One of the reasons I like this book is that it is one of the few leadership books that recognizes that ‘leadership’ is not an ability or skill or collection of abilities or skills within some people – leaders. Leadership is a relationship between people. Others have to agree to be led.

And, at times, those others do the leading and you agree to be led.

I also like the lack of emphasis on ‘competencies’ and trait theory – that there are traits or competencies that are common to leaders – and the acknowledgement that leaders are often very different from each other – in fact have more apart than they have in common.

At a time when large organizations arae commonly trying to standardise leadership behaviour, this book is a refreshing reminder that it won’t allow itself to be. Because, again, leadership isn’t something inside a ‘leader’. It’s a relationship between people.

Here are the authors outlining the four qualities inspirational leaders share

“We’ve discovered that inspirational leaders … share four unexpected qualities:

1. They selectively show their weaknesses. By exposing some vulnerability, they reveal their approachability and humanity.
2. They rely heavily on intuition to gauge the appropriate timing and course of their actions. Their ability to collect and interpret soft data helps them know just when and how to act.
3. They manage employees with something we call tough empathy. Inspirational leaders empathize passionately—and realistically—with people, and they care intensely about the work employees do.
4. They reveal their differences. They capitalize on what’s unique about themselves.

You may find yourself in a top position without these qualities, but few people will want to be led by you.

Our theory about the four essential qualities of leadership, it should be noted, is not about results per se. While many of the leaders we have studied and use as examples do in fact post superior financial returns, the focus of our research has been on leaders who excel at inspiring people—in capturing hearts, minds, and souls.

This ability is not everything in business, but any experienced leader will tell you it is worth quite a lot. Indeed, great results may be impossible without it.”

This is a bit self-indulgent. It’s my younger son playing piano with his uni housemates in their band. What intrigued me is why he is doing it quite like this. So, I asked him.

It’s because one of their ‘fans’ asked. It says so on-screen partway through the video clip. It reminded me of when a CD Baby customer asked for a squid in answer to the question on the form ‘Anything else you want?’ and was sent one (look it up on You Tube). Younger people, bands, companies seem to have far less problem with this adaptation of what they do in response to what customers ask – turning it into a quirky feature.

Anyway, here’s the blindfolded piano player and his musical friends to illustrate the point:

Love this…

“Listen to the mustn’ts, child.
Listen to the don’ts.
Listen to the shouldn’ts, the impossibles, the won’ts.
Listen to the never haves,
Then listen close to me…
Anything can happen, child. Anything can be.”

– Shel Silverstein

Hat tip: It’s from Audrey & Jim Lanford’s Quote of The Day daily email. You can subscribe here if you like: http://www.famous-quotes-and-quotations.com/

Well, I was 17th last year, largely, I think, for creating The Leadership Hub, and winning some awards around the world for the corporate version, which runs inside the intranet of a large organization and brings their global leadership community together as a development platform. No-one’s done it like that before as far as I know, and I think that’s what brought me to this website’s (below) attention.

Anyway, see the email I just received, below, and do please vote. For me if you think I deserve it, but for someone else if I don’t. I didn’t put myself up for this, I should add.

Phil Dourado

PS If you get ‘failed’ when you try voting using their drop-down list of the Top 30 candidates (hey, why am I in small print in there ) , then just write into the field a bit further down that says ‘nominate’ and submit that instead – my name if you like, or someone else’s if not www.leadershipgurus.net 

“Dear Global Guru Candidates

We are finalizing the ranking for 2012. And your originality, works and impact have qualified you as one of the world’s top 30 Leadership gurus. And as you know, 40% of the ranking is based on peer voting.

So, please get your fans to vote for you at: www.leadershipgurus.net. The final calculations will be completed by March 1st. we will inform you individually when we tabulate the results.

All the best,

Athena

PS. As usual, if anyone contacts you and asks for money or donations representing Leadership Gurus or Global Gurus, it is NOT us. We will never request or accept compensation or gratuities for this award”

Vote here: www.leadershipgurus.net 

I walked into my local Tesco Metro the other day and they have this new, real-time display above the entrance doors. Sometimes it says ’30 seconds’ even. This time it was less than 60.

The lesson’s  obvious for all of us. This just makes the point in one wonderfully ‘in  your face’ screen. In the 1980s and 1990s, large organizations busily created processes for managing customers based on them/us queuing or waiting in line – most notably the contact centre/center industry.

But, customers don’t want to wait. They hate you for it. They hate your call centres that queue them or make them wait in line. They hate your attempts to route them through your system with Interactive Voice Response.  They hate you for making them fill in a form with their personal details when you already have that information. They don’t want that. They want a real person answering their question now.

The reason they won’t wait is that time is life. By asking them to wait, you are stealing their precious time – you are taking little chunks of their life. You are killing them by moments. That’s how they/we see it. Life’s short. We all want to get the most out of it. The more you eat into people’s time by making them wait, the more you are, literally, taking their life away from them, second by second, when they want to do something else with that time.

So, before you build yet another process based on the assumption that customers will wait in line to reach you. Or even on the cynical assumption that they won’t wait, so you ‘manage’ the queue that way – which we all have experience of as customers; you actually exploit the ‘Life’s too short to wait’ feeling we all have by making your service have a long wait time – the traditional route for keeping customer complaint calls down – then you are, in the long-term, dead yourself as an organization.

Follow Tesco. Follow Disney. Bust your queues or lines. Don’t build processes that assume customers will wait for you.

Why on earth should they?

Phil Dourado 

I like the story Ricardo Semler tells about how he was teaching leadership to a class of corporate CEOs at Harvard and asked them to all write down on a piece of card their company values and put it on the desk in front of them. When they went out for coffee, he moved all the cards around. When they came back, it took them a while to realize the cards had been moved because, guess what…They were substantially the same.

Using the triptych of Vision, Mission and Values to try and set a distinct course that sets your organization apart has become an industry. And few people seem to notice that the values are interchangeable. Which is why the UK supermarket chain Sainsbury’s “It’s our values that make us different” doesn’t actually make sense. Their values aren’t any different from half a dozen other big company values.

A universal set of values doesn’t set you apart

Because, surprise, surprise, when you ask your workforce in a consultation exercise, so that you can distil out the values they will put hand on heart to and try to live each day…you end up with largely the same values as every other company. They are human values, common to all of us.

Yes, they need to be injected into large organizations and lived by. But, don’t think they will make you appear much different from anyone else.  Because everyone’s doing it.

So, the usual question applies: What else you got? That makes you distinctive, different, preferred as an employer, for customers, investors and the rest of us?

Give stuff away unexpectedly

I ordered a floor lamp and inside the packaging was a packet of free biscuits/cookies with a note saying ‘a little gift from us. Hope you like the lamp.’ That made an impression on me in a way that no amount of vision, mission and values statements will.

Similarly, I ordered something small from an Amazon marketplace supplier and in the package was a little pack of candy – funny chewy teeth! No note, just that little extra. And CD Baby and their “Anything else you want? Just ask?” … leading to the now famous video of the customer who asked for a squid and received it (!) (thanks to the brilliant founder, Derek Sivers ) … that’s a largely unremarked trend that creates the difference and the ‘preferredness’ that all the high-faluting consultant-driven Mission, Vision, Values will never really get near.

Give stuff away unexpectedly. Unrelated to your product even. It’s what will get you remembered and preferred. And that’s what it’s all about in an over-crowded market where customers are resistant to all of the corporate jargon and management speak and judge you by your actions.

The Gift Society is making a comeback

We are teetering on a post-capitalist world according to some. I don’t think so. I think capitalism is just evolving. And part of that evolution is incorporating practices from pre-capitalist ‘gift’ societies. See The Gift, a powerful, intense, beautifully-argued book (but so intense I’ve never been able to get through more than half of it) for clues.

Links to look into this more deeply

Here’s a link to Marcel Mauss’s original book The Gift, described on Wikipedia

And here’s a link to the beautifully written book of the same name by Lewis Hyde. Beware, it is so densely packed with Hyde’s poetic but forensic analysis that I occasionally had to stop and come up for air as I felt I was drowning.

And here’s an old post on The Leadership Hub that is still relevant if you want more on Vision, Mission and Values (yawn):
http://www.theleadershiphub.com/blogs/ideology-revisioning-boundaries

Phil Dourado

“In this era of ever-accelerating change, being able to create, navigate amid uncertainty, and adapt using an experimental approach will increasingly be a vital advantage.

The way to begin is with little bets.” – Peter Sims

I love this book.

One sentence book summary: You innovate to keep changing and improving by a constant series of ‘little bets’ – affordable experimental changes or mini pilots – taken at all levels of the organization: if you are not trying at least one new thing or new approach at any one time, then you will stay the same; maybe you’re ‘good’ already so play safe most of the time, but since ‘good’ is no longer good enough, you may look like you’re succeeding, but you are actually slowly slipping behind. (Wow, what a long sentence…)

Why this is so important: Fundamental to the little bets approach is knowing that you will get something wrong, learn why and improve it. It’s because it’s new that you don’t know if it will work. And you ‘learn by doing’ – smart business leaders call this ‘failing forwards‘ – It looks like failure but it teaches you something you didn’t know and teaches you how ‘it’ will work, and you then fix it and find you now have something no competitor has. You created it.

One paragraph on why you will think this is wrong compared with the way you are used to working: NONE of us are comfortable with this approach as it ‘ups’ what looks like our failure rate. We all want to be in charge of the unit or department or organization that rarely gets anything ‘wrong’ – the safe pair of hands.

That old-fashioned view of what success looks like just means you will stay in safe territory where you know how to do what you are doing. So, you will not progress fast enough. As Picasso said, he was always trying new things that he didn’t know how to do, in order to learn how to do them. That’s the only way we move forward.

Fundamental to the little bets approach is that you:

1. Experiment: Learn by doing. Fail quickly to learn fast. Develop experiments and prototypes to gather insights, identify problems, and build up to creative ideas, like Beethoven did in order to discover new musical styles and forms.

2. Play: A playful, improvisational, and humorous atmosphere quiets our inhibitions when ideas are incubating or newly hatched, and prevents creative ideas from being snuffed out or prematurely judged.

3. Immerse: Take time to get out into the world to gather fresh ideas and insights, in order to understand deeper human motivations and desires, and absorb how things work from the ground up.

4. Define: Use insights gathered throughout the process to define specific problems and needs before solving them, just as the Google founders did when they realized that their library search algorithm could address a much larger problem.

5. Reorient: Be flexible in pursuit of larger goals and aspirations, making good use of small wins to make necessary pivots and chart the course to completion.

6. Iterate: Repeat, refine, and test frequently armed with better insights, information, and assumptions as time goes on.

Great book. Busts the ‘innovation is only noticeable if it’s big innovation’ thinking and shows how to create a continuously innovating culture that improves – a continuous improvement ‘engine’ if you will.

More on Peter Sims’ website>>>

Peter Sims talks about the book on his website (I’m a link. Click on me).

Relax! A Happy Business Story

By Henry Stewart, Cathy Busani and James Moran

You can download a free pdf copy of this book on this link:

http://www.happy.co.uk/about/free-publications/

60-Second Main Learning Points

In this fictional tale, a highly stressed small business owner discovers a new way to run his company.

Prologue

What would your organization be like if you completely trusted everybody? What would you have to do to get to that point?

Chapter 1: About Trust and Information

• Without information, people cannot take responsibility – with information, people cannot avoid taking responsibility.
• Agree principles that everyone can work within.
• Train the staff to do the jobs you’re trusting them to do.
• Trust them to do it.

Chapter 2: Celebrate Mistakes

• Celebrate your mistakes and learn from them.
• Imagine what it would be like to work somewhere where you never got blamed for your mistakes… where mistakes were seen as positive things, as outcomes of risk and innovation.
• You can’t learn from your mistakes if you don’t make any mistakes – go make some.

Weekly Mistake meetings – people talk about the mistakes that they made and how they could do things differently. Admit when you, the boss, make a mistake.

Chapter 3: What to Judge Your People On

• Look at how your people’s targets fit within the company principles and targets – get your people to see the big picture.
• Judge your people on the results they achieve, not the number of hours they work.
• Recognize when people have done good work, give your feedback personally and make it specific.

How are they going to know how much you appreciate them unless you tell them? Recognize when anyone does a good job and make sure they all know that you’re pleased with their work. By showing that you appreciate them you’ll increase their motivation and enthusiasm and consequently improve their morale.

Chapter 4: Listening is Different From Hearing

• It’s not enough to hear, you have to really listen to people.
• People say more than they actually “say”.
• If someone is acting out of character, ask them what is really wrong – and how you can help.
• Frame conversations to help people listen better.

Chapter 5: Believe the Best

Always believe the best of your staff. Believing the best should form the basis of every communication.

• Believe the best of people.
• Give them the benefit of the doubt.
• Listen without judgement or assumption.
• Ask how you can help them.

Chapter 6: Hire For Attitude Train for Skill

• Hire people your existing staff will be happy working with.
• Skills can be learnt, a good attitude is either there or not there.
• If somebody is not happy in their current job, see if they can do something else better.
• Set your staff up to succeed – exploit their strengths, not their weaknesses.

Chapter 8: Job Ownership and Full Involvement from Everyone

• Create a framework which gives people ownership over their jobs.
• Get everyone involved in the decisions that affect them.
• If people are involved in decision, they will be more committed to making those decisions work.

Chapter 9: Work/Life Balance

• Help people to balance their home lives with their working lives.
• If people are happier with the balance of their lives, they will be more motivated and produce better work.

Chapter 10: Putting it All Together

• People work best when they feel good about themselves.
• How would your organization be different if management focused on making people feel good?
• Ask your people for ideas – they may know how things work better than you!

Author of this book, Henry Stewart, in these videos, talks about some of the learning from the book:

http://www.thinkers50.com/video/65 ( 5.24)

http://www.thinkers50.com/video/64 (2.28)

The New Capitalist Manifesto: Building a Disruptively Better Business, by Umair Haque

What can I say, other than that I completely agree with the premise behind this book by Umair Haque – that the way too many large corporations are led delivers ‘thin value’: value spread thinly at the top and not encompassing all of the stakeholders – and that it’s time for new leadership and a new value proposition. Some companies are doing it already. Time for more. Here’s the blurb from publishers Harvard Business School:

“Welcome to the worst decade since the Great Depression. Trillions of dollars of financial assets destroyed; trillions in shareholder value vanished; worldwide GDP stalled.

“But this isn’t a financial crisis, or even an economic one, says Umair Haque. It’s a crisis of institutions-ideals inherited from the industrial age. These ideals include rampant exploitation of resources, top-down command of resource allocations, withholding of information from stakeholders to control them, and a single-minded pursuit of profit for its own sake.

“All this has produced “thin value”-short-term economic gains that accrue to some people far more than others, and that don’t make us happier or healthier. It has left resources depleted and has spawned conflict, organizational rigidity, economic stagnation, and nihilism.

In The New Capitalist Manifesto, Haque advocates a new set of ideals:

(1)Renewal: Use resources sustainably to maximize efficiencies,

(2) Democracy: Allocate resources democratically to foster organizational agility,

(3) Peace: Practice economic non-violence in business,

(4) Equity: Create industries that make the least well off better off, and

(5) Meaning: Generate payoffs that tangibly improve quality of life.

Yes, adopting these ideals requires bold and sustained changes. But some companies-Google, Walmart, Nike-are rising to the challenge. In this bold manifesto, Haque makes an irresistible business case for following their lead.”

Yep, I’ll buy into that.

Phil Dourado

Ah, the clever thinking of Dave Snowden and Cynthia Kurtz reaches a wider business audience. I like the contrast between the glitzy, American pseudo-news presentation, including CGI backdrops, with Dave’s no-nonsense, gruff, non-glitzy communication via skype in this clip. The ‘emergent’ quadrant of Dave’s cynefin helped inform The IHG Leaders Lounge – an emergent platform that shapes itself to the pattern of usage, rather than assuming a pre-built platform will meet the users’ needs.

Cynefin on Wikipedia

And here’s Dave himself explaining it on YouTube