Is leadership something you do to other people? Grammar suggests it is. Remember 'subject and object' from English lessons? "I (subject) do something to you (the object)". "I lead you" = the active subject is the leader and the passive recipient (the object), the 'done to', is the person being led.

This is wholly wrong and we need to eradicate that language-based deep assumption - which we absorbed very young - and realise that today's leadership is a partnership in which people agree to coalesce around a common purpose. It's a networked world. There is less deference to hierarchy. The best leadership is no longer about telling, about exercising power. It's about helping shape meaning, purpose, direction and method of getting to the goal. It's an agreement between people. And, as Byron said, leaders are led as much as leading.

Professor Jonathan Gosling of Exeter University in the UK, a colleague of Henry Mintzberg at Canada's McGill, has contributed a paper to The Leadership Hub on how new-style leadership development has to acknowledge the network effect in which we learn from each other, rather than dividing into those who do (teach) and those who are done to (passive learners). He calls his paper 'Wiki schools or ATMs'. The Hub, I'm glad to say, is emerging as a 'wiki school' for leadership. If you're not sure what that is, Jonathan's paper explains it. You can find a link to it on the home page of The Hub.

I'm on a bit of a Hamel kick at the moment, so here's more from him:

Professor Gary Hamel says Maslow's well-known hierarchy of needs is not enough to analyse how we work anymore. In a recent podcast for the Times Online, strategist and author of The Future of Management, Professor Gary Hamel, explains how we need a hierarchy of human capability.

Here's the existing stack of human capability that Hamel says most management is based on:

Intellect

Diligence

Obedience

You can see how this hierarchy fits in with the old needs of scientific management (Fordism, industrialism, a hierarchy in which people at the bottom do what they are told to do by people who supposedly know more at the top).

Now, says Hamel, you can buy Obedience, Diligence and Intellect from anywhere for almost nothing. With a global workforce to draw on, millions of them highly educated and motivated, these three levels are no longer enough to create a high-performing organization.

The three higher levels we need to add to the stack, to move on from old-style management and define 'the future of management' (the title of his latest book, which Amazon editors ranked as the best business book of 2007) , says Hamel, are:

Calling/Passion

Creativity

Initiative

Without adding those three levels, you are not going to create any value whatsoever, he argues.

This is a 20 minute podcast that starts off talking about the internet but quickly moves away from the internet to the more wide-ranging future of management.

Don't be put off by Prof. Hamel's slightly shrill voice (he's shouting a bit and has a curious accent that seems to be a combination of Louisiana Bayoux and East Coast academic). Give yourself a minute to adjust to it, as he's the best strategy thinker of his generation, in my opinion, and comes out with some inspiring insights that will help you think differently.

I particularly like this podcast, because his riff on 'the democracy of ideas' about halfway in , exactly describes how The Leadership Hub works. And he says this is critical to the new model for management and leadership that we all need to move towards.

Here's the link to the podcast:
Gary Hamel on The Future of Management

Too much writing about leadership and innovation says it is about predicting, forecasting, inventing the future. No, it's not. It's about understanding the present more deeply than your competitors do. Gary Hamel explained it to me in an interview once:

"People who innovate successfully are not forecasters. They are in touch with what’s happening, whereas the competition simply haven’t noticed. People who innovate successfully don’t see the future. They see beneath the surface of the present. And they pull together what they see into a proposition that has instant appeal for customers, but which customers didn’t even know they wanted until it appeared.

"How do you do this? Nokia are a great example. Twenty years ago the top people at Nokia got together in a cold room just outside the Arctic Circle and decided they were going to beat Motorola. Very funny. Motorola was and still is one of the most respected companies in the world, up there with GE.

Nokia succeeded because they saw what was changing and exploited it. There are three steps to doing this:

1. Find the fringe
2. Look for the pattern
3. Data is not enough: Experience, feel and understand what’s happening.

It’s at the margin that you notice change happening first. Nokia sent its engineers from Finland and told them to live in places where exciting things were happening. They sent them to spend time in nightclubs in Tokyo, in the King’s Road in London, on Venice Beach in southern California.

Their brief was to observe marginal trend-setting lifestyles and blend in, then report back. It was that experiential learning, getting under the skin of the ‘now’ by actually living it rather than conducting a questionnaire, that brought Nokia’s engineers back to Finland with an emphasis on aesthetics and design and on more elegant, user-friendly interfaces. And that was how they did, indeed, beat Motorola in the phone handset market.”

Source: My notes from an interview I did with Gary Hamel a while back.