Leaders in London blog readers: scroll down for your Robert Kennedy clip

Do we think ourselves into new ways of acting or act ourselves into new ways of thinking?

The evidence suggests the latter works. Act 'as if' you are leading and you lead. Stephanie West Allen has a fascinating post over at her blog idealawg based on an article written by herself and Jeffrey Schwartz. Schwartz coached Leo DiCaprio for his role as Howard Hughes in The Aviator. DiCaprio's acting out of Hughes' Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (constantly washing his hands) for the movie led to the actor showing symptoms of OCD himself.

There's also a brilliant webinar given by Jeffrey Schwartz and David Rock on the neuroscience of Leadership on the Strategy+Business webinars site. I have some notes from it if you don't have the time to listen to it all (email me Phil@60Secondleader.com if you want the notes).

Labels: acting 'as if'

Leaders in London blog readers : scroll down for your Robert Kennedy clip

Just came across this, from Albert Einstein, in this book:

"All religion, arts and sciences are branches of the same tree. All these aspirations are directed towards ennobling man's life, lifting it from the sphere of mere physical existence and leading the individual towards freedom."

Am I being naive, or is that a wonderful definition of what leadership should be today (including self-leadership - leading ourselves towards freedom)?

Leaders in London blog readers : scroll down for your Robert Kennedy clip


This is Dr. Milton Wexler, an extraordinary leader who died last month, aged 98. When Dr. Wexler's wife died of Huntington's Disease, decades ago, this amazing man - a psycho-analyst, not a specialist in hereditary diseases - later supported by his daughter Nancy, galvanised scientists around the world, bringing them together in collaborative groups to unlock the mysteries of HD. Thanks to their efforts, and the Hereditary Diseases Foundation, which they founded and funded, the gene was discovered a decade ago. Much of the momentum towards finding a cure for this illness over the past few decades has come initially from this one man and subsequently from his daughter Nancy and her sister Alice.

There's a wonderful short article in The Examiner (but it is not linkable to) explaining how Wexler, a Hollywood psycho-analyst, came into the hereditary research field from outside and quickly became its global leader and inspiration, with his daughter Nancy taking up the baton. Here's an extract with lessons for other leaders and would-be leaders in how to step from one field into another and shake it up by inspiring people to look for a new way of doing things:

"In the early 1970s, Wexler began to recruit young scientists to help find a cure. The freewheeling workshops - inspired by his therapeutic sessions with artists - stressed brainstorming and were innovative in biomedical research.In 1983, scientists nurtured by Wexler - and later also by Nancy, a clinical psychologist - found the genetic marker for Huntington's. In 1993, they located the gene itself. 'The search for the Huntington's gene became the paradigm for all such gene hunts,' said Dr. Francis Collins, director of the government-supported National Human Genome Research Institute in Bethesda, Md. 'That all came out of that wonderful intellectual ferment that Milton and Nancy created.' "

Yes, I have a personal interest in this as you can see from the Home Page of this site.

Labels: breakthrough leadership, innovative leadership

At last year's Leaders in London, John Kotter told a story about Robert Kennedy on the night Martin Luther King was killed that reminded me what a great almost-president he was.

I've been searching for film of the impromptu speech Kennedy made that night and just found it on You Tube. It's below. Ignore the Italian subtitles. There's a preamble, below, you might want to read before clicking on the clip to fully appreciate it.





Kennedy was due to give a campaign speech in a poor black part of Indianapolis. He knew, but the crowd didn't, that Martin Luther King had been killed that night. You can hear him say at the start of the clip "Do they know about Martin Luther King?"

The sheriff's department tried to get him to cancel the speech, because it was too dangerous to address a crowd that night. He refused. From the back of a flatbed truck, he abandoned his campaign speech and made this one instead.

There were riots in sixty American cities that night in outrage and grief at Dr. King's death. The one major city that saw no riots was Indianapolis, where Robert Kennedy had made this speech.

The end of his speech is cut off in this clip, so I've reproduced it below.

John Kotter - professor of leadership at Harvard - says that when he showed this clip once, a member of the audience came forward at the end and explained that the speech was only half the act of leadership Kennedy carried out that night that stopped the violence in one part of the States at least.

After stepping off the plane at Indianapolis, he gathered together the 100 or so volunteer campaign stewards who were there to help organise the event and told them Dr. King was dead and that he was going to tell the crowd. One of the young stewards was the man attending Prof. Kotter's seminar: he had been there.

Their task, said Kennedy to his young volunteers, was to go out into the centre of Indianapolis after he had talked to the crowd, and look for people out on the streets who were raging over Dr. King's death, and to console them, to counsel them. Kennedy explained that he couldn't tell them what to say because he didn't know himself what he was going to say that night.

He also said that he realised this was not what they had signed up for when they volunteered to help him make a campaign speech and that it could be dangerous, so they should feel free to leave with a clear conscience. Only two of the hundred or so young people walked away.

Kennedy then went up onto his flatbed truck, and his peace emissaries dispersed to join the crowd.

A nearly-President who quotes, off the top of his head, his favourite poet, Aeschylus, and who asks the people to follow the lead of the Ancient Greeks. And thereby prevents a night of violence. Oh, how sadly different from what we have now...

ROBERT KENNEDY'S IMPROMPTU SPEECH THAT PREVENTED A NIGHT OF VIOLENCE

"I have sad news ... and that is that Martin Luther King was shot and killed tonight.

Martin Luther King dedicated his life to love and to justice for his fellow human beings, and he died because of that effort.

"In this difficult day, in this difficult time for the United States, it is perhaps well to ask what kind of a nation we are and what direction we want to move in.

"For those of you who are black—considering the evidence there evidently is that there were white people who were responsible--you can be filled with bitterness, with hatred, and a desire for revenge. We can move in that direction as a country, in great polarization--black people amongst black, white people amongst white, filled with hatred toward one another.

"Or we can make an effort, as Martin Luther King did, to understand and to comprehend, and to replace that violence, that stain of bloodshed that has spread across our land, with an effort to understand with compassion and love.

"For those of you who are black and are tempted to be filled with hatred and distrust at the injustice of such an act, against all white people, I can only say that I feel in my own heart the same kind of feeling. I had a member of my family killed, but he was killed by a white man.

"But we have to make an effort in the United States, we have to make an effort to understand, to go beyond these rather difficult times.

"My favorite poet was Aeschylus. He wrote: "In our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God."

"What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence or lawlessness; but love and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or they be black.

"So I shall ask you tonight to return home, to say a prayer for the family of Martin Luther King, that's true, but more importantly to say a prayer for our own country, which all of us love--a prayer for understanding and that compassion of which I spoke.

"We can do well in this country. We will have difficult times; we've had difficult times in the past; we will have difficult times in the future. It is not the end of violence; it is not the end of lawlessness; it is not the end of disorder.
But the vast majority of white people and the vast majority of black people in this country want to live together, want to improve the quality of our life, and want justice for all human beings who abide in our land.

"Let us dedicate ourselves to what the Greeks wrote so many years ago: to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world.

Let us dedicate ourselves to that, and say a prayer for our country and for our people."

Labels: acts of leadership, speeches

USEFUL CONCEPT TO EXPLAIN MY RANT ABOUT TARGETS, BELOW: Goodhart’s Law. Named after a chief economist at the Bank of England. Goodhart’s Law states that if a measure becomes a target it loses its value and ceases to be a measure. Controlling an indicator of a problem will not cure the problem. Goodhart himself phrased it like this: `Any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes’.

SOURCE: Central Banking, Monetary Theory and Practice: Essays in honour of Charles Goodhart, page 96. Systems thinking, as practised by Toyota and other high-performing organizations, stresses that target-based systems distort behaviour and make your organization inflexible. John Seddon’s book Freedom From Command & Control is helpful in understanding systems thinking and how you can lead more effectively by using it. Peter Senge's work is also instructive on systems thinking and how it can help you avoid falling into the trap of target-based attempts to lead change.

More on the misuse of targets in attempts at leading change - which is obviously a bug-bear of mine - in The 60 Second Leader, my book, due out April in the UK and June in North America. Damn, I plugged. But, I'm angry about this target nonsense, so researched it and put it in the book. So that plug was based on passion, not self-promotion. Honest.

Labels: targets

This is relevant to leadership and customer issues, so I'll post this in both blogs.

From BBC News today comes another example of how people cheat when they have to work in a target-based performance management system - even with the best intentions and even the most senior people (what, you only expect call centre agents to cheat their targets? Target-based systems distort everything and most people's behaviour).

Again, this one is from the National Health Service, and follows on from sporadic stories of ambulances having to wait outside hospitals with patients in the back (because the Accident and Emergency 'waiting time limit' for patients, imposed by central government, is measured from when they come in through the door, and the hospital would have broken its limit and been penalised if the patients waited inside the hospital for treatment, so they were kept in ambulances).

This isn't evidence of pernicious people. It's brilliant, dedicated people pushed into ludicrous behaviour by top-down target-setting. Top-down targets distort. Check out any of the lean service analysts and consultants to see how flawed the whole thing is. Anyway, here's the latest example of what bad targets do to good people - and the terrible damage it does to the reputation of a much-loved institution:

FROM THE BBC

Patient waiting lists 'manipulated'
Last Updated: Saturday, 07 April 2007, 12:28 GMT

A senior cancer specialist has admitted giving patients unnecessary treatments to manipulate hospital waiting lists.

Chris Hamilton, consultant clinical oncologist at Hull's Princess Royal Hospital, told the BBC the problem was a government requirement that all treatment began within 31 days of diagnosis.

He says it means some low-risk patients are being treated before more urgent cases.

Mr Hamilton told the BBC he had given some prostate cancer patients hormone therapy to move them down the waiting list.

He said: "You're caught in a bind. Either you give them unnecessary treatment with hormones and reclassify them or you put them to the front of the queue where they shouldn't really be."

He added that he knew other hospitals were carrying out a similar practice and he had informed national cancer director Mike Richards.

The Prostate Cancer Charity condemned Mr Hamilton's claims saying it was "deeply unethical" to give patients treatment they did not need.

Dr Chris Hiley, head of policy and research, said: "It would be totally unacceptable if hormone treatment were being prescribed for men with prostate cancer simply in order to meet treatment target times - when it is not required to treat their cancer.

"It has nothing to do with patient centred care or good medicine.

"When men are diagnosed with prostate cancer, they need personal support and timely treatment. Providing the wrong treatment to meet NHS targets shows no regard for what patients need - the right treatment given at the right time with care and respect."

Labels: lean service, targets

Marion Janner, over at the Bright Blog, does a great job of highlighting how good leadership - at all levels - can transform the quality of life for people in acute mental health wards and other psychiatric facilities. Check out her latest post on Wotton Lawn Hospital for an inspiring example.

Marion created the Star Wards programme, which offers acute wards a pack of practical transformational ideas for taking the lead in improving every aspect of life and work in a mental health ward. She then reports in her blog on examples of surprisingly good practice, to inspire others by showing them what can be achieved.

As with so much in healthcare, the differences in practice between some mental health acute wards where people are apparently left lethargic and sitting around versus wards where, as Marion describes in her most recent post, a particularly fragile looking patient was deeply engrossed in potting a seedling in a plastic cup as part of the nursery for the garden, is not down to resources, but to leadership, commitment to enriching people's lives, imagination and a willingness to improvise and engage.

I'm a great admirer of Marion's work as she is a powerful example of how to lead change when you may not be the technical 'leader' in an organization. She is an outside-in change agent who inspires organizations to change for the better without actually being part of their leadership hierarchy. Which is exactly as it should be today. There shouldn't be a leadership hierarchy in any organization; just catalysts for change at all levels and a readiness at all levels to listen to their good advice and let people take the initiative by sharing ideas to lead change.

See the Customer Blog for a nice example Marion quotes about the power of improvisation when dealing with customers - in this case acute mental health patients - involving a paper plate and a bit of imagination on the part of a member of staff.

Labels: change agents