Leadership is for rejects

Posted on August 23, 2011 by Ken Carroll

Leadership evolved out of the things that management rejected. 50 years ago, there were no ‘leaders’ in business. There were ‘administrators’ in gray suits (as in Masters in Business Administration) who spent their time on paperwork and what we would now identify as management.

 But the term got old and and practices changed and so we got ‘managers’, then ‘executives’, then ‘C’ people, and now ‘leaders’.

Throughout its history, leadership (whatever form it took) was a grab-bag for the things that management was not, for the stuff that management rejected. Most managers ran a mile from human issues and stuck to tangibles.

So, leaders gradually emerged as the guys who looked to people and the things you couldn’t easily quantify or produce through compliance: vision, purpose, inspiration.

Leadership will continue to change, but the human dimension is not going away. On the contrary, there is a new awareness about the meaning of work because there are new ways to inform ourselves and take more control over our destinies.

Leaders must respond to this humanization. Those who don’t will fail. Those who ignore the human heart, human motivation, and human nature, will fail. Those who act like they can control how people think and feel will fail.

Ken Carroll

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Leadership as mining

Posted on August 22, 2011 by Ken Carroll

 As a manager, your job is to manage the material resources of your organization – inventory, cash, facilities. As a leader, your job is to manage its psychological resources, aka, the people.

But as Ken Robinson pointed out (somewhere), inner resources (like natural resources) don’t lie on the surface. And since they’re out of sight, we mostly ignore them.

You have to dig if you want to find the greatest possibilities within yourself and others. They are not – repeat, not – obvious.

But even simple discoveries can be transformative. They can change individuals and organizations. Seeing your own worst habits can do it. Knowing why you act as you do can do it. Sometimes self-awareness alone makes it obvious where you need to change or even transform.

Where do you need to grow? Are you doing the mining work to find out? Are your teams?

Ken Carroll

Posted in Leadership, New leadership skills, Self-awareness, Thew New Humanism | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

Why we need new leadership

Posted on August 1, 2011 by Ken Carroll

 I don’t know of a single institution that isn’t under the threat of massive trauma or even annihilation. From the Catholic church to the US economic order, from the welfare state to the corporation, it’s all rattling. The old centers of control are breaking down and power is devolving to the edges.

New leaders, new leadership

A millennia old institutional model is under siege from distributed model. The hierarchy is giving way to the network and the old  patriarchal leadership is going with it. We need new types of leaders and new types of leadership, becasue the people and personalities who ran the old institutions will not be suited to lead the new ones.

But are we ready? 

The question is whether we’re ready on the edges for the new responsibilities. What does it even mean for the individual when institutional hierarchies dissolve? For one thing, it means that we have to be better at self-starting, self-regulating, self-motivation. It means we need to become self-directed, and understand the nature of the personal autonomy.

In politics

This can come as a shock to the system as no institution in the past could tolerate anything like it.  And to an extent we are beginning to understand. I think we see this in many ways. At the level of politics, the rise of libertarianism in the US is an example. This article makes the point extremely well.

“What used to be the General Motors Building near Central Park South has an Apple store where the automobile showroom once was. When Kodak loses customers, it withers…… But when government fails, it expands even faster. This is, Gillespie and Welch say, because “politics is a lagging indicator of change,” a sector of top-down traditions increasingly out of step with today’s “bottom-up business and culture” of: “You want soy with that decaf mocha frappuccino?”

Ken Carroll

Posted in Leadership, Self-direction, Thew New Humanism | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments

Huffington’s leadership challenge

Posted on June 11, 2011 by Ken Carroll

This article on on the recent AOL/HuffPo merger describes the leadership challenge facing Huffington and her team. If the author is correct she’s not up to it.

First, it seems she has recklessly agreed to take on AOL tasks and responsibilities that are way beyond the team. $300 mill is an awful lot of money and the article gives the impression that she rushed into it, leaving her people to drown.

But the article doesn’t even touch on some other mistakes — how her unpaid, left-of-center writers are feeling used, or how many of her readers have been alienated by the corporate dealing, and so on. It appears as if she has dissed the entire ecosystem around what she built in order to concentrate on growing traffic through seo tricks and content farming, and all in order to make the big sale. Ouch.

It looks bad but she could save it. Any suggestions?

Update: I’m not at all sure how this is supposed to help either. It’s got to be one of the most embarrassing articles I’ve read on HuffPo.

Ken Carroll

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Gary Hamel, New Humanism, and management 2.0

Posted on May 14, 2011 by Ken Carroll

Gary Hamel is the leading thinker on management 2.0 and someone who gets the new humanism. In fact, this video introduction to his excellent The Future of Management, is probably the best 90 seconds you will see on the topic anywhere.

 

“You can’t compete and win unless you’re able to get the very best out of your people… You can’t build a company that’s fit for the future unless you build a company that’s fit for human beings. And let’s just admit it, management as it has been practiced for the last hundred years has not been very people friendly.”

Hamel spends a lot of time on diagnosing the problems and he has plenty of general observations on the future of management but he’s upfront about not having all the answers. He openly solicits your ideas here. Well worth a visit.

My own diagnosis of the problem is that management 1.0 operated through a profound ignorance of human nature. It meant that we forced people to comply with the needs of the system rather than building management practices around the realities of human nature.

Ken Carroll

Posted in Management 2.0, New leadership skills, Thew New Humanism | Tagged , | 1 Comment

The New Humanism

Posted on May 10, 2011 by Ken Carroll

Here’s David Brooks talking about a ‘new humanism’. He sees it as the result primarily of insights from neuroscience. I agree that neuroscience will change everything we know about management, leadership, and whole lot else in the coming years (though I think he underestimates what other sources of wisdom can tell us here).

Why neuroscience? Because what it reveals is human nature, things that are true for every human being. The structures of the brain, the circuitry of the emotions, the electro-chemical processes that regulate and control everything that goes on inside of us, can now be observed to a greater or lesser extent through MRI scans and other means.

Objective about the subjective

In the past it was difficult to say anything objective about our utterly subjective inner experience. But now, we can see the circuitry of things like the emotions, for example – where they originate, as well as the various chemical and physical processes that then follow.

The human mind is becoming accessible to study in a way that was never before possible and there is a level of objectivity that we can bring, even to things like the emotions. For 2 years I’ve read up everything I could find on neuroscience and the more I learn the deeper this belief becomes.

Management will respond

Modern management has been predicated on a very shallow understanding of human nature. Management 2.0 will have to be constructed around the realities of who we are, rather than as it was in the past, when we had to conform to the dicates of what managemers needed – compliance in an old industrial setting, basically. We’re just at the beginning of what neuroscience will reveal, but already we have a lot more to go on — perhaps even  enough to proclaim a new humanism.

This is just the tip of a great iceberg but it is central to my own arguments concerning self-direction. More on this later.

Ken Carroll

Posted in Leadership, Self-direction | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

Self-direction and the New Leadership Skills

Posted on May 2, 2011 by Ken Carroll

We need a new conception of leadership and I believe self-direction describes an alternative model. So, what can the capacity for self-direction do for you?

Well, a lot. However, its main objective is not material gain (though it often follows) but rather on a form of actualization, or a culture of actualization, even. It occurred to me that three quotes from Umair Haque help convey the ethos of self-direction and of the New Leadership as I see them:

  • ‘The manager is concerned with what you can do, and how (fast) you can do it. The builder, with who you can become – and why.”
  • “They’ll tell you: “Money makes the world go round”. Wrong. The human world is a search for meaning.”
  • “Mediocrity thinks: “My goal is high performance”. Try: “I’m going to amplify my potential, to revolutionize it.”

The New Leadership Skills are above all about people.  Leaders absolutely must become better students of human nature and human motivation than our business-schools would have us believe.

What say you, people?

Ken Carroll

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Self-direction goes beyond learning

Posted on April 27, 2011 by Ken Carroll


Here is the presentation I mentioned in the last post (with some revisions). The bigger argument goes beyond learning and it is this one: We’ve been concerned exclusively in the West with externally driven freedoms i.e., those that come from the environment. To a large extent we’ve solved these questions but done so while neglecting the issue of internally driven freedoms, i.e., the psychological ones.

The notion of self-directed learning has been around for some time, but I ask why not take it to its logical conclusion – the self-directed life? The new choice and freedoms that living in a networked world offers are not complete until we are psychologuically ready for them.

And what’s even more important is that anyone can learn the skills of this mysterious psychological freedom.

Much more on how that is done in later posts.

Ken Carroll

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Self-direction can be learned

Posted on April 26, 2011 by Ken Carroll

Typical Curt Bonk book

This morning I addressed Dr Curt Bonk‘s class at the School of Education at Indiana University. Last year Curt published an important book on how web technologies are changing education and learning – The World is Open - in which he included reference to my work at ChinesePod.

The topic for my presentation was Self-direction in an open world and I began with a definition of self-directed learning that is based on ownership of the learning:

  •  Autonomy, freedom, control on the part of the learner
  • You educate yourself in resource-rich environments
  • You act on personal decisions and direct experience, rather than instruction

I believe that this level of respect for the individual is essential. Self-direction is also more motivating since the learner is using his own strategies for his own ends.

But not everyone is self-directed and Curt suggested that perhaps 25% of learners may possess that quality. I think he may be  right but I also think that far more could learn the skills of self-direction. In fact, the need to become self-directed is essential for anyone in the new world of flattened organizations and in contexts beyond learning — and certainly in leadership.

I’d be interested in ideas on this 25% approximation or why this is the case. Why is it that 1 in 4 (ballpark, I realize) would intuitively figure out self-directed learning strategies? Or is that too high?  In the leadership and other contexts I think there are far less than 25% who are naturally self-directed. Some interesting discussion possibilities here.

Ken Carroll

Posted in ChinesePod, Leadership, Motivation, Self-direction | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

Leadership porn

Posted on February 23, 2011 by Ken Carroll

There’s a difference between looking at something and doing it. B-school professors pride themselves on scientific methods and empirical research. Their expertise is in objectively observing business, rather than subjectively doing business. The approach is therefore vicarious, detached, data-driven, and so on.   

So are their books. This one, what really works is actually based on a formula -“4+2”. The approach is in keeping with their philosophy: Years of data, a 5 year study, and their claim: They have nailed the secret of ‘sustained business success’. 

The book reveals something about the math and science mindset that dominates our schools and the business culture. It’s filled with facts but empty of judgment, personal experience, or humanity. It’s generic and interchangeable so it can scale, and it’s typical of a million other publications. It’s also endorsed by some really big names.

And it’s completely useless in any real sense, unless you think the 4 platitudes that form its argument are news: ’Make your strategy clear and focused.’ ‘Eexecute flawlessly.’ ‘Build a performance-based culture.’ “Make your organization fast and flat’.

I happened to choose this particular book as an example, but in fact it’s pretty typical. Business lit has become a deterministic, over-analytic, parody, the equivalent of listening to the sports results to enhance your game. They treat business as if it were physics, where all you have to do is learn the laws.

You can certainly observe business using scientific principles, but to try to do business in what was  (falsely) seen as a ‘scientific’ process required that you ignored the people involved. It’s simply the wrong paradigm and it wasnlt scientific  anyway. (There is no end of room for real science, of course, like neuroscience, for example.) The book, like so many others, has no relevance whatsoever in real life and I challenge anyone, using their own empirical standards to show that it has. It’s passionless, vicarious, voyeurism. It qualifies, to my mind, as leadership porn, or something even worse — it’s a report.

But it is also a very strong indicator of just how far we try to remove people from our understanding of business. This is where leadership must take up the slack and a topic I plan to explore in the next few posts.

Ken Carroll

Posted in Creative leadership, Leadership | Tagged , | 2 Comments