Phil's blog

There’s a fascinating talk from Iain Couzin over at Edge, that helps us realize how inadequate are most of our thoughts about large scale change in people behaviour and whether you can achieve it through ‘leadership’. Couzins is an Assistant Professor at Princeton who studies self-organized pattern formation in a wide range of biological systems, including ants, fish schools, bird flocks, locust/cricket swarms and human crowds. His work is relevant to how companies are run. Here are some extracts:

NO TOP DOWN, NO BOTTOM UP

“A fundamental question in biology is how the functioning of collective systems works—whether you are dealing with the function of a tissue and how the cells within a tissue interact, or whether you’re dealing with ecologies or even ecosystems. We really need to build a new understanding and new tools that allow us to integrate across these scales. People refer to top-down and bottom-up; in some sense we have to take both approaches to try to understand these systems.”

YOU DON’T NEED A LEADER

“We have been extending these types of flocking models to understand information transfer within groups. What these models initially did, and what was very important to show in the ’80s and ’90s is that you don’t need a leader. You do not need a commander to tell individuals what to do. Previously when people looked at, say, ant colony raiding patterns—and this was in the ’40s and ’50s—they thought they had to be pre-concerted, there had to be a word of command, there had to be a commander. We then learned that that is not the case. We also now know that there are differences among individuals, that information differs, that individuals are moving around interacting relatively locally with their environment.”

BIG CHANGE COMES FROM RELATIVELY SMALL LOCAL INTERACTIONS

From ants to fish:

“And yet the individuals’ functioning is entirely within the context of these schools; you can see the integration of the behavior when they are attacked by predators, you can see why in the ’40s people thought there must be thought transference, must be telekinesis, because of these remarkable maneuvers. We now know that these maneuvers are created by the relatively local interactions among the individuals.”

I’ve been reading Bill George’s True North, the follow-up to his book Authentic Leadership. So, what is an ‘authentic leader?’ According to George, an authentic leader has found his or her inner voice and remains true to it. This is Warren Bennis stuff, for anyone who’s read Bennis. And it’s no surprise True North is part of the ‘Warren Bennis Signature Series’ imprint. George echoes the Dean of Leadership (as the FT calls Bennis), when he says that true authentic leaders have often (but not always) been through an extremely tough experience that reveals their true nature to themselves – the death of a loved one, bankruptcy, overcoming serious illness.

Bennis observed that authentic leaders are often forged in the crucible of overcoming adversity, whether as a child or later in their career. This echoes Hemingway’s “The world breaks all of us. But some are strong at the broken places.” And it plays to the heroic, romantic leadership model, even if unintentionally.

We tend to have an archetype in our head of leaders as infallible, certain of where they are going, moving from success to success. Even George’s phrase ‘True North’ reinforces that image. But, great leaders – authentic leaders – often don’t feel that way when they are in the middle of achieving great things.

Anne Mulcahy, the CEO credited with rescuing Xerox from its downward spiral, is a case in point. The emotional roller coaster of trying to keep people at Xerox motivated and pull the company back from the brink was so draining that, at one point, Mulcahy described to George, she was on the way home, drained, and had to pull over to the side of the road. She sat there, temporarily unable to move, and said to herself, “I don’t know where to go. I don’t want to go home. There’s just no place to go.”

The boxer Jack Dempsey once supposedly said champions get up when they can’t. Dempsey would have said, Mulcahey ‘got up when she couldn’t’. And she is now widely praised as the woman who saved Xerox (a claim she would herself deny, as she credits a lot of people at Xerox with saving the company). That’s the test of an authentic leader, says George.

And, of course it applies to people at all levels, not just the top of an organisation. You lead your own life by refusing to be knocked out of shape and by getting up when you are knocked down.

The over-riding impression of an ‘authentic leader’ from True North is of a leader in George’s own image: he was a brilliant, empathetic leader at Medtronic (inventor of the pacemaker), which he grew by encouraging leadership at all levels, driven by the higher purpose of saving lives. The 125 leaders he profiled for his research into authentic leaders tend to be like that, too, kind of tough but fair benevolent teacher/leader figures.

Which raises the question: is an apparently autocratic, empathy-lite leader such as the UK’s Alan Sugar or Rupert Murdoch an authentic leader? Of course they are, in the sense that they are honest and true to themselves. What you see is what you get. But, I’m not sure either of them have been through the deep inner journey of enlightenment and understanding self and others that Bill George says is necessary to be an authentic leader.

A large number of credible commentators call him the most successful CEO of modern times. He turned Edison’s company, General Electric, from a $13 billion to a $400+ billion turnover company. His gruff way of expressing himself and his early reputation as ‘Neutron Jack’ when he began leading GE by slashing jobs (‘Neutron’ as in the bomb that kills people but leaves buildings standing), plus GE’s performance development structure of ‘culling’ the bottom 10% of performers, has meant people think of Welch as the archetypal tough guy, take no prisoners, ruthless leader.

This reputation is, at best, 50% of the picture. It has blinded a lot of people to the fact that Welch pioneered enlightened leadership practices such as: ‘bossless leadership’, sharing new ideas across units, techniques for bringing people together to challenge bosses with solutions to problems that had to be implemented to a deadline (GE’s famous ‘Workout’ technique), the learning organization (he set up GE’s learning centre at Crotonville and taught classes there himself), putting ‘living the values’ behaviour above ‘making the numbers’, moving from ‘command and control’ to giving away control…and a whole lot else besides.

I’ve put together ten quick lessons from him. Here they are:

1. WHAT TO MEASURE?
“If I had to run a company on three measures, those measures would be customer satisfaction, employee satisfaction and cash flow.”

2. BUILD CONFIDENCE. THAT’S YOUR JOB DESCRIPTION
“If you’re not simple, you can’t be fast. And, if you’re not fast, you’re dead. So, everything we do (at GE) focuses on building self-confidence in people so they can be simple.”

3. SET YOUR PEOPLE FREE
“You’ve got to balance freedom with some control, but you’ve got to have more freedom than you’ve ever dreamed of.”

4. SHOUT WHEN YOU WIN
“People feel guilty about stopping to celebrate a little victory … but it lets people know they’ve won. It’s so critical to an institution. It brings it alive, gives it character.”

5. NUMBERS AREN’T ENOUGH
“Numbers aren’t the vision. Numbers are the product. I never talk about numbers.”

6. SPEND MORE TIME ON TALENT DEVELOPMENT
“In most companies, the talent review process is a farce. At GE, Jack Welch and his top two Human Resources people visited each division for a day. They reviewed the top 20 to 50 people by name. The talent review process…at GE…has the intensity and importance of the budget process at most companies.”
McKinsey’s Ed Michaels, in his book The War For Talent.

7. FAIR DOESN’T MEAN ‘THE SAME’
“Every person should be treated fairly in an organization, but every person should be treated differently in an organization.”

8. MAKE PEOPLE SHARE GOOD IDEAS
“What makes a company flourish is transferring ideas.” At quarterly meetings, Welch insisted that GE bring together the leaders of all of its businesses to share best practice ideas. “We take the best of diversity and use it,” said Welch.

9. MEET CUSTOMERS MORE OFTEN
Welch made a point of personally meeting GE’s major customers in the spring and fall of every year. He put much of his and GE’s customer insights down to these twice-a-year reality checks with customers.

10 DON’T DITHER. JUMP.
“I’ve learned in a hundred ways that I rarely regretted acting but often regretted NOT acting fast enough.”

The world is in our heads. And mostly the world in our heads is wrong. That’s partly because our references are wrong. See the Gall-Peters Projection to see a map of what the world really looks like, in terms of country and continent size. The world maps on our walls are nearly all based on the Mercator Projection, which began a navigation aid for sailors and unintentionally shrinks some countries and enlarges others.

But, how you see the world also comes down to power and where you are when you look at it. This was brought home to me over the past week: I regularly trawl through new members of The Leadership Hub to see what parts of the world people are joining from.

While noting a lot of new sign-ups from India, and that most of Action Aid’s workers in Ethiopia seem to have joined over the last couple of weeks, I also noticed these two answers to the sign-up question “Where in the world are you?”

1. The North-East*
2. DC

*North-East USA, it turned out to be, of course.

What was that question again? Oh yeah, “Where in the world are you?” The world is in our heads. Since the second answer – DC – came from someone working for the International Monetary Fund, ‘the world ends at our borders’ perspective is particularly telling.

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.