I heard this, recently, from Robert Putnam (via the radio, you understand, not in person). Putnam is the author of Bowling Alone, which focuses on the fragmentation of social capital. He uses the poignant image of how people often bowl alone in American bowling alleys where they would once bowl in a group. The book's been around for a while.

Anyway, this is the bit that's new to me. Apparently he said this:

"If you are a member of no groups and join one, you cut the risk of dying over the next year by 50%."

I haven't had the chance to source the research and check the quote (I guess I should buy the book), but it's startling. Looks like my favourite quote, E. M. Forster's 'Only connect' - that the point of the human condition is to connect positively with others - is even more powerful than I thought it was. It can be the difference between life and death.

Labels: individualism

Kris Murrin of the creativity consultancy ?WhatIf! tells a great story about how one of Disney’s imagineers brought to life a customer experience he was trying to create, but that the Disney board consistently refused to fund.

The imagineer had twice presented to the board a thick, bound proposal for a new park that featured live animals. Twice the proposal was thrown out on the grounds that “people don’t want to see live animals. Where’s the ‘wow’ in that?”

The third time, the imagineer didn’t bring a thick proposal into the boardroom with him. He brought in, on the end of a chain, a six-foot Bengal tiger. “Now do you get it?” he asked. They got it. Disney’s Animal Kingdom was the result.

I traced this story back, and it turns out it was Michael Eisner himself who was on the receiving end of the tiger. The imagineer was Joe Rohde, a senior creative executive at Disney, and an explorer who sports a handlebar moustache and an elongated ear lobe, stretched by a string of shells and bones collected from his visits to tribal villages in Africa, Thailand and Nepal.

“He once brought a tiger on a leash into a meeting with Disney CEO Michael Eisner to illustrate the allure of live animals. Stunned, and no doubt impressed, Eisner gave Rohde the go-ahead for Animal Kingdom, Walt Disney World's fourth theme park”, it says in the Disney on-line talk forum on these pages. It’s fascinating reading.

This story also evidences epiphanies and how direct experience and emotion generate them. I'll blog a bit more on epiphanies later, as they seem vital in the change process. Have been musing on epiphanies and the part they play in change since Johnnie Moore led me to a paper on leadership and change.

I'm looking forward to Eisner himself coming to talk at the European Customer Management World event in London next May that I'm involved with. He's widely-demonized by Walt-lovers among the Disney-rati and clearly wasn't a lot of fun to work for. But I think he has more in common with Walt in his laser-like focus on the pre-eminence of ideas than his detractors give him credit for.

Labels: customer experience, Disney, Eisner

This may be old news to you. In which case excuse my slowness in catching up...

I like the way the new thinking on the neuroscience of leadership (or, more accurately, some old thinking, updated with a sprinkling of interesting new brainwave evidence thanks to MRI scanners) confirms that leading by asking questions is more effective than leading by telling.

Finding solutions through using questions to direct our attention goes all the way back to Socrates. David Rock and Jeffrey Schwartz's highly-readable article in the summer for Business + Intelligence magazine has been followed up by a very good webinar on the neuroscience of leadership. (It's about 30 minutes of them plus 30 minutes of good questions - appropriately enough).

Thanks to Mark Goulston for pointing me at the webinar.

Labels: David Rock, Jeffrey Schwartz, neuroscience, questions, Socrates

Technorati Profile

That's a technical thing for the Technorati spiders only...

I like Tim Sanders. He has some great things to say on leadership and has revived the old 'abundance mentality beats scarcity mentality' argument and is convincing when he says this is the new zeitgeist we all operate in now.

So, why do I not quite buy into it whenever he does this Mother Theresa impersonation (see below)? Is it because he looks and sounds just like the villain Gary Oldman plays in the movie The Fifth Element? Or that he seems to be ripping off the line that Bill Hicks often used to end his sets with? I don't know. I'm just not convinced by his facial language and body language that he's completely comfortable with what he's saying. Or maybe he's just not convinced that the audience will buy into it. In which case he's being brave.

Labels: communication

That's a headline from the Ironic Times this week, referring to the great 'known unknown' of being sacked:

It's a reference, of course, to his widely-lampooned musing a few years ago in answer to a journalist's question, about what we know and don't know. It went something like this:

The Unknown
"As we know, There are known knowns: There are things we know we know.
We also know there are known unknowns: That is to say we know there are some things we do not know.
But there are also unknown unknowns, the ones we don't know we don't know."

I think I know where he stole it from - Fernando Flores, the Chilean senator, philosopher, former transformational business consultant, father of a number of very important ideas in computing (action workflow and others) and former political prisoner under Pinochet.

If my guess is right, it's a perfect example of how original thought from a first class mind can come across as rubbish when mis-applied by a Rumsfeld mind.

Here's where I'm guessing some researcher at the Department of Defense found this original thought, passed it to his boss so he could maneouvre around the 'terrorist information' problem and had it translated into gobbledegook for his troubles:

"...The World According to Flores exists in three realms. The first is the smallest -- and the most self-limiting: What You Know You Know. It is a self-contained world, in which people are unwilling to risk their identity in order to take on new challenges. A richer realm is What You Don't Know -- the realm of uncertainty, which manifests itself as anxiety or boredom...But it is the third realm of Flores's taxonomy to which people should aspire: What You Don't Know You Don't Know. To live in this realm is to notice opportunities that have the power to reinvent your company, opportunities that we're normally too blind to see. In this third realm, you see without bias: You're not weighed down with information. The language of this realm is the language of truth, which requires trust. "

That's from a 1998 article by Harriet Rubin in Fast Company magazine on Fernando Flores

Technorati Tags: Donald+Rumsfeld, Fernando+Flores, known unknown, knowledge, leadership

Labels: Fernando Flores, knowledge

I've always been wary of optimism. It tends to filter out too many unwelcome facts and encourages bluster. Useful critical thoughts, from within and from without, become discouraged as negative thinking.

Yet, I've found that my preference for unvarnished truth (if you can ever find it) grates with people I work with sometimes. They assume I'm a pessimist when I gleefully enumerate all the things that can go wrong. I'm not. I just like confronting reality, as Bossidy and Charan put it in their book of the same name.

In too many organizations, confronting reality is an exercise in staring at the sun. Can't be done for long. Have to put the filter of optimism in place to make it bearable. But, I've never been able to find a compromise position that confronts reality without scaring people off or discouraging them.

Until I discovered a formula of words from Jim Collins that he calls The Stockdale Paradox. Level 5 leaders - Collins' low-ego, high-performance quiet leaders - practise, he says "a willingness to look at the brutal reality of the situation, but remain hopeful and determined that one will overcome it."

I like that. It's still quite hard to translate that position into an inspiring rallying cry. Stoicism is not inspiring. Which is why most corporate leaders default to presenting an upbeat view.

Labels: Jim Collins, optimism, quiet leaders, truth

I've always loved the 'I am Spartacus' scene in the middle of this clip. Rene Carayol used the clip to illustrate what real leadership is in a session for the Inspired Leaders Network a while back, which set me hunting for it. This overlong version is the nearest I could find.

Lawrence Olivier's Crassus has the power over life and death. But, who's the real leader here? You can tell from the look on Olivier's face that he knows it isn't and never will be him.

Labels: influence, Power

Well, how spooky is that?

Couple of days ago I wrote about luck and leadership, below, having just finished researching it for a book.

And today over at the www.execubooks.com blog, they've asked us to blog about luck in business.

Actually, not spooky at all. As Echo wisely says to Locke in an episode of Lost :

"Mr. Locke, don't confuse fate with coincidence."

Here's a quick coincidence story for you:

I was standing just outside the door of a motel room in Maine a couple of years ago, looking at the sea.

A woman came out from the next room and said, "Do you mind if I ask you a personal question? Does your wife have Huntington's Disease?"

"Yes," I said, surprised, as so few people know the illness. "How do you know?"

"Because my daughter, who is in our motel room, has it too. I recognized it," she smiled. "My daughter is on a drug trial. It's a thing called LAX-101. Your wife should ask about it. You never know," she said.

"Well, that's weird", I said. "My wife's on the LAX-101 trial, too".

There are nearly 60 million people in the UK. Around 50 were on the LAX-101 trial.
There are, as of last month, 300 million people in the US. Around 50 were on the LAX-101 trial.

And two of those 1-in-36 million families find themselves next to each other in a motel on a fairly empty stetch of the coast of Maine.

Now, THAT's what you call a coincidence.

Nothing to do with leadership, but it still astonishes me...

Trial didn't work by the way. "Inconclusive results. More research needed" is the actual finding. My wife still takes the trial drug, just in case: You never know.

The Financial Times says Warren Bennis virtually invented leadership as an academic discipline. The author of 27 books on leadership and business, he has been dubbed The Dean of leadership.

I interviewed Professor Bennis and then chaired a session he gave at a conference. We struck up an email relationship afterwards, where I asked his advice to help develop my thinking on a number of leadership issues. He impressed me as a courteous, warm, wise man, generous with his time and insights; a great teacher.

Here are three ten-second insights of his on leadership that I've just re-found in my notes and that I like in particular. It's a quick preview of the section on Prof. Bennis I am working on for The 60 Second Leader book:

1. Leaders evolve
"Leaders don’t emerge like Venus out of the sea. If you want to create leadership at every level, leaders at the top have to create the systems and culture that allow that to happen. You can’t put a person in a microwave and out pops the McLeader. It doesn’t happen like that. Leadership is something that evolves."

2. First enlightenment, then the laundry
“As the Zen master says, ‘first Enlightenment, then the laundry’. Leadership is about both. It’s not just about vision and guidance from on high. It’s about delivering results.”

3. Be like Disraeli
“It was said of Queen Victoria’s great Prime Minister Gladstone, that when you had dinner with him you came away thinking he was the wittiest, most intelligent, most charming person you ever met. When you dined with the other great Prime Minister of Queen Victoria’s reign, Disraeli, it was said you came away thinking YOU were all those things. If you can do that while maintaining integrity and truthfulness, you release the greatness in people. That’s a great leader.”

"Charles Handy tells how he was trying to write one day and was suffering from writer's block. A group of children came by and were playing outside his window.

For some reason, the sounds unleashed his creative juices and the words started flowing.

He went out to them, told them how great it was to hear them having fun outside his window and how pleased he was that it helped him work and asked if they could come back the next day. They did. Same thing happened. So, he asks them back again.

At the end of the third day, he has got loads of work done to the sound of these kids playing outside his window and runs out, delighted. 'Come back tomorrow and I'll give you a pound!' he cries, triumphantly.

Next day: no kids. Handy finds his creative muse has disappeared with them.

He goes off in search and finds the kids playing in another street. 'Why didn't you come back?' he asks.

'For a pound, it wasn't worth it,' is the scathing answer he gets..."

I came across that story the other day and it reminded me how reward and recognition programmes can cheapen motivation and backfire unless they are carefully tailored to what actually makes your employees tick. I heard it originally from Frank Douglas, a brilliant HR VP at Shell whom I like a lot.

Leaders spend a lot of time and effort trying to motivate and animate people. Motivation and incentive programmes always seem completely uninspiring to me, a kind of papering over of the cracks, an admission that the substantive work in itself is not motivating enough.

I've been researching luck and leadership for the 60 Second Leader; specifically, whether you can make your own luck.

The first thing I discovered is that it's an apocryphal story that, before he appointed a new general, Napoleon used to ask one critical question: "But, is he lucky?" Shame. I liked that story.

Then I was reminded of this experiment on missed opportunity: subjects were asked to watch a video clip of two teams passing a basketball between them, and told they had to count the number of passes. Halfway through the clip, a man dressed in a gorilla suit walks on in the background, beats his chest, then walks off again. Eighty per cent of the subjects failed to spot the gorilla.(1)

If you think success looks like all the things that used to make you successful, but the fast-changing markets out there constantly re-define what success actually looks like, then you will be unlucky. You will be looking for basketballs and missing gorillas.

Serendipity - bumping into something useful - is part of luck. But openness to the new thing - a prepared mind primed to spot and grab opportunity - is the other half. The luck factor is part-external and part-internal. The two halves need to connect or you walk right on by.

There is an obvious, but not consistent, correlation between hard work and luck, as the oil magnate John Paul Getty noted:


My formula for success is…
Rise early.
Work late.
Strike oil.
- J P Getty

OK, he meant it as a tongue-in-cheek comment on the high risk oil prospecting sector he worked in, but there is also an underlying truth to leadership in this quote: the harder you work and the more opportunities you open up, and the more you allow your people to try different things, the luckier you are likely to become.

The psychologist and former magician (!) Richard Wisemanhas done some of the most interesting work on luck and business lately. Wiseman’s work veers towards positive thinking and self-help. But, he insists that lucky thinking patterns create real-world business impact. He experimented with making an organization more lucky by instilling in managers and employees what he says are the positive thought patterns of ‘lucky’ people. The business claimed to improve its profits by 20%.

(1) Did You Spot The Gorilla? How to recognize hidden opportunities in your life, Richard Wiseman