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Phil's Leadership blog

The Blogs of War

Mar 14th, 2007 | Leadership | 0 Comments »

“The implications of soldiers that express their thoughts every day can be explosive,”
– Extract from a war blog kept by a US soldier serving in Iraq.

I am interested in how leadership is changing in the military. Partly because old command and control leadership that permeates all organizations is based on the military model, whereas the military itself has, in many cases, moved on from that.

The US during the invasion of Afghanistan ceded control to junior officers in the field, whose favoured means of communicating horizontally with each other was texting on their mobile phones, using satellite links. The Army recognised that in such a fast-moving environment as a theatre of war, leading through the traditional vertical chain of command is impractical.

The US Army’s recruitment campaign a while back was based on the theme “I am an army of one” and featured individual front-line trooops who had to make fast decisions regularly that would in the past have been passed up a hierarchy for a ‘leader’ to make the decisions.

Nothing illustrates the tension more between the increasing discretion given to troops on the ground to make decisions and the traditional military control model than the war blogs kept by US troops exercising their First amendment right to freedom of expression while serving in Iraq.

Under the old military leadership model, soldiers did not think. How does leadership work in a thinking army? BBC Radio 4 ran a fascinating item today on the war blogs kept by US soldiers in Iraq, including references to some of the highly disturbing and unsanitised clips of war in action as individual soldiers used small handhelds for vblogging that ended up on YouTube. The Radio 4 programme will be available in a day or two on their ‘Listen Again’ facility on the BBC website here if you are interested.

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Weird idea of the week: Induce happiness

Mar 11th, 2007 | Leadership | 0 Comments »

Want a happy workplace? Fed up with your people scowling at customers? Try Zajonc’s weird idea for inducing happiness:

Saying the phonemes e and ah, which activate smiling muscles, puts people in a better mood than saying the German ü, which activates muscles associated with negative emotions (Zajonc, Murphy & Inglehart, 1989). Simply activating one of the smiling muscles by holding a pen in the teeth (rather than with the lips, which activates a frowning muscle) is enough to make cartoons seem more amusing (Strack, Martin & Stepper, 1988).

Better (and less open to a law suit) than putting happy pills in their coffee.

Source: I learnt that from Bob Sutton of Stanford University

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How leaders write great speeches

Mar 7th, 2007 | Leadership | 0 Comments »

Lincoln was once asked how long it had taken him to write the one-page Gettysburg Address, the seminal speech that united a nation.

He replied “All my life.”

Great speeches don’t come from speech writers, which most CEOs resort to. Nor are great speeches made with Powerpoint, which the rest of us mere mortals have to make do with in lieu of speechwriters. It’s deceptively simple: be yourself. People respond to authenticity.

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Participation literacy in Web 2.0. Why no-one comes to the party

Feb 25th, 2007 | Leadership | 0 Comments »

I’m building the 60 Second Leader online community with my IT colleague Brom and we are trying to make it as participatory and co-creational as possible (co-creative? I prefer ‘co-creational’ as it has echoes of ‘creationism’ and therefore sounds more godlike, and the point is to let everyone do the creating -there is that of god in each of us, as the Quakers say).

But, this brings us up against the problem of participation literacy – I think a lot of people don’t get involved with Wikis and even multi-user blogs because they (like me, with Wikis) don’t really know instantly what to do.

And I/they don’t have the time or confidence to try learning-by-doing within a participatory site (though some of the newer Wiki software looks more like word processing software, so is more familiar than the techno-aware formats most of them are in).

This isn’t a new problem. Organizations that have tried to build Knowledge Management or knowledge exchange platforms within their corporation to get people to participate have built far more parties-that-no-one-comes-to than thriving centres of exchange. Though, that is partly a problem of centrism and diktat rather than literacy.

Anyway, our proposed solution at the moment is to offer a range of tools for the 60 Second Leader online commmunity to interact and participate with, such as

1. a Q & A function, using something like www.yedda.com if poss.
2. find-a-buddy with the same interests function for individual peer assists and peer mentoring and coaching, privately or sharing the outcomes/learning (hopefully the latter, with the confidential stuff kept out)
3. a multi-user blog to raise leadership issues and share insights and solutions
4. a ‘re-write the book of leadership’ wiki so participants can re-write the 60 Second Leader book as soon as it is published (April in the UK, June in the US) because they know more than me about leadership (I don’t believe in the possibility of expertise, least of all that I have any…)
5. A ‘set up a small group to find a solution to a problem, then disperse the group when you are happy, but don’t forget th share the solutions’ tool (I know: we need to find a better name than that for group peer assistance. Hey, maybe ‘group peer assistance’ then…

…and a few more ‘tools’ of participation and interaction and contribution. Some of these will be taken up. Others will languish and we will remove them. That process will be a form of ‘co-creation’ of the environment, as participants choose by use or omission what tools will form the environment.

Anyway, that’s where we are so far. Anyone out there who can help us improve this approach…your thoughts will be immensely useful.

I’ve built traditional websites the traditional way before – design brief, design agency, specify the architecture, specify the functionality, ask for a user experience (that you never get), road test it with some ‘users’ before going live etc…and the result was cr*p in both cases. A normal business to business website that was just like any other, in other words.

So, this time we are using this trial and error emergent process to let the shape of the thing emerge rather than prescribe or proscribe it in advance. Fingers crossed.

Some interesting thoughts on navigation and the idea of ‘flow’ or being in the zone on the Participation literacy website if you scroll down on it to the headline here

Flow: the link between existence and navigation.

Two thoughts on what great leaders do

Feb 24th, 2007 | Leadership | 0 Comments »

“Tell me, I forget
Show me, I remember
Involve me, I understand”
– Confucius (attrib.)

“The great leader is he
of whom the people say
‘I did it myself'”
– Lao Tsu

I missed Chinese New Year a few days ago, so that’s my way of making up for it by sharing a couple of insights on leadership from a couple of Chinese masters. That second insight is one of the most profound on leadership you will ever find.

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Web communities have a lot to teach us

Feb 23rd, 2007 | Leadership | 0 Comments »

Guy Kawasaki moderated a panel of web community founders recently. They were fresh, informal, funny, and live in a world of peers and no rules. Community-based networks of common interest have the potential, it seems to me, to teach the corporate world some lessons in how to bring people together to pursue a common purpose, add value and generate income for participants.

As the dominant organisational form for big business is being effortlessly attacked by private venture funds, the scope for these boys (see link below: where are the girl founders by the way?) with their new community forms to teach corporates how to bring people together productively is massive:

Guy Kawasaki and a panel of web community founders

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A 60 Second Leader Tale: Covey on Turning Janitors into leader

Feb 22nd, 2007 | Leadership | 0 Comments »

Stephen Covey is talking at Leaders in London later this year, and so I dug out these notes I made last time I heard him speak. I like this story as it challenges what most people mean when they say the words ‘leader’ or ‘leadership’…

“A manager asked me how to get a team of janitors working in a way where they took responsibility instead of ducking it. I asked who managed the supplies, cleaning schedules, keeping within budget and so on.

He managed all of that. So, my advice was to cede it all step-by-step to the janitors. Let them set the schedules. Show them how to do the budgeting. The principle at work here is: ‘Lead people, manage things.’

He felt this was not possible with manual labour. But, much of what we have to do today is turning manual workers into knowledge workers.*

The janitors now do the planning and doing. The supervisor serves them. He has become a ‘servant leader’. Costs are down, incidentally…”

Source: My notes from a talk given by Stephen Covey. Before you can lead others you need to be able to take charge of and lead yourself. Frontline leadership, where there is no direct supervision of others in a hierarchy, often consists of this initiative-taking self-leadership, and leading peers by example.

*The phrase ‘knowledge worker’ is commonly taken to mean what white-collar workers have to evolve into. That’s wrong. Manual workers are becoming knowledge workers, too.

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How can you die before you die?

Feb 21st, 2007 | Leadership | 0 Comments »

Moving from a product to a customer-centred culture demands innovative, flexible thinking. So, where do you start? Edward de Bono tells the story of Ron Barbaro of Prudential Insurance, Canada, to illustrate how to do it.

Barbaro was at the hospital bedside of a terminally ill friend, whose illness was long and drawn out. Barbaro was frustrated that his industry had no product that was of relevance to his friend’s situation; that could ease his life before death, rather than pay up after, as existing life assurance did then.

Barbaro left the hospital thinking the ridiculous: “How can you die before you die?” If he had lacked the mental flexibility to come up with such an apparently absurd question, he would not have come up with the answer: Living Needs Benefit, a new product that pays out 75% of a life policy while the policy holder is still alive.

At a stroke, Barbaro had invented a new product that made life assurance much more attractive for single people, a category of customer (often affluent) who previously had little use for it. Now, almost every life assurance company around the world has a similar category of product.

De Bono defines this kind of thinking – beginning with a thought far removed from any existing product and then forcing the brain to work out a pathway from there to a workable product – as a ‘provocation’, rather like the grit in an oyster that encourages a pearl to form. Yes, I know this is old stuff, but it’s still not practised enough.

“The brain is astute at building new pathways to connect different areas, and this kind of exercise helps develop that ability,” he says. It worked for Barbaro. He became President of Prudential Canada.

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Capitalism 2.0? CoCo Companies: Co-ownership and Co-creation

Feb 19th, 2007 | Leadership | 0 Comments »

“What makes wage slaves?” asked Groucho Marx once. “Wages.”

The Employee Ownership Association in the UK today publishes a paper by Richard Reeves (whose Intelligence Agency site seems permanently closed for renovation, but his contact details are up there) on CoCo Companies – companies that practise co-ownership and co-creation.

If you were to create an ideal business or organizational form from a blank sheet today, to fit the expectations people have of their lives and work, and to bring people together in a joint enterprise, it would look far more like a CoCo company than it would a limited company.

“CoCo companies may offer an organisational model whose time has come”, says Richard.

Mutual or co-operative enterprises, with a new injection of co-creation, may finally fulfil the promise John Stuart Mill held for them a century and a half ago.

Richard’s biography of Mill comes out this year and he quotes the philosopher-economist as saying that co-ownership holds out the prospect of:

“…the healing of the standing feud between labour and capital; the transformation of human life, from a conflict of classes struggling for opposite interests, to a friendly rivalry in their pursuit of a common good to all; the elevation of the dignity of labour; a new sense of security and independence in the labouring classes; and the conversion of each human being’s daily occupation into a school of the social sympathies and practical intelligence.”

Gets my vote.

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Are you an Asshole Leader?

Feb 19th, 2007 | Leadership | 0 Comments »

Try the 24-question Asshole-Rating Self-Assessment (ARSE – at last the Yanks spell it correctly) that Guy Kawasaki and his friends at Electric Pulp have put together. It’s from the excellent Bob Sutton’s book The No Asshole Rule. Unfortunately, this rule, and this self-assessment, are highly relevant to a lot of leaders, as you will find out if you go through the 24 questions. Of course they don’t apply to you…But they will remind you of plenty of bad bosses (hopefully from your past rather than your present).

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