The Chief Happiness Officer Blog

Category: Leadership

Leadership is an insanely important discipline. Here you’ll find the thought, tools and tricks of the trade of great leaders.

  • Open source and business

    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.
    …
    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.

    Via OpenBusiness.

    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.

  • Leadership darwinism

    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?

  • The future of leadership

    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.
    …
    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.

  • Business – New school

    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.

  • Quote

    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 leadership

    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”.

  • Quote

    If an organization is narrow in the images that it directs toward its own actions, then when it examines what it has said, it will see only bland displays. This means in turn that the organization won’t be able to make much interesting sense of what’s going on or of its place in it. That’s not a trivial outcome, because the kind of sense that an organization makes of its thoughts and of itself has an effect on its ability to deal with change. An organization that continually sees itself in novel images, images that are permeated with diverse skills and sensitivities, thereby is equipped to deal with altered surroundings when they appear.
    – Karl Weick

  • Quote

    The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. But the opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth.

    – Niels Bohr

  • Ethical balance sheet

    Bank manager Hans Erik Brønserud explains the reasoning behind the ethical balance sheet his bank does in addition to the normal balance sheet:

    First and foremost this has given us a tool, which gives us a unique opportunity to sense how our stakeholders view us and what we do. Every year we get specific feedback on whether we are in agreement with our customers, employees and community, and the tables and graphs instantly show us if we’re slacking in any area.

    But all of this knowledge makes no difference if we in management don’t take in the signals and correct the things that aren’t working optimally, and this we’ve chosen to do since the very first ethical balance sheet.

    BTW, I’m thrilled by their mission statement:

    1) We must treat our customers in a way that keeps them coming back and makes them mention on favourably to people who aren’t yet customers with us.

    2) We must treat our employees in a way that makes them look forward to coming to work every day and be proud to mention where they work.

    3) We must make enough money to keep fulfilling the first 2

    Read the entire article (in danish)

  • Quote

    In every substantive sense, employees of a company carry more risks than do the shareholders. Also, their contributions of knowledge, skills and entrepreneurship are typically more important than the contributions of capital by shareholders, a pure commodity that is perhaps in excess supply.

    – Sumantra Ghoshal