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.

  • Should Your Next CEO Be a Philosopher?

    Technology is still important to a company’s competitive edge, but it seems that most organizations today have the technology down. It’s still important, but it’s more and more becoming a given – which makes it harder to use it to differentiate yourself in the eyes of the customer. So if you can’t use technology to give you an edge, what can you use?

    …according to a Wharton professor and an Israeli venture capitalist, a company?s ability to understand its customers? philosophical outlook may be as vital to its success as R&D and other efforts.

    …although it?s a given that technological assets can determine the progress of an individual, a company or even a nation, the decision to embrace or to reject technology is itself deeply affected by abstract ideas that are embedded in an individual?s (or a nation?s) general life philosophy.

    You can read the entire article here. I agree whole-heartedly. Let’s bring back philosophy as a day-to-day activity, not as an academic discipline. Let’s make room for contemplation of life’s big issues in the work place. It’ll be fun, it’ll be good and it’ll make us better at whatever we do.

  • In the depths of the organization

    I’m reading some of the new books that I just got from Amazon, and one of them opens with this insight:

    It’s impossible to manage or even know what’s going on in the depths of the organization. I mean, each of us can fool ourselves into thinking we’re smart and running a tight ship. But really the best we can do is create a context and hope that things emerge in a positive way, and this is tough because you can’t really see the impact your decisions have on people. So you just kind of hope what you want to happen is happening and the sound confident when telling others.
    – Anonymous executive vice president quoted in The Hidden Power of Social Networks.

    This is probably a widely shared sentiment, yet some people still think that leadership is just a matter of controlling an organization, setting goals and following up, knowing your metrics and following your strategy. I’m fairly certain that the VP quoted above knows all of these methods and uses them and he still feels in the dark about what really goes on “in the depths of the organization (a wonderful expression that – made me think of the dangerous depths of some wild jungle). The issue is not whether we can or cannot control the organization (though I reamin convinced that it is impossible). The issue is that we shouldn’t even try to. Any organization that is centrally controlled is bound to be highly ineffecient and (what’s worse) absolutely no fun to work in.

    So leadership is not about control. Herb Kelleher, former CEO of Southwest Airlines, was asked how he controls his organization. His answer is classic:

    Control: Never had it, don’t want it.

  • IT policies at Semco

    I’ve gotta hit you with one more quote from CIO Insight’s brilliant interview with Ricardo Semler. This one’s about IT policies:

    One of the things I’ve noticed with this security issue is that IT people want to make sure that their systems are intact, private, confidential “blah, blah, blah” but they think nothing whatsoever of invading the e-mail privacy of their own employees. That’s very interesting to me, because it’s not only a double standard, but a violation of constitutional rights. Companies have taken the blind assumption that because the system is theirs, then anything that people do on it has to be available to them. I think it’s a very hypocritical mode, and it deals with fundamental freedom issues that I don’t think people have completely thought through.

    …And what’s most interesting is that we searched far and wide for anybody who could tell us what kind of software or system could be installed on our [server] that would make it impossible for our own IT people to spy on people’s e-mail. We did not find one. We had to customize one.

    Imagine that: A company that actually goes out of it’s way to ENSURE that employees’ emails stay private. That is an immensely powerful statement of faith in people.

  • Common sense at Semco

    CIO insight has a truly excellent interview with Ricardo Semler, the CEO of Semco. Here’s my favourite bit from the interview:

    When you want somebody hired, let’s say it’s for a leadership position of some kind, you go to the system and you advertise that you think someone is needed. Then on a given day – say, Wednesday at 4 o’clock, meeting room 11 – you say we’re going to discuss this, whoever’s interested. Because of the fundamental tenet that we don’t want anyone involved in anything that they really don’t want to do, all of our meetings are on a voluntary basis, meaning that the meetings are known, and then whoever is interested can and will show up, and should also leave the moment they become uninterested. It is a bit unnerving to watch these things, because people come in, plunk their things down, and then 15 minutes later somebody else says “Bye bye, see you.” But the fact is that whoever is left there has a stake in the decision being made, and the decision is final in the sense that it’s going to be implemented after the meeting.

    All meetings are voluntary. How cool is that? Read the interview, it’s great! Also, for those of us who know Open Space Technology: That’s the law of two feet right there!

  • The happy leader

    What is it that the best leaders do that gives them their results? How do great leaders motivate and inspire? Why do they do it?

    I’m convinced, that it’s very simple: The best leader is the happy leader. One who sets the happiness of himself and his people above anything else. There are many examples of such leaders, and we’ve written an article about The Happy Leader that describes a few cases both in Denmark and internationally. The article also contains specific tips on how to get the same results for yourself.

    The article is only available in danish, but if there’s demand for it, I’ll translate it into english.

  • Moral imagination

    I found a very interesting article on Using Moral Imagination for irreplicable Strategic Advantage.

    Based on “The Moral Advantage Model” the author argues that there is a strategic, competitive advantage beyond the traditional two of low cost and differentiation. From the article:

    With agility, companies with moral imagination evolve their strategies and operational practices to changing worlds while simultaneously remaining steadfastly faithful to the values and purpose that define them.
    …
    The key … lies in using Moral Imagination to understand two dynamics. The first concerns the degree to which work satisfies the deepest human needs of employees and concerns the company’s Values and Ethics. The second concerns the degree to which a company’s product and service satisfies the deepest human needs of its customers and concerns the company’s Strategy.

    I like the article both for it’s logic which is clear and compelling but also for the way it talks about moral choices grounded in clear strategic concepts and thinking. Read it!

  • Ricardo Semler

    The ever blogging Chris Corrigan points to an excerpt of Ricardo Semler’s book The Seven-Day Weekend. A small teaser:

    I believe the old way of doing business is dying, and the sooner it’s dead and buried the better off we all will be. Incendiary words, yet Semco’s alliance with Cushman & Wakefield, as well as other joint ventures that I will describe shortly, suggests that the transition from the old to the new can be hugely profitable and not nearly as socially disruptive as might be feared at first. On the contrary, the path Semco has been blazing for more than twenty years has led to an unprecedented record of innovation, customer satisfaction, growth, and an end to repressive command-and-control management practices that cause much labor unrest and personal misery, from the top to the bottom of many organizations.

    That does it, Semler is going on my list of people I’ve gotta have a conversation with.

  • Happy at work – world-wide

    At the Interactive Organizations Conference 2004, I offered the idea of creating an international IO, based on the happy at work project.

    Instead of getting all theoretical, we could simply organize around the purpose of making people happy at work, and create an IO for just that. Here’s the idea: We already have some proven methods and technologies in the work we do in Denmark. We have lectures, a workshop, a book, a game, a video, a conference and much more. All of this we are willing to give away to anyone who’s interested in using it, and we’ll make this the basis of the world-wide happy at work project.

    If you’re interested in participating in this drop me an email. The exact details are still a little hazy – but mostly, I think it could be a LOT of fun :o)

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  • Interactive Organizations Conference

    The interactive organization is one that is less dominated by traditional control structures and where people are more free to do their work. Interactive organizations (IO’s) are therefore more efficient, adapt faster to changes in their environment – and they’re a lot more fun to be in. They can also be chaotic and frustrating :o)

    I’ve been a leader and participant (in interactive orgs everyone is both) in three different organizations which were interactive, and I can assure you, that I will never again work in a “traditional” workplace. I could simply never function again under the old, inflexible ways defined by the org chart.

    So when I heard that the first conference on IO’s was being organized in Krakow I knew that I had to be a part of it. The term Interactive Organization was defined in Harrison Owen’s book The power of spirit, how organizations transfrom and describes what a workplace organized around Open Space Technology might be like.
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  • There ain’t no such thing as change management

    I’m currently reading “The spirit of leadership” by Harrison Owen and it has something to say on the difference between management and leadership:
    [Managers] control the system, whatever that system might be. And the operative word is control. A good manager makes the plan, manages to the plan, and meets the plan. The details are taken care of, the abberancies are controlled, and the problems are solved. … But when the balance swings to nostability and change occurs in radical, discontinuous jumps, the skills of management don’t work quite as well as they used to.

    Which would make “change management” an oxymoron – there ain’t no such thing. A better term would be “change leadership”.