Phil's Leadership blog

Well, how spooky is that?

Couple of days ago I wrote about luck and leadership, below, having just finished researching it for a book.

And today over at the www.execubooks.com blog, they’ve asked us to blog about luck in business.

Actually, not spooky at all. As Echo wisely says to Locke in an episode of Lost :

“Mr. Locke, don’t confuse fate with coincidence.”

Here’s a quick coincidence story for you:

I was standing just outside the door of a motel room in Maine a couple of years ago, looking at the sea.

A woman came out from the next room and said, “Do you mind if I ask you a personal question? Does your wife have Huntington’s Disease?”

“Yes,” I said, surprised, as so few people know the illness. “How do you know?”

“Because my daughter, who is in our motel room, has it too. I recognized it,” she smiled. “My daughter is on a drug trial. It’s a thing called LAX-101. Your wife should ask about it. You never know,” she said.

“Well, that’s weird”, I said. “My wife’s on the LAX-101 trial, too”.

There are nearly 60 million people in the UK. Around 50 were on the LAX-101 trial.
There are, as of last month, 300 million people in the US. Around 50 were on the LAX-101 trial.

And two of those 1-in-36 million families find themselves next to each other in a motel on a fairly empty stetch of the coast of Maine.

Now, THAT’s what you call a coincidence.

Nothing to do with leadership, but it still astonishes me…

Trial didn’t work by the way. “Inconclusive results. More research needed” is the actual finding. My wife still takes the trial drug, just in case: You never know.

The Financial Times says Warren Bennis virtually invented leadership as an academic discipline. The author of 27 books on leadership and business, he has been dubbed The Dean of leadership.

I interviewed Professor Bennis and then chaired a session he gave at a conference. We struck up an email relationship afterwards, where I asked his advice to help develop my thinking on a number of leadership issues. He impressed me as a courteous, warm, wise man, generous with his time and insights; a great teacher.

Here are three ten-second insights of his on leadership that I’ve just re-found in my notes and that I like in particular. It’s a quick preview of the section on Prof. Bennis I am working on for The 60 Second Leader book:

1. Leaders evolve
“Leaders don’t emerge like Venus out of the sea. If you want to create leadership at every level, leaders at the top have to create the systems and culture that allow that to happen. You can’t put a person in a microwave and out pops the McLeader. It doesn’t happen like that. Leadership is something that evolves.”

2. First enlightenment, then the laundry
“As the Zen master says, ‘first Enlightenment, then the laundry’. Leadership is about both. It’s not just about vision and guidance from on high. It’s about delivering results.”

3. Be like Disraeli
“It was said of Queen Victoria’s great Prime Minister Gladstone, that when you had dinner with him you came away thinking he was the wittiest, most intelligent, most charming person you ever met. When you dined with the other great Prime Minister of Queen Victoria’s reign, Disraeli, it was said you came away thinking YOU were all those things. If you can do that while maintaining integrity and truthfulness, you release the greatness in people. That’s a great leader.”

“Charles Handy tells how he was trying to write one day and was suffering from writer’s block. A group of children came by and were playing outside his window.

For some reason, the sounds unleashed his creative juices and the words started flowing.

He went out to them, told them how great it was to hear them having fun outside his window and how pleased he was that it helped him work and asked if they could come back the next day. They did. Same thing happened. So, he asks them back again.

At the end of the third day, he has got loads of work done to the sound of these kids playing outside his window and runs out, delighted. ‘Come back tomorrow and I’ll give you a pound!’ he cries, triumphantly.

Next day: no kids. Handy finds his creative muse has disappeared with them.

He goes off in search and finds the kids playing in another street. ‘Why didn’t you come back?’ he asks.

‘For a pound, it wasn’t worth it,’ is the scathing answer he gets…”

I came across that story the other day and it reminded me how reward and recognition programmes can cheapen motivation and backfire unless they are carefully tailored to what actually makes your employees tick. I heard it originally from Frank Douglas, a brilliant HR VP at Shell whom I like a lot.

Leaders spend a lot of time and effort trying to motivate and animate people. Motivation and incentive programmes always seem completely uninspiring to me, a kind of papering over of the cracks, an admission that the substantive work in itself is not motivating enough.

I’ve been researching luck and leadership for the 60 Second Leader; specifically, whether you can make your own luck.

The first thing I discovered is that it’s an apocryphal story that, before he appointed a new general, Napoleon used to ask one critical question: “But, is he lucky?” Shame. I liked that story.

Then I was reminded of this experiment on missed opportunity: subjects were asked to watch a video clip of two teams passing a basketball between them, and told they had to count the number of passes. Halfway through the clip, a man dressed in a gorilla suit walks on in the background, beats his chest, then walks off again. Eighty per cent of the subjects failed to spot the gorilla.(1)

If you think success looks like all the things that used to make you successful, but the fast-changing markets out there constantly re-define what success actually looks like, then you will be unlucky. You will be looking for basketballs and missing gorillas.

Serendipity – bumping into something useful – is part of luck. But openness to the new thing – a prepared mind primed to spot and grab opportunity – is the other half. The luck factor is part-external and part-internal. The two halves need to connect or you walk right on by.

There is an obvious, but not consistent, correlation between hard work and luck, as the oil magnate John Paul Getty noted:

My formula for success is…
Rise early.
Work late.
Strike oil.
– J P Getty

OK, he meant it as a tongue-in-cheek comment on the high risk oil prospecting sector he worked in, but there is also an underlying truth to leadership in this quote: the harder you work and the more opportunities you open up, and the more you allow your people to try different things, the luckier you are likely to become.

The psychologist and former magician (!) Richard Wisemanhas done some of the most interesting work on luck and business lately. Wiseman’s work veers towards positive thinking and self-help. But, he insists that lucky thinking patterns create real-world business impact. He experimented with making an organization more lucky by instilling in managers and employees what he says are the positive thought patterns of ‘lucky’ people. The business claimed to improve its profits by 20%.

(1) Did You Spot The Gorilla? How to recognize hidden opportunities in your life, Richard WisemanI’ve been researching luck and leadership for the 60 Second Leader; specifically, whether you can make your own luck.

The first thing I discovered is that it’s an apocryphal story that, before he appointed a new general, Napoleon used to ask one critical question: “But, is he lucky?” Shame. I liked that story.

Then I was reminded of this experiment on missed opportunity: subjects were asked to watch a video clip of two teams passing a basketball between them, and told they had to count the number of passes. Halfway through the clip, a man dressed in a gorilla suit walks on in the background, beats his chest, then walks off again. Eighty per cent of the subjects failed to spot the gorilla.(1)

If you think success looks like all the things that used to make you successful, but the fast-changing markets out there constantly re-define what success actually looks like, then you will be unlucky. You will be looking for basketballs and missing gorillas.

Serendipity – bumping into something useful – is part of luck. But openness to the new thing – a prepared mind primed to spot and grab opportunity – is the other half. The luck factor is part-external and part-internal. The two halves need to connect or you walk right on by.

There is an obvious, but not consistent, correlation between hard work and luck, as the oil magnate John Paul Getty noted:

My formula for success is…
Rise early.
Work late.
Strike oil.
– J P Getty

OK, he meant it as a tongue-in-cheek comment on the high risk oil prospecting sector he worked in, but there is also an underlying truth to leadership in this quote: the harder you work and the more opportunities you open up, and the more you allow your people to try different things, the luckier you are likely to become.

The psychologist and former magician (!) Richard Wisemanhas done some of the most interesting work on luck and business lately. Wiseman’s work veers towards positive thinking and self-help. But, he insists that lucky thinking patterns create real-world business impact. He experimented with making an organization more lucky by instilling in managers and employees what he says are the positive thought patterns of ‘lucky’ people. The business claimed to improve its profits by 20%.

(1) Did You Spot The Gorilla? How to recognize hidden opportunities in your life, Richard Wiseman

Big family reunion at our house yesterday: I was up till midnight on Saturday making enough vegetarian lasagne to feed an army the next day. Well, a vegetarian army. The picture is of Eija, who was our leader for most of the afternoon. She’s taking a rest: tiring stuff this leading.

Once everyone had arrived and eaten, the image that stands out in my mind is of four-year-old Eija (pronounced ‘Aya’ she told me patiently), the youngest member of our family, sitting herself on the back of one of the sofas so that she was high enough for everyone to hear and see her (unintentionally, I think), and holding court. Fifteen other faces, mostly adult, were turned in her direction in rapt concentration as she led the conversation.

It reminded me how fearless kids can be. And that they often lead us without our acknowledging it. I know I learn constantly from my two sons, and leading and teaching are closely related. As are leading and learning (full of paradoxes this leadership stuff, isn’t it).

Anyway, it helps to break the old stereotypes of strutting male leaders – the leader as patriarch, in particular – to remind ourselves that anyone can lead, and that includes children. In fact, because of the power of ‘naive mind’ or whatever the innovation researchers call it, especially children.

I’ve currently put this (see post, below) in as the draft introduction to the 60 Second Leader – the book I’m supposed to be writing. Sorry, if John at Capstone is reading this, I meant the book I have almost finished (one month till deadline for manuscript submission…gulp).

It’s a reminder that, as with Eija (“It’s pronounced ‘Aya’ actually”), size doesn’t matter in leadership.

“A leader is the one who climbs the tallest tree, surveys the entire situation, and yells ‘wrong jungle’. “ – Stephen Covey

“Leadership is something that can be learned by anyone, taught to everyone, denied to no-one.” – Warren Bennis & Burt Nanus

All those Churchillian and strutting male CEO images we associate with leadership can mean we don’t listen when someone who doesn’t fit the ‘leader’ mould is saying something extremely powerful.

Here’s an example: a 10-year-old girl who became a leader in a particular situation – a true story that helps break those strong prejudices in our heads about what a leader is. I’m toying with using this as the introduction to the leadership book I’m writing at the moment.

The girl, Tilly, was on the beach in Phuket, Thailand, with her family in December 2004. She noticed the sea looked odd. It was foaming, like the head of a beer, all across the sea. ‘Bad sea day’, she and her mum joked together. ‘Then I suddenly had a vision in my head of the video we watched in a geography lesson of the sea in Hawaii before a tsunami. It was exactly the same,’ Tilly said later.

At first her mum didn’t get it when Tilly told her, as if in a scene from the film Jaws, that they had to get everyone out of the water. So certain was Tilly of her recollection and of what was about to happen, that she became hysterical. Instead of telling her off, her parents listened, agreed to get the rest of the family off the beach, then persuaded the lifeguards to start getting people out of the sea.

They warned as many people as possible and then turned and ran when it became obvious Tilly was right about what was coming. Listening to a 10-year-old girl with a powerful story to tell saved their lives and the lives of many others.

So, the one who climbs the tallest tree and sees the bigger picture, as Covey puts it in the quote above, doesn’t have to be the person who heads the organization. Sometimes people at the front line, maybe in a relatively junior position, have a clearer view of where the organization is going wrong and, in this case, of a disaster that is about to strike.

What allowed Tilly to become a leader in this situation was a combination of her learning, her confidence in her own judgement, her urgent sense that she could and should make a difference, her concern and sense of responsibility for other people, and the readiness of her family to listen to her, trust her and ultimately be led by her. Does your organization (and that includes you) create that same set of circumstances (culture) to allow people at all levels to step up and take the lead when they need to?

I was talking to Elizabeth Handy, wife of Charles Handy, on the phone recently (name dropper? Moi?) when she reminded me of a point in their book The New Alchemists, about people who achieve great things:

“If you are going to do something great, you need one thing first – someone who told you when you were a child, and believed it, that you were capable of great things.”

It’s true, of course. And it applies to adults, too. We are all capable of great things. As long as we follow the lead of assertive, bright, feisty 10-year-olds who do the right thing rather than just do what they’re told.

PS Tilly is real, by the way, not an internet myth. She was awarded a bravery medal by the UK’s Marine Society.