won't cover everything.

I had to do a 'three word' exercise once. The profile field I was filling in on an online community said "Three important words." For me, the answer was "No-one is ordinary."

If you apply the six word exercise to famous leaders from history, it's actually easier, as you are summing up their legacy and achievements. So, Baldoni reports that Peggy Noonan, the columnist, says Lincoln's six words would be:

"Preserved the Union. Freed the slaves."

One that popped into my head this morning is Julius Caesar:

"I came. I saw. I conquered."

In Latin it's down to three words - Veni. Vidi. Vici.

So, what about you? Who are you or what do you want your legacy to be - what people would 'label' you as when looking back on you - in six words or less?

Here's the John Baldoni blog to prompt your thinking.

Here's the Dan Pink blog where lots of reader comments contributing their six words should jog your brain cells into coming up with six words for yourself.

Labels: authenticity, common purpose, Dan Pink, Hemingway, John Baldoni, Lincoln

"There is an ancient saying that knowledge is only a rumour until it is in the muscle."

I noticed that on the 'Embodied leadership' course description over at Roffey Park's centre in the UK. I don't think I posted on it here before. Hope not.

It's true isn't it: it's in the doing that we cement the knowing. Leadership talk is not nearly as important as leadership doing.

An additional thought: a psychologist friend of mine who specialises in habits says it takes up to seven weeks of consciously trying a new leadership practice (even something as simple as expressing appreciation) to engrain it as a habit.

Labels: leadership development, leadership practise

"We are here to add what we can to life, not to get what we can from life."
- William Osler

Just came across that and it's a reminder of something good leaders know and do - contribute and serve. The ridiculous attempts to save 'bonus cultures' and other old-think approaches to life and the world - "My role in life is to accumulate and consume as much as possible" - that are going on all around us at the moment may be the last throes of a primitivism we are moving away from, with the climate debate prompting us to shift how we think of our lives away from accumulating and consuming.

For leaders, Ken Blanchard puts it this way - That we have too many self-serving leaders and not enough leaders who serve.

It's the move away from a scarcity to an abundance attitude that we are all inching towards (those of us who are comfortably off, that is) - from waking up thinking 'What can I earn/accumulate today to stave off...what, starvation?' to 'What can I contribute today?'

As people know who love their work, when you go out determined to contribute, you find people queuing up to buy your services anyway.

Or I may be a fanciful old hippy.

Labels: climate change, Ken Blanchard, meaning of life, post-consumerism, self-serving leadership, servant leadership