"Textbooks would make my job so much easier."

Miriam Coulibaly, who teaches 195 pupils at a school in Mali, quoted today in the New York Times.

Puts into perspective any resource problems we might feel faced with at work in 2007, doesn't it. Not wanting to get preachy about it, but there is a great thing called The Reverse Book Club that helps with this situation by the way. I was attracted by its marketing strapline a while back: something like "Four books a month for a fiver and you never get to see a single one of them."

On the news this morning was yet another report bemoaning the fact that top bosses had awarded themselves compensation packages through 2006 that vastly outstripped the pay increases, proportionally (and, of course, in pure financial terms), of the people who work for them.

"It shows a lack of leadership" said the expert commentator who compiled the report. That it does. But, I've been thinking about Darwinism and leadership lately and the traditional interpretation of Darwin helps explain a lot about traditional forms of leadership and the organizational cultures they create, including the tendency to over self-reward.

Command and control leadership is alpha male leadership (wth very few exceptions). A male fights his way to the top of the organization and rules. Others compete with each other for a place in the pecking order.

It's survival of the fittest and power and wealth to the winners. Failure is associated with weakness, with not being fit to thrive. But, this is actually a crude misinterpretation of how a species, organization, group, survives and thrives.

As I read in The Gift (a powerful book I am slowly ploughing through: see bottom left for a link), when Kropotkin and others looked at the same data as Darwin, they didn't see competition as a fight to the finish or for dominance. Kropotkin was drawn to Darwin's own observation of the blind pelican who was fed fish by other pelicans in his flock.

A number of evolutionary biologists consider Darwin's notion of competition as too unsophisticated, as incomplete. Lynn Margulis, for example, argues strongly that co-operation (endosymbiosis in evolutionary jargon) is key.

"Life did not take over the globe by combat but by networking," she contends*. As with organisms, organizations (and individuals within them) that co-operate with others often out-compete those that do not.

Similarly, in a networked world, most leaders will succeed by building relationships, by networking. The power is located within the network, within the community. It is because we are networked as never before that old style leadership is in crisis.

*Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan, Microcosmos: Four Billion Years of Evolution from Our Microbial Ancestors. Summit Books, New York, 1986.

PS Scroll up for a free sample chapter from my new book, The 60 Second Leader, that looks into the consequent attitudes to 'Leadership and Failure' - why failure is associated with weakness.

Labels: Competition

In Catherine the Great's garden in St. Petersburg there is a soldier. A visitor asks the soldier why he is there. The soldier does not know. The curious visitor repeats the question to his lieutenant, who also does not know the answer. The visitor does some research and discovers that, 150 years earlier, Catherine the Great was walking in the garden when she saw a particularly beautiful flower. She called a soldier and ordered him to stand guard to ensure nobody stepped on the flower. A soldier was still standing there 150 years later. What I'm saying here is that many companies have institutionalized certain procedures which are dysfunctional in this day and age.

- Manfred Kets De Vries

Labels: change, inertia, Manfred Kets De Vries

Heard Rene Carayol say this at Leaders in London. Very true. HR departments in large organizations who are currently working away diligently on your standardised, desired leadership behaviours, please note:

" We have been told for years now that there is a standard homogenised great leader type or template we have to aspire to. Organizations deliver one training programme, people are expected to become clone leaders. That doesn’t work. The marketplace tells us that difference works. Challenging the status quo and standing out from the pack is what makes a great leader. There is one question you need to find the answer to in order to define your difference: What do you stand for? "

I have a separate problem with the whole notion of 'great leaders' but I will come back to that in another post.

Technorati Tags: leadership+development, great+leaders

Labels: great leaders, HR, leadership development

Nice example of how to lead talent in an episode couple of nights ago of the TV series Bones, about a female pathologist. In this episode Bones has a new boss, also female, and clashes with her throughout the episode. Bones decides she has to quit, reluctantly. She loves her job, but cannot take being told what to do. She is a genius at what she does. The new boss can see what’s coming and wants to find a way they can work together. The conversation goes like this, at a table in a diner:

Bones: “We have a problem…I have a problem with control and authority.”

New Boss: “Can you see a way out of it?”

B: “No. (Seems to be preparing to offer her resignation).”

NB: “Look: I’m in charge. But, out of respect for you…Do you play Monopoly?”

B: (Frowns, puzzled). “Y-e-s”.

NB: “Well, in Monopoly they have that thing called a Get Out Of Jail Free card. Like I said, I’m in charge, but out of respect for you, you have permission to defy me. No consequences.”

B: “How many can I have?”

NB: “One a week.”

B: “Five per case.”

NB: “Three per case.”

B: “Done.”

They shake hands.

Lesson? Creative talent often has a problem with authority. A creative leadership response is to flex where necessary. Good leaders break rules and give others leeway to do so too. Creativity and rule-breaking go together.

Labels: negotiation, talent

I heard General Colin Powell tell this Gorbachev story at Leaders in London last week. Powell was Secretary of State at the time of the story:

"I remember going to see President Gorbachev when he was leading his country through Perestroika and Glasnost. He said to me “You are not doing enough to help! You know what we are trying to do here and you need to help us do it!” I sat back and made it clear that, well, he was still a Commie, I guess, and the USSR had been the enemy for decades. He leant forward and smiled. “Mr. Secretary,” he said, “I am afraid you will need to find yourself a new enemy.” "

I'm convinced you get glimpses of true leadership in the true firsthand anecdotes people tell rather than in the official versions. Every firsthand anecdote I've heard about Gorbachev simply reinforces what a great leader he was, despite the way he is vilified today within Russia. Rene Carayol, for example, tells this story about him:

Carayol on Gorbachev:

“I was part of an event where Gorbachev was due to speak. This was in the days when Raisa, his wife, was still alive. They were, you will remember, devoted to each other. He was sitting next to her at a table. It was a very high-powered meeting.

“When it was his turn to speak, he rose, looking a little tense. But Raisa touched his hand. He looked down at her; she said something to him. He seemed to relax, smiled and went over to the lectern. I couldn’t resist sidling over to his interpreter and asking what she had said. “She said ‘You will be fine. It will be OK’,” he said.

“This man had changed the course of history, had faced down some of the most reactionary power bases in the world, had put in motion forces that had led to the Berlin wall tumbling. Outside Russia he is recognized as a world statesman of great bravery and stature. Yet he was nervous about talking to this gathering of people in a room. It was a nice reminder that brave leaders aren’t fearless; they just conquer that fear; in this case, with a little help.”

Labels: Carayol, Gorbachev, Powell, stories

Q: Head or Heart?

A: 60% follow their heart

...according to the self-styled "world's leading self-discovery site". Don't know about that, but it shows that trying to lead with just rational analysis alone won't get you very far. Daniel Goleman was right.

Communities of Practice (COPs) bring together people with knowledge and experience in a given subject. COPs tend to emerge and grow organically. Tendrils form between people; like seeks out like, and a network forms. COPs are self-organized and self-managed.

By contrast, when organizations try to bring together a concentration of knowledge and expertise they create Centres of Excellence (COEs). These are resourced by management, which sets goals and channels the thinking of its members. COEs tend to be exclusive. COPs are inclusive. Guess which work best as catalysts for innovative ideas and for accelerating learning.

Karl Moore, Professor of Management at McGill University, is exploring a third organizational form that leaders may find more useful than Centres of Excellence; a form that embraces the feeling that the best ideas emerge from the kind of voluntary sharing that is a feature of a Community of Practice, and cannot be as effectively mandated from on high, as with Centres of Excellence.

Moore's new idea is Accelerated Communities of Practice (ACOPS, inevitably), which are a synthesis of COPs and COEs. (Still with me?)

"ACOPs combine aspects of COPs and COEs and operate as a middle stage between the two," claims Moore, who is working on helping global organizations identify which COPs have the potential to morph into COEs and then on how to make it happen. He feels ACOPs may be the halfway stage that will lead eventually to Centres of Excellence that have grown organically out of COPs - emerged, in other words, with a little massaging - rather than created top-down.

Since emergent change benefits from a groundswell of power whereas top-down change mostly fails, I look forward to seeing how Moore's experiments work out.

Source: Peter Fisk, who is great at spotting emergent ideas, has, on his Marketing Genius website, an article by Stuart Crainer from Business and Strategy Review, looking at what business thought leaders are working on at the moment. It's about a year old now but, hey, a lot of it is news to me.

Labels: knowledge