Leadership is an insanely important discipline. Here you’ll find the thought, tools and tricks of the trade of great leaders.
I’m speaking at an HR conference in Istanbul next month, a leading turkish newspaper wanted to do an interview by email about happiness at work. They sent me some great questions, which I answered as best I could. The best part about great questions is that they leave you and the questioner wiser.
Below are the questions and my answers, which contain some of our basic thoughts on happiness at work.
What is your dangerous idea?
The brilliant minds of The Edge community have been pondering that question and have come up with no less than 117 essays.
Here are a few of my favourites:
Carolyn Porco: The greatest story ever told.
At the heart of every scientific inquiry is a deep spiritual quest – to grasp, to know, to feel connected through an understanding of the secrets of the natural world, to have a sense of one’s part in the greater whole.
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And we don’t have one god, we have many of them. We find gods in the nucleus of every atom, in the structure of space/time, in the counter-intuitive mechanisms of electromagneticsm. What richness! What consummate beauty!
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These are reasons enough for jubilation … for riotous, unrestrained, exuberant merry-making.So what are we missing?
Ceremony.
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We have no loving ministers, guiding and teaching the flocks in the ways of the ‘gods’. We have no fervent missionaries, no loyal apostles. And we lack the all-inclusive ecumenical embrace, the extended invitation to the unwashed masses. Alienation does not warm the heart; communion does.But what if? What if we appropriated the craft, the artistry, the methods of formal religion to get the message across? Imagine ‘Einstein’s Witnesses’ going door to door or TV evangelists passionately espousing the beauty of evolution.
Could it work? Could we create institutions that filled the roles of religion but which were based on science rather than faith? That is one hell of a dangerous idea. Not to mention weird and wonderful.
Philip Zimbardo: The banality of evil is matched by the banality of heroism
This view implies that any of us could as easily become heroes as perpetrators of evil depending on how we are impacted by situational forces. We then want to discover how to limit, constrain, and prevent those situational and systemic forces that propel some of us toward social pathology.
It is equally important for our society to foster the heroic imagination in our citizens by conveying the message that anyone is a hero-in-waiting who will be counted upon to do the right thing when the time comes to make the heroic decision to act to help or to act to prevent harm.
This is a wonderful shift in thinking: Rather than thinking of people as potential nazis or executioners (common thinking has it, that under the right circumstances all of us could become either), think of people as potential heroes and foster that potential.
Simon Baron-Cohen: A political system based on empathy
What would it be like if our political chambers were based on the principles of empathizing? It is dangerous because it would mean a revolution in how we choose our politicians, how our political chambers govern, and how our politicians think and behave. We have never given such an alternative political process a chance. Might it be better and safer than what we currently have? Since empathy is about keeping in mind the thoughts and feelings of other people (not just your own), and being sensitive to another person’s thoughts and feelings (not just riding rough-shod over them), it is clearly incompatible with notions of “doing battle with the opposition” and “defeating the opposition” in order to win and hold on to power.
Yes! I think more and more these days on how to create a better way of politics. This is an important insight.
Also check out last year’s question: “What do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it?”
The Imagination Lab Foundation is an independent, non-profit research institute founded in 2000 and operating from Lausanne, Switzerland.
Its raison d’étre is to develop and spread actionable ideas about imaginative, reflective and responsible organizational practices. The Foundation’s underlying philosophy is to value imagination as a source of meaningful responses to emergent change and play as an effective way to draw on this human capacity.
Go visit them and be sure to check out their amazing collection of articles. Grrrreat stuff!
John Abrams, President of South Mountain Company, tells the story of how the company became employee-owned:
In 1987 I sold my business, South Mountain Company, to my employees (and myself)… Shared ownership and control is our method at South Mountain. “Every employee, an owner” is our intention. More than half of our thirty employees are full owners. Each time another comes in, and each time a new management invention encourages more voices to be heard, we move steadily toward the goals of democracy, fairness, and transparency.
Among the advantages: Commitment, effectiveness, productivity. Read the whole story here.
CIO Insight has a great interview with Berkeley political scientist Steven Weber on the open source movement and it’s current and future business impact. A few choice bits:
Economists are shocked at the notion that people engage in behavior in many parts of their lives for nonmonetary reasons… It’s an interesting reminder that human motivation is a really complex thing… Creativity is really important to people. And taking the opportunity to engage in these open-source communities allows people to stretch their creativity and learn while they’re doing it. It’s an important reminder to managers that there’s a lot of motivation out there that most organizations don’t tap into very well.
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Good ideas and innovative thoughts are randomly distributed throughout the human population. It’s critical to recognize that if you give people the infrastructure to create their own products, they’re likely to figure some out, because they know what they need better than you do. I think the open-source community, at least at the level of underlying operating systems, has done that, not necessarily because that was what they intended to do, but they created an ecology in which that’s possible.
The most commonly used argument against open source is, that if companies can’t patent what they invent, innovation will stop because they can’t effectively make money of it. That is of course b.s., and here’s why:
I can give you one example that friends of mine who work in the biotechnology industry would cite on the downside of holding lots of this stuff in proprietary IP rights.
They call it “the tragedy of the anti-commons.” Let’s say I’m a researcher working at a small biotech firm here in the Bay Area. And I think there’s something interesting I would like to do with a particular molecule and its interaction with a particular gene. Much of this stuff is now patented, and there are so many competing patent claims on so many different parts of the things I would need to work on, that the cost of actually figuring out what permissions I need are astronomical. So lots of small companies simply can’t work on it.
They call it the tragedy of the anti-commons in the sense that in order to work on this, they’ve got to get a permission to use this molecule and a license to play with this gene. That’s just too expensive, so they walk away from it.
The tragedy of the anti-commons… I’ll have to remember that one :o) “Intellectual Property” is a concept that makes zero sense. Trying to enforce IP means stifling innovation and holding back technological and scientific development. I say we give up the notion once and for all and see where that takes us.
In the case where a board can’t figure out to depose self-obsessed, autocratic and power-hungry managers, we’ll probably se in the future that these leaders will in principle be deposed by their own employees, who will leave for better workplaces with better leaders and leadership values, that create a better space for the employees’ personal goals and life visions to unfold.
This will leave the managers who use hierarchical leadership, control systems and autocratic leadership values without significant access to getting employees. Ie. a leadership with no followers, which is both pathetic and useless.
– Alfred Josefsen, CEO of Irma
Right on, Alfred – you tell’em :o)
There will be two kinds of darwinism operating against bad managers:
1) Employee selection: Employees will leave bad managers behind and gravitate towards better leaders.
2) Marketplace selection: Companies with autocratic old-school management are less efficient, and will loose market share to better-run organizations. In the end they’ll die out altogether.
If I had stock in a company, and wanted to make money out of those stocks, I’d ask the board of directors two questions:
1) What are you doing to make the people in the organization happy?
2) How are you training leaders to make themselves and others happy?
This Fast Company article on leadership according to Harvard’s Ronald Heifetz is ancient (from way back in 1999) but very true. A few choice quotes:
The real heroism of leadership involves having the courage to face reality — and helping the people around you to face reality.
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Mustering the courage to interrogate reality is a central function of a leader. And that requires the courage to face three realities at once. First, what values do we stand for — and are there gaps between those values and how we actually behave? Second, what are the skills and talents of our company — and are there gaps between those resources and what the market demands? Third, what opportunities does the future hold — and are there gaps between those opportunities and our ability to capitalize on them?Now, don’t get the wrong idea. Leaders don’t answer those questions themselves. That’s the old definition of leadership: The leader has the answers — the vision — and everything else is a sales job to persuade people to sign up for it.
Read the whole article here. I long to see more of that kind of leaderhip in companies, and fortunately it is becoming more and more common.
David Heinemeier Hansson is one of the hottest names in IT right now. He’s been developing something called Ruby on Rails, which is a tool for developing web applications. Now Denmark has become too small for David, and he’s left for Chicago, better to work with his compatriots at 37signals, one of the most admired software shops right now.
The evening before he left, he gave a presentation in Copenhagen to a small crowd of techies, bloggers, business people and others. I was there and I was blown away by this guy. Not only is he a good developer, he also has an amazing sense for how a business can also be designed. And he’s 26 years old. Interestingly, his software design principles are the same as his business design principles, making his philosophy consistent and credible. Here are the main points I took away from his presentation:
Solve the next problem
Whether you’re working on software or building a business, this means that you should tackle the issues that matter right now. Don’t solve the problems you think will appear in 6 months – they probably won’t, you see. Solve the next problem, and then the next. In six months time, you will have plenty of stuff to work on, but it won’t be what you thought six months ago.
Solve your own problems
When you work on something that you yourself need, you’re much more efficient. Rather than working on something that some remote client will use, attack issues that are important to you.
Do as little as possible – or slightly less
The complexity of any system does not grow proportianl to the size of the system – it grows exponentially. Making a system twice as large makes it waaay more that twise as complex. Therefore, make your system as simple as possible, or maybe even a little simpler.
And if I may be allowed to brag for a moment here: This is exactly how we work on the Happy At Work Project. Here are a few of our maxims, that I might add:
Try stuff
Rather than analyzing a given choice to death, make a quick decision and try it out. If it doesn’t work, try something else.
Relax
It’ll all work out. Don’t beat yourself up and don’t work too hard. Take plenty of breaks and do lots of different stuff to stimulate your mind.
The best of luck to David in Chicago – I’m sure he’ll do famously.
Each individual should work for himself. People will not sacrifice themselves for the company. They come to work at the company to enjoy themselves.
– Soichiro Honda, founder of (surprise) Honda
Via Metacool via Mike Wagner.
Democratic organizations need leaders too – the main difference is that in a democratic organization leadership is dynamic and distributed. In a traditional organization leadership is static and centralized.
A common misconception is that democracy entails a lack of strong leadership, but this is only true of dysfunctional democracies. Healthy democracies have many leaders, who step up whenever interest, passion, energy, motivation and organizational needs dictate.
You may see different people taking leadership in different areas, or you may see people taking leadership in the same area at different times. But note that leadership in a democratic organization is something you actively seek out – whereas in a traditional organization it “comes with the job”.
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