Big family reunion at our house yesterday: I was up till midnight on Saturday making enough vegetarian lasagne to feed an army the next day. Well, a vegetarian army. The picture is of Eija, who was our leader for most of the afternoon. She's taking a rest: tiring stuff this leading.

Once everyone had arrived and eaten, the image that stands out in my mind is of four-year-old Eija (pronounced 'Aya' she told me patiently), the youngest member of our family, sitting herself on the back of one of the sofas so that she was high enough for everyone to hear and see her (unintentionally, I think), and holding court. Fifteen other faces, mostly adult, were turned in her direction in rapt concentration as she led the conversation.

It reminded me how fearless kids can be. And that they often lead us without our acknowledging it. I know I learn constantly from my two sons, and leading and teaching are closely related. As are leading and learning (full of paradoxes this leadership stuff, isn't it).

Anyway, it helps to break the old stereotypes of strutting male leaders - the leader as patriarch, in particular - to remind ourselves that anyone can lead, and that includes children. In fact, because of the power of 'naive mind' or whatever the innovation researchers call it, especially children.

I've currently put this (see post, below) in as the draft introduction to the 60 Second Leader - the book I'm supposed to be writing. Sorry, if John at Capstone is reading this, I meant the book I have almost finished (one month till deadline for manuscript submission...gulp).

It's a reminder that, as with Eija ("It's pronounced 'Aya' actually"), size doesn't matter in leadership.

“A leader is the one who climbs the tallest tree, surveys the entire situation, and yells 'wrong jungle'. " - Stephen Covey

“Leadership is something that can be learned by anyone, taught to everyone, denied to no-one.” - Warren Bennis & Burt Nanus

All those Churchillian and strutting male CEO images we associate with leadership can mean we don’t listen when someone who doesn’t fit the ‘leader’ mould is saying something extremely powerful.

Here’s an example: a 10-year-old girl who became a leader in a particular situation – a true story that helps break those strong prejudices in our heads about what a leader is. I'm toying with using this as the introduction to the leadership book I'm writing at the moment.

The girl, Tilly, was on the beach in Phuket, Thailand, with her family in December 2004. She noticed the sea looked odd. It was foaming, like the head of a beer, all across the sea. ‘Bad sea day’, she and her mum joked together. ‘Then I suddenly had a vision in my head of the video we watched in a geography lesson of the sea in Hawaii before a tsunami. It was exactly the same,’ Tilly said later.

At first her mum didn’t get it when Tilly told her, as if in a scene from the film Jaws, that they had to get everyone out of the water. So certain was Tilly of her recollection and of what was about to happen, that she became hysterical. Instead of telling her off, her parents listened, agreed to get the rest of the family off the beach, then persuaded the lifeguards to start getting people out of the sea.

They warned as many people as possible and then turned and ran when it became obvious Tilly was right about what was coming. Listening to a 10-year-old girl with a powerful story to tell saved their lives and the lives of many others.

So, the one who climbs the tallest tree and sees the bigger picture, as Covey puts it in the quote above, doesn’t have to be the person who heads the organization. Sometimes people at the front line, maybe in a relatively junior position, have a clearer view of where the organization is going wrong and, in this case, of a disaster that is about to strike.

What allowed Tilly to become a leader in this situation was a combination of her learning, her confidence in her own judgement, her urgent sense that she could and should make a difference, her concern and sense of responsibility for other people, and the readiness of her family to listen to her, trust her and ultimately be led by her. Does your organization (and that includes you) create that same set of circumstances (culture) to allow people at all levels to step up and take the lead when they need to?

I was talking to Elizabeth Handy, wife of Charles Handy, on the phone recently (name dropper? Moi?) when she reminded me of a point in their book The New Alchemists, about people who achieve great things:

“If you are going to do something great, you need one thing first – someone who told you when you were a child, and believed it, that you were capable of great things.”

It’s true, of course. And it applies to adults, too. We are all capable of great things. As long as we follow the lead of assertive, bright, feisty 10-year-olds who do the right thing rather than just do what they’re told.

PS Tilly is real, by the way, not an internet myth. She was awarded a bravery medal by the UK's Marine Society.

Instinct or intuition is out of fashion at the moment in leadership circles. Blame Skilling and Lay. People want to see your working out, like you used to have to do in your maths book at school, to prove that the conclusion is anchored in reality.

The return to 'show me the evidence'-based leadership is a shame. I had my head in Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking yesterday and I can't remember what she wrote that sparked this off, but she reminded me that instinct and intuition are, in fact, 'ploughed-in' knowledge. It has merged with you so completely that it is no longer part of your conscious thought. You don't even know how you know it.

So, anyway, more intuition in leadership, I reckon...

Oh yes. What a timely book.

The Starfish & The Spider.

Leaderless organizations.

Like it. Curious recommendation in a leadership blog. But, as I said below, I am ambivalent about leadership. As currently practised it's about 80% awful.

I seem a bit obsessed with why leaders fail at the moment. I think it's because there is so much written on 'how to be a great leader' yet it's quite obvious when you look around that most leadership is bad leadership. So, I'm more attracted to the idea of identifying and working on what we are getting wrong first. Anyway, here goes with a little more on leaders and failure...

THE TOP 11 REASONS LEADERS FAIL

Score yourself with a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ for each of these and see how many you get out of 11. Be honest: no-one else will know but you.

1. Arrogance. You’re right. Everyone else is wrong.
2. Melodrama. You always grab the centre of attention
3. Volatility. Your mood shifts are sudden and unpredictable
4. Excessive caution. The next decision you make may be your first.
5. Habitual distrust. You focus on the negatives.
6. Aloofness. You disengage and disconnect.
7. Mischievousness. You know that rules are only suggestions.
8. Eccentricity. It’s fun to be different just for the sake of it.
9. Passive resistance. Your silence is misinterpreted as acceptance.
10. Perfectionism. You get the little things right while the big things go wrong.
11. Eagerness to please. You want to win any popularity contest.

So, how did you score? Before you get too pleased with yourself, even if you only gave yourself a ‘yes’ on one of the 11 it can be your downfall – EACH of these is a common reason leaders fail. Well, don’t blame me, you walked right into it: you only had to read the headline of this item properly to be pre-warned.

- These 11 points are from the book Why CEOs Fail: The 11 behaviours that can derail your climb to the top and how to manage them by David Dotlich, Peter Cairo et al. 2003. It’s not just for CEOs, despite its title.

When did you last join the front line and work there for a few hours? The best leaders keep connected with their staff and market by going 'back to the floor' regularly. I recently came across this example from Richard Branson:

“I...insist that we continually ask our staff for any suggestions they might have, and I try my hand at their jobs. When I tried pushing a trolley down the aisle of a jumbo, I found I crashed into everyone. When I talked to the crew about this they suggested we introduce a more waitress-style service and keep the trolleys to a minimum. As it turned out, by getting rid of trolleys altogether in Upper Class, we were able to use up some of the aisle space to provide the longest and largest seats in the air.”

- Richard Branson, frm his book Losing My Virginity, challenging the conventional wisdom that leaders operate from the centre and don’t get involved in detail out at the front line. Richard Branson will be sharing more of his leadership techniques live by satellite in his session at Leaders in London at the end of November.

I'm a week late on this one, so apologies for being even more behindhand than usual...

A week and a bit ago Muhammad Yunus received the Nobel Peace Prize for his work as 'banker to the poor'. I'm not one for the 'great man' (it's always men) school of history, but there are a few obvious Mandela-stature exceptions and Muhammad Yunus is one of them.

With Grameen Bank and Grameen Phone, Yunus proved that the poor and even destitute can be customers, using the collateral of their own skills and hard work.

I remember back in the 1980s when the New York banks were widely condemned for practising a secret policy of 'red-lining' - drawing a red line around deprived areas of the city on a map and creating a blanket policy of not lending to the people who lived there, as they were assumed to be a bad credit risk.

Cutting off whole sections of the population from banking services stinks in moral terms, leaving them with no option but loan sharks and pawn brokers; no ladder out of the cycle of poverty. Yunus showed it stinks in capitalist terms, too. When the major banks laughed at his suggestion that they break destitute Bangladeshis out of the poverty cycle with a new concept that gave them an alternative to loan sharks - micro-lending - they laughed in his face.

So, he leant a group of villagers the money in his own pocket - £14 - to buy the materials they needed to set up smallscale businesses. They all paid him back with interest. His new idea - microlending - grew into the £2.5 billion Grameen Bank that is owned by its users, is estimated to have helped hundreds of thousands of people out of poverty AND continues to make a profit.

The proportion of borrowers who default on their loan is tiny compared to traditional bank lending. Yunus then spotted that with mobile phones, local growers and crafts people - mostly women - could jump past middle-men who tended to exploit them with very low prices, to find out what actual prices were in markets and negotiate direct with buyers further away, increasing their bargaining power.

So, he launched Grameen Phone, a phone rental scheme with its own network to get mobile phones in the hands of the poor. Now if you go to Bangladesh 'GrameenPhone' is likely to pop up on your phone screen as your local provider as it has become, like the bank, a highly profitable success story.

Yunus, an economics professor, still lives in a tiny flat in Bangladesh. He explained once that he developed the idea for the Grameen Bank during the Bangladeshi famine in the 1970s, when he became increasingly disillusioned that people were dying while he and other economics professors were sitting around in Chittagong University teaching elegant economic theories "whereas in fact the starvation all around us showed we knew nothing. What we were teaching wasn't helping."

He once said to The Guardian newspaper "One day we will look in museums and say to our children, 'That's what poverty looked like.'"

That sounds naive. Until you look at what he has achieved so far. Fifty other countries - including the US - have taken up micro-lending. Yunus's work helped prompt C K Prahalad's book The Fortune At The Bottom Of The Pyramid, which looks at practising a new form of global capitalism that includes the world's poorest and that makes healthy profits while at the same time helping people out of poverty.

Now, like I said, I am wary of the whole 'great man as leader' or 'great man as forger of history' school of thinking. But, every now and again one comes along that makes us see the world afresh and inspires us by showing us we can do the apparently un-doable and take the lead to make change happen. Sounds like a leader to me.

So...what are the first four disciplines?

More on Martin Scorcese's leadership as a director:

"He's the kind of director who makes you think it was your idea."
- Ray Winstone, on his role in The Departed.

All the best leaders do. Lao Tsu (or Tse, depending on how you want to spell it) noted this in the Tao Te Ching centuries ago:

"The good leader is he whom the people revere.
The great leader is he of whom the people say,
'We did it ourselves'."

OK, time to admit something weird in a leadership blog - I am absolutely ambivalent about the whole idea of leadership. We lead ourselves. Full stop. I don't want anyone leading me. Do you?

I love being inspired by people who provoke in me that feeling of "Wow, I could do that, too," or "I never thought of it like that before". I would love it if some of the things I do even occasionally provided inspiration to other people. But, I don't want to be a 'leader' and I don't want to be 'led'. I guess it's the old communitarian in me.

But, the great thing is that traditional notions of leadership don't work any more anyway. So, I work in this area because we have a tabula rasa - a blank sheet where we can virtually start again and get it right this time; allow distributed leadership cultures to emerge in which everyone leads.

Peter Senge has updated his Fifth Discipline book with 100 extra pages that help relaunch the battle for distributed leadership after a decade or so when the CEO as hero-leader seemed, depressingly, to be back in fashion.

I couldn't agree more with this from him (my emphasis in bold):

"Most leadership strategies are doomed to failure from the outset...The first problem with all of the stuff that's out there about leadership is that we haven't got a clue what we're talking about. We use the word "leader" to mean "executive": The leader is the person at the top. That definition says that leadership is synonymous with a position. And if leadership is synonomous with a position, then it doesn't matter what a leader does. All that matters is where the leader sits. If you define a leader as an executive, then you absolutely deny everyone else in an organization the opportunity to be a leader."

Oh yes, oh yes, oh yes...

The new rules of business

"The rules of business are now different because of the great networked connections that bring us all together. There's a kind of new Cartesian Darwinism at work. It used to be 'I think, therefore I am'. Now, it's 'I didn't think fast enough, therefore I was.' "

SOURCE: I was invited to a closed meeting of one of the Big Five consultancy groups a while back - It was kind of a pep rally for their highly paid consultants, partners, and a jolly for their big ticket customers. Can't remember why they let me in. It was themed based on The Matrix. The door staff all wore Smith agent suits, dark glasses, earpieces. The stage looked like a film set, with a copy of the dentist chair-thing you sit in to be plugged into the Matrix.

The back of the chair was to the audience as we filed in. It was all decidedly surreal. Then the lights in the theatre dimmed, the chair swung around to reveal the surprise speaker sitting in it, playing the role of Neo the messianic rebel, come to tell us where real truth lay and that what we thought was real about business and leadership was in fact an illusion.

It was Sir Bob. He embarked on an inspired rant about the new world of business and leadership that blew me away. Luckily I had my notebook in my pocket and could just about write shorthand in the dark. I just found the notes in a drawer this morning. Thought you might like that quote...I'll post a bit more of it later.

"Sir, What is the secret of your success?" a reporter asked a bank president.

"Two words."

"And, Sir, what are they?"

"Right decisions."

"And how do you make right decisions?"

"One word."

"And, Sir, what is that one word?"

"Experience."

"And how do you get Experience ?"

"Two words."

"And, Sir, what are the two words?"

"Wrong decisions."

Source: Tim Small at Compass sent me that. I think he got it from an agency he was working with called The Storytellers.

"Almost everything I've ever done well I'd never done before."
- Steve Wozniak, inventor of the Apple computer, talking on BBC Radio 4 this morning

Er, so what?

Successful innovation comes about at the intersection of experience and novelty. The two pull against each other and the leaders of organizations that want to foster innovation have to channel this tension away from conflict and into creativity. It's the grit that forms the core of the pearl. Thomas Kuhn, the father of scientific thinking about innovation, taught us this. He called it 'The Essential Tension'.

Leading innovation is one of the least understood and most challenging areas of leadership today. I'm working on a chapter on it for The 60 Second Leader book at the moment and on a 'how to lead innovation' module for the 60 Second Leader development system I'm, er, developing.

So, Wozniak's comment spoke to me as I was making the coffee this morning after dropping Danny at school.

Incidentally, his new autobiography is brilliantly titled - iWoz. (iPod, iWoz, geddit? Better than Woz, Not Woz or whatever that band of David Was's used to be called.)

Steve's website is worth a look, too. It's here

Ha! The link worked. Thanks to Johnnie Moore for showing me how to do that...

'The Tripping Point' refers to those moments in life where you land on your back side and suddenly realize, with blinding clarity, that you got it wrong.

For successful people, these are illumination points in life where the shock of failure sears into them, they adapt, get up and move on. Apparently.

I know, I wish I'd thought of it, too (the 'Tripping Point'). But, I didn't. It's from Jerry Porras' latest book Success Built To Last , which looks at the traits of highly successful people in the same way he and James Collins looked at the traits of highly successful companies in Built to Last .

"Bring me a one-armed economist," said Harry Truman.
"I am sick of asking an economist for advice and every single one of them saying 'Well, on the one hand...' ".
Source: Tom Peters

Re: The 'Secret of Happiness is'... post, below

Yes, more choice is making us miserable as consumers.

But, on the other hand...Malcolm Gladwell and others point to the fractionalization of markets as being a necessary part of the disintegration of the mass market, of allowing people to have their individual tastes catered for.

There is no perfect Pepsi, he says, just perfect Pepsis. Because different people want different things and have different tastes.

This blindingly obvious breakthrough accounts for all the different Cokes with lime twists, lemon twists and the gold one with no caffeine and no sugar that you can never find on the shelves and so you have to settle for the confusing new Coke One when you're not really sure how that's different from Diet Coke etc. etc. that you have to navigate through to find the one you want (or fail to if it's the gold one).

There may be a compelling logic in the horizontal extension strategy but more choice still makes life more difficult to manage. On a personal note, Sainsbury's needs to put more of that gold Coke on the shelves. I can never find it. The constant failure is ruining my trips to the supermarket. I feel like a hunter-gatherer who returns from the trip empty-handed...again. Erm, Schwartz is clearly right.

Phew...So I'm not mad after all.

I wrote a section in the book Seven Secrets of Inspired Leaders that came across as slightly unhinged. I was trying to make a point about the death of geography in global business. Now that you can be everywhere at once, we have to reframe global business leadership, stop thinking in terms of 'import' and 'export' of 'here' and 'there'. As Gertrude Stein said about the Midwest, "There is no there, there."

It was an obscure but important point - that too much global business thinking is still framed in terms of self and other - but I was struggling to make the point clearly and simply (I still haven't made it as clear as it should be, even trying again here...).

So I used star-gazing to explain how you can be everywhere at once (thanks to internet, intranets etc.). The star you look at at night is actually part of you because matter from it has been converted into light which is hitting the back of your eye and is being absorbed into your body. Wherever you think you are, you are at the centre and connected to everywhere else.

I still cringe when I read that passage again. So, what a relief today to find a new book has just been published by a cosmologist and a philosopher of science saying something very similar.

It's called View From The Centre Of The Universe. We are, in many ways, at the centre of the Universe, it says, and the principles that govern the Universe run through the fabric of our being. Kind of what I was trying to say about global business to help break us out of out-dated models for doing business with the rest of the world. I think.

More evidence that I'm saner than I thought on this link >>>
http://snipurl.com/ImNotMadAfterAll

99% of recruitment advertising is pants (UK word. US readers substitute 'crap'). I used to write about advertising and marketing (sometimes still do) for Marketing, Marketing Week, the Independent and others, and despaired of ever seeing a creative recruitment ad.

But this is possibly the most moving and creative interweaving of images and words in a recruitment ad I have ever seen. Make sure to read what's on the cricket ball in the last frame:

Social worker recruitment ad

How does this relate to leadership? Well, it's mentioned here mainly because I swoon over powerful written communication and it is so rare to see something as beautifully crafted as this. Leaders are storytellers, makers of meaning, and this ad does that beautifully.

I found it in Lee McEwan's brilliant Serendipity Book having been led there by Johnnie Moore's blog.

...low expectations.

Everything was better when everything was worse.

Because:

When you have no choice and you are disappointed, the world is responsible.
When you have 100s of choices and you are still not happy with the ones you make, you blame yourself.

The more options we have, the more we regret what we didn't choose. This opportunity cost becomes a lingering regret that subtracts from the satisfaction of the choice,

I've been reading Barry Schwartz's excellent The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less . The above is a distillation.

If your product expansion strategy is based on horizontal extension - increasing the choice offered to consumers - you need to be aware of this paradox, as you do if you're a politician trying to push further choice into areas of our lives such as the health service and schools. (Hint: we want them all to be good, not to be able to choose between good schools and bad ones. You are passing the buck).

Schwartz cites research (also cited in Malcolm Gladwell's talks and books ) showing that customers are more likely to buy from a choice of half a dozen jams on a supermarket shelf than they are from a choice of thirty, which they hurry past, confused.

Schwartz was prompted to write his book after counting 175 salad dressings and 75 iced teas in his local supermarket and thinking "This is crazy".

Just a thought.

How different is your behaviour when no-one is looking or listening?

I heard a scientist this morning talking about how in quantum theory the very act of observing can change the thing being observed.

The cliched thoughts that brings crowding into your head include the obvious one: "If a tree falls in the forest and no-one is there to hear it, does it make a noise?" (The answer of course is that the fall makes vibrations in the air, but the very definition of a 'noise', as with a 'sound' is when those vibrations are received by an eardrum that resonates with them, so no there is no sound if there is nothing or no-one to hear it).

Or, as the educationalist Sir Ken Robinson puts it "If a man says something in a forest and there is no woman to hear him, is he still wrong?"

But it also made me think that one definition of authentic leadership is that the people we respect and trust most as leaders are those whom we assume have the least 'side' as they say in political circles - who are when alone most like they are in public.

So, what are you like when no-one's watching?

We don't have to turn to leadership books for lessons in how great leaders draw out brilliant performances from people. There are examples all around us. So, I've picked a couple from sport and film-making that struck me over the past day or two.

The first is from the Manchester United footballer (soccer player to our American friends) Ole Gunnar Solskjaer, known as 'the baby-faced assassin' for his combination of innocent looks and ruthless ability to score goals. It's from a Sky TV programme on the 50 greatest foreign players to play in the UK that was on last night:

Great leaders focus the attention on you, not them
"When I was a young player and had first come to Manchester United (the biggest football team in the world) I needed someone to look up to. That was Eric Cantona. We were all in awe of him. Yet he always looked after me. Before a match he would say to me: 'Today you are going to score when we get out there. No question.' To a young lad from Norway like me, hearing that from him gave me wings."

I've bolded that last bit because it's so great.

I found another nice illustration of how great leaders get extraordinary performances out of people, in this conversation between Matt Damon and Leo Dicaprio about how director Martin Scorcese inspires the cast and crew. It's from a publicity clip about their new film The Departed:

Matt Damon on Martin Scorcese
"Everyone's excited to be there (on the set), because he's giving everyone space to do their best work...(He's so) energised, disciplined and focussed, he brings out the best in everyone around him...Nobody wants to show up empty-handed."

Leonardo Dicaprio on Martin Scorcese
"I can't specifically identify anything he does particularly different than other directors. I just feel there's such a respect level for him when people come on the set, even the minor characters, that everyone is just on their A Game. They know they've got to come completely prepared with something to offer that man."

Dead Bachelors in Remote China Still Find Wives
- By Jim Yardley

New York Times, today.

Part of the purpose of this blog is to save you time as I read leadership books for you, find and select the best bits, then distil them. That's the principle behind the whole 60 Second Leader thing.

In the spirit of letting me dig out the gems for you (hey, I've just realized that means I do all the hard work. Oh well, too late now...) here's the 60 Second version of a book I've just mined as part of my research for the 60 Second Leader development system.

It's The Leadership Crash Course by Paul Taffinder.

If you're the methodical type and into self-assessments you might like this book. I found it slow-going, I'm afraid. But there are these four sharp insights in it:

Leadership is not always intentional
A brilliant observation.

A Quick Win can be a Slow Death...
...if you railroad it through so people feel it's imposed on them rather than a change they had a hand in deciding on.

Leaders break rules. It's their job.
Absolutely. Your job is NOT to enforce rules, it's to let people break them where they need breaking.

Leaders are masters AND servants
As we all are, of course. Most forget the second bit and lord it with the first bit.

End of 60 Second book report.

Just to prove competition really can come from anywhere:

"This week Tesco launched its own-brand computer software, taking it head-to-head with Microsoft, the world's largest software company.

An initial range of six titles, which will include office software and security suites, will sell for less than £20 each."

About time someone broke the illusion that the mass of Microsoft office products are anything more than commodity stuff now. Who'd have thought it would be Tesco?

I love how daring and unexpected they are under the leadership of Sir Terry Leahy. More please.

When it comes to leader communication, three is a magic number.

Our brains are hardwired to remember information more easily when it is grouped into three. Yet the Powerpoint default slideset always gives you four bullet points to fill. Say no more. The power of three: as easy as A, B, C; as clear as 1, 2, 3.

Rudy Giuliani, the former mayor of New York, tells us there are three keys to leadership:

1. If you are going to lead be optimistic. If you're not, you're followers can hardly be expected to be.
2. If you don't love people, do something else.
3. Be absolutely clear on what you stand for.

The substantive points in Giuliani’s threesome are powerful enough. But, the fact that he groups them into three makes them even more memorable. The Power of Three: It's a useful communications tool to keep in your leader’s toolkit.