Phil's Leadership blog

Arrrhhh, it’s leadership, Jim lad, but not as we know it…

I’ve been fascinated for a long time by what makes things viral. I mean way before the Net made it possible: urban myths were replicating at speed from continent to continent well before the Web connected us all up.

There’s an academic at UC Berkeley who specializes in urban myths and how they spread. I’ve got a couple of his books, but they are more yawn-inducing than they should be.

So, why are all things viral relevant to leadership? Because they are a way of leading people’s behaviour that, in their spontaneity, are nearly impossible to predict or anticipate.

A friend of mine, Dave Favis-Mortlock, who is an expert on self-organizing systems, could probably tell us more about how a piece of communication reaches a tipping point and goes viral. But, Dave’s so clever I have trouble keeping up with him.

Latest mind-boggling example of a viral communication leading millions of people to change their behaviour is Talk Like A Pirate day. It’s this Tuesday and 19 million people (what?) are expected to take part. Even if you discount that estimate for hype it’s still a massive number.

It started when a couple of friends began, as a joke, cussing each other in pirate-speak while playing racquetball.

Here’s a news item about it:

“It started out as a joke.
They were hoping for 15 minutes of fame and then … Arrr!
They were creating a Web site, writing books and making countless radio and television interviews.
‘I think we’ve stretched it into 17 minutes,’ said Cap’n Slappy, aka Mark Summers.
Try five years.
The fifth International Talk Like a Pirate Day will be celebrated Tuesday by an estimated 19 million people on seven continents…”

More about it here, if you must:
http://snipurl.com/TalkLikeAPirate

We were asked this past week on the www.execubooks.com blogsite to blog on outsourcing. Here are a couple of samples from that blog (below) from me, in case you want to wander over there to browse the other contributors, too (link is on the right). Next week we are blogging over there on customer loyalty. Should be good. It’s one of the few subjects I know a little bit about 😉

It struck me this week that you can now outsource anything

First, outsource your prayers

“Short On Priests, US Catholics Outsource Prayer to Indian Clergy”

– Headline in the New York Times spotted by Tom Peters. Apparently, American clergy charge $5 per prayer to pray for supplicants who have asked for divine help, whereas Indian clergy charge just 90 cents.

Then, outsource your kids

Offshoring the family is the latest fad for UK-based parents. Families based in London are sending their kids to the International School in Bangalore, India – It offers grounds, facilities and education standards that match or eclipse the best private schools. Yet, it costs £8,000 (GB Pounds – about $14,500 US) per year to board, including flights and tuition, versus £25,000 per year for a similar-level private school in the UK. Gets a bit tiring if you go home for lunch.

Source: BBC Radio 4 You & Yours. You can listen to it again here: http://snipurl.com/outsourcethekids

Finally, outsource your clothes

“Don’t own anything if you can help it. If you can, rent your shoes.”

– Forrest Gump, from Winston Groom’s book Gumpisms, the Wit and Wisdom of Forrest Gump

Export jobs or import people? Clustering and the Ideopolis

Domestic outsourcing is part of the basic ‘make or buy’ equation that faces every business – Do I ‘make’ in-house a particular function or do I stop doing it myself and buy it in from a supplier instead. As such, it’s old news. I can’t get that worked up about it myself to be honest.

Where it suddenly becomes interesting, though, is when the outsourced function goes…abroad. Then the whole debate turns into how western employees are being undercut by highly educated (there is a call center in India staffed entirely by graduates, for example) but low-cost foreign workers.

Despite arguments to the contrary, you can’t legislate against jobs going abroad. The whole offshoring debate, it seems to me, looks down the wrong end of the telescope.

As The Economist magazine put it recently, the choice, in the ageing societies of the West (Europe in particular) is to export jobs or import people. The antidote to the fear of losing American jobs (and European jobs) to offshoring is to create ‘hotspots’ or clusters that attract capital, skilled people, ideas and other wealth generators to cluster around your particular area.

What am I talking about? Silicon Valley is the perfect example. 73% of people working in Silicon Valley weren’t born in the US. They moved there. They are a foreign legion. They are among the best in the world at what they do and they came to California to do it because Silicon Valley is where the best IT entrepreneurs are clustered.

We need to reframe the debate away from the narrow ‘all our jobs are going abroad’ kneejerk reaction to focus on how to take advantage of geographical clustering (Michael Porter has done a lot of work on this recently). Kjell Nordstrom, the economist and author of Funky Business, says “There are thousands of valleys around the world – the financial valley of Wall Street or London, the fashion valley of Emliano Romagna in Italy.”

A guy called Professor Tom Cannon has been helping cities from Boston to Liverpool develop into a new kind of city-state (economically and job-creationally speaking) termed an Ideopolis. This involves developing your own power of attraction as a region by stimulating the growth of ‘valley’-type clusters of activity in your area, centring on high value knowledge, ideas and creativity-based jobs.

Not much consolation to a call centre worker in Nebraska who has just lost her job to someone in New Delhi, though, I’ll grant you.

The emergence of ‘the internet of things’ – the increasing merging of the internet and the real world as more and more devices act as bridges between the two – was brought home to be recently by the pigeon that blogs. This extract is from ‘The New World of Blogjects’ in Roland Piquepaille’s Technology Trends blog ( http://www.primidi.com/2006/03/14.html#a1467 ). Piquepaille is quoting from Julian Bleeker’s ‘Why Things Matter’ – a ‘Manifesto for Networked Objects’.

The Pigeon that Blogs

“The Pigeon that Blogs is a project by Beatriz da Costa. It’s a pigeon, or more precisely, a flock of pigeons that are equipped with some telematics to communicate on the Internet wirelessly, a GPS device for tracing where it’s been flying, and an environmental sensor that records the levels of toxins and pollutants in the air through which they fly. These are the bits of data that the flocks ‘blog’.

They disseminate their flight paths, probably viewable on a Google Map, together with information about the current toxic state of the local atmosphere. The Pigeon that Blogs is a mash-up of GPS, GSM communications technology and pollution sensors that represents a full-order species evolution…

About the utility of such a mash-up, (Julian) Bleecker uses this analogy: ‘Pigeons that tell us about the quality of the air we breathe are the Web 2.0 (or World 2.0) progeny of the Canary in the Coal Mine’.”

Why do leaders need to know this?

Because you need to know your organizations and people are increasingly operating in World 2.0 rather than just Web 2.0. The real world and the internet are merging.

Bleecker is a researcher at the University of Southern California, and published his paper earlier this year. ‘Blogjects’ are, like the pigeon, objects that blog. People have been using the phrase “Web 2.0” over the past year or so to describe the post-dotcom interactive internet where the user ‘mashes up’ internet content and applications to suit their needs.

Bleeker and others point out that the phrase “Web 2.0” is too modest and implies the Web is still safely behind the screen of your laptop. No, it’s not. It’s merging with the real world to create what Bleeker calls “World 2.0”.

A friend of mine who works at Virgin Atlantic said to me a long while ago “Richard Branson’s mum is the reason he is like he is, you know; why he expects people to take the initiative to do the right thing, to be creative and responsible but to have fun and take chances, too.”

I didn’t understand what she meant till I read these two anecdotes from Branson, below:

Find your own way home

“When I was four years old, Mum stopped the car a few miles from our house and told me to find my own way home across the fields. She made it a game, one I was happy to play. It was an early challenge.

As I grew older, these lessons grew harder. Early one winter morning, Mum shook me awake and told me to get dressed. It was dark and cold, but I crawled out of bed. I was given a packed lunch and an apple. ‘I’m sure you’ll find some water along the way,’ Mum said, as she waved me off on a fifty-mile bike ride to the south coast.

It was still dark when I set off on my own. I spent the night with a relative and returned home the next day. When I walked into the kitchen at home, I felt very proud. I was sure I would be greeted with cheers. Instead, Mum said, ‘Well done, Ricky. Was that fun? Now run along: the vicar wants you to chop some logs for him.’

To some people this might sound harsh. But the members of my family love and care for each other very much. We are a close-knit unit. My parents wanted us to be strong and to rely on ourselves.”

How to start an airline

You can see how that ‘Find your own way home, Ricky and have fun doing it’ spirit fostered by Branson’s mum helped to shape Branson as he grew older, in this anecdote, from later in his life:

“Our plan was to travel on to Puerto Rico – but when we got to the airport, the flight was cancelled. People were roaming about, looking lost. No one was doing anything. So I did – someone had to.

I chartered a plane for about $2,000. I divided that by the number of people. It came to $39 a head. I borrowed a blackboard and wrote on it:

VIRGIN AIRWAYS.
$39 SINGLE FLIGHT
TO PUERTO RICO

….I had never chartered a plane before.”

I love that “I had never chartered a plane before”.

I spent part of our family summer holiday reading Richard Branson’s autobiography Losing My Virginity (thanks for the loan of the book, Brom), which is where these two anecdotes come from.

The stories give you an insight into the Virgin employee culture of personal leadership, taking responsibility, innovation and customer-centredness that clearly comes direct from Branson (and from his Mum).

Having finished Sandy’s book on Learning To Live With Huntington’s Disease (the manuscript is now with the publisher: Hooray!!!) I am off now to the beach till 5 September. So, no blogging from me till then. Any mail will be re-directed to second beach hut on the left, Cagnes-sur-Mer, Cote d’Azur, and promptly turned into a paper boat that floats off, unread, into the Med. Bye for now.

As I’m developing the 60 Second Leader(TM) book and online learning system at the moment, I had to include in this blog Dee Hock’s 60 Second PhD in Leadership (I first heard this from Tom Peters, who uses it sometimes in his presentations):

First, says Hock (who founded Visa), think back to the best boss you ever had and the worst boss you ever had. Then…

1. Make a list of all things done to you that you abhorred.
2. DON’T DO THEM TO OTHERS. EVER.
3. Make another list of things done to you that you loved.
4. DO THEM TO OTHERS. ALWAYS.

– Dee Hock, Founder of Visa

And you thought this leadership stuff was complicated…

I’ve been working with the UK’s National Health Service recently and have noticed the welcome emergence of Evidence-Based Medicine as a better way of reaching decisions than doctors relying on habit, their own relatively narrow experience, hierarchy (“I’m the consultant, therefore my decisions must not be questioned”), and the mystique of their own expertise.

Bob Sutton and Jeffrey Pfeffer have a new book out, partly inspired by Evidence-Based Medicine. In their book, Hard Facts, Dangerous Half Truths and Total Nonsense , they draw on the growth of Evidence-Based Medicine as a discipline and call for a parallel growth in evidence-based business decision-making instead of instinct.

BUT, I’m not so sure. Intuition and instinct are not always based on “Dangerous Half Truths and Total Nonsense” as the title of their book says. They are actually often sub-conscious, fast ways of processing, accessing and aggregating evidence and then reaching a swift conclusion.

Leaders need more of both – a clear-eyed focus on the relevant facts and evidence (rather than evidence that promotes a particular agenda or perspective), PLUS more reliance on individual and collective instinct.

I’ve got a couple of great examples of the power of instinct somewhere. I’ll dig them out and post them. One’s to do with finding fish, the other with how George Soros’ gets a back spasm when he’s about to make a ‘wrong’ investment decision.