tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-59827981179933951662024-02-19T11:33:21.471-05:00JDs ViewsDavid Slocum on leadership, media, culture, and the creative industries.David Slocumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11148276375463185535noreply@blogger.comBlogger94125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5982798117993395166.post-32606359118399825012015-08-28T07:37:00.000-04:002015-08-28T07:37:27.860-04:00Recommended New Fall 2015 Books for Better Creative Leadership<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Please visit my website at http://jdavidslocum.com for my latest posts, including my Fall 2015 book recommendations for Creative Leaders. Thanks.</div>
David Slocumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11148276375463185535noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5982798117993395166.post-64057906772440448772015-06-20T14:26:00.002-04:002015-06-20T14:26:51.840-04:00Awards for Creativity in Advertising We Should (Also) Be Giving<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
As Cannes Lions 2015 begins, my thoughts on some other needed awards for creativity in advertising. To read, please visit my new website at <a href="http://jdavidslocum.com/">http://jdavidslocum.com</a> . </div>
David Slocumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11148276375463185535noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5982798117993395166.post-40807245602422851082015-06-02T03:01:00.000-04:002015-06-02T03:01:13.636-04:00Summer Reading for Creative Leaders 2015<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
For my recommendations of new books for Creative Leaders for Summer 2015, visit my website at <a href="http://jdavidslocum.com/">http://jdavidslocum.com</a> </div>
David Slocumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11148276375463185535noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5982798117993395166.post-71744633139872497232015-05-12T02:37:00.000-04:002015-05-12T02:37:38.063-04:00The Leadership Legacy of Hollywood Boss Charlie Bluhdorn<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Thanks for visiting. <br />
<br />
I'm no longer posting new content at this site. To view all my blogposts, visit my website at <a href="http://jdavidslocum.com/">http://jdavidslocum.com</a><br />
<br />
My latest post, 'The Leadership Legacy of Hollywood Boss Charlie Bluhdorn,' can also be viewed on the Berlin School of Creative Leadership page at <a href="http://onforb.es/1crrgCg">forbes.com </a></div>
David Slocumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11148276375463185535noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5982798117993395166.post-47091255081856331032015-03-14T04:21:00.002-04:002015-03-14T04:21:31.308-04:00The 7 Tyrannies that Creative Leaders Must Overcome<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
For my latest post, on the 7 tyrannies that creative leaders must overcome, please visit my new website at <a href="http://jdavidslocum.com/">http://jdavidslocum.com</a>. Thank you!</div>
David Slocumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11148276375463185535noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5982798117993395166.post-65750113290939889872015-02-19T03:28:00.002-05:002015-02-19T03:31:42.103-05:00The 'Whiplash' Effect: Rethinking the Lessons of Musical Leadership<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
For my latest post, on the leadership lessons of the Academy Award-nominated film, <i>Whiplash</i>, please visit my new site at <a href="http://jdavidslocum.com/">http://jdavidslocum.com</a> . Thanks and enjoy!<br />
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David Slocumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11148276375463185535noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5982798117993395166.post-9249561046277113172015-01-09T05:18:00.003-05:002015-01-09T05:19:09.994-05:00New Books for Creative Leaders to Read to Start 2015<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Please find my latest list of recommended creative leadership readings for early 2015 on my new website at <a href="http://bit.ly/1BO4hYj">http://jdavidslocum.com</a>. Thanks for checking it out.</div>
David Slocumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11148276375463185535noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5982798117993395166.post-57227355450034116592014-12-11T17:46:00.001-05:002014-12-11T17:46:54.944-05:00Top Ten Creative Leadership Books of 2014<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
I've selected my top ten books on Creative Leadership from the past year. The list, along with other notable titles, is now posted on my new website at <a href="http://jdavidslocum.com/top-ten-creative-leadership-books-of-2014/">http://jdavidslocum.com</a>. Though quite a bit more is also already on the site, overall it's still very much in beta. I hope you like the new look and promise of better content to come in the new year. Thanks for visiting and letting me know what you think. DS </div>
David Slocumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11148276375463185535noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5982798117993395166.post-66986817778319470622014-11-25T17:54:00.000-05:002014-11-25T17:54:05.874-05:00Review of Don Tapscott, 'The Digital Economy, Anniversary Edition'<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Don
Tapscott, <i><a href="https://www.blogger.com/%3Ciframe%20style=%22width:120px;height:240px;%22%20marginwidth=%220%22%20marginheight=%220%22%20scrolling=%22no%22%20frameborder=%220%22%20src=%22//ws-na.amazon-adsystem.com/widgets/q?ServiceVersion=20070822&OneJS=1&Operation=GetAdHtml&MarketPlace=US&source=ac&ref=qf_sp_asin_til&ad_type=product_link&tracking_id=jdasl-20&marketplace=amazon&region=US&placement=0071835555&asins=0071835555&linkId=OSJZFFKSXAL5EPRT&show_border=true&link_opens_in_new_window=true%22%3E%20%3C/iframe%3E" target="_blank">The Digital Economy, Anniversary Edition: Rethinking Promise andPeril in the Age of Networked Intelligence</a></i>, New Foreword by Eric Schmidt, New
York: McGraw Hill, 2015 [Pub Date: October 27, 2014]<o:p></o:p></b></div>
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I first read <i>The Digital Economy</i> in 1997, two years
following its initial publication and after I had completed Don Tapscott’s next
book, <i><a href="https://www.blogger.com/%3Ciframe%20style=%22width:120px;height:240px;%22%20marginwidth=%220%22%20marginheight=%220%22%20scrolling=%22no%22%20frameborder=%220%22%20src=%22//ws-na.amazon-adsystem.com/widgets/q?ServiceVersion=20070822&OneJS=1&Operation=GetAdHtml&MarketPlace=US&source=ac&ref=qf_sp_asin_til&ad_type=product_link&tracking_id=jdasl-20&marketplace=amazon&region=US&placement=0071347984&asins=0071347984&linkId=DHUXJ772LBXEGJMN&show_border=true&link_opens_in_new_window=true%22%3E%20%3C/iframe%3E" target="_blank">Growing Up Digital</a></i>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>At the
time, I was teaching in and directing a postgraduate Media Studies programme
that ambitiously sought to combine the study and practice of more traditional
media, particularly narrative film, documentary, and television, with new media
theory, digital production and even design principles.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It was a heady pre-Millennial moment of
experimenting with increasingly widespread digital technologies and of musing
on the potentially world-changing possibilities they seemed to represent.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></div>
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Fittingly, <i>The Digital Economy</i> ranged widely from practical
issues of managing and implementing technologies to more far-reaching questions
about where they might enable individuals, businesses and society to go. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In an early chapter, Tapscott distinguishes
between business process reengineering and business transformation – and how
taking that latter, more ambitious step required an openness to change.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>While an important distinction in terms of
business, of course, the clear implication concerned a more general willingness
to accept and participate in larger-scale transformation, of individual,
economy, and society.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The book then went
on to offer probing yet accessible discussions of the import of analog versus
digital, the arrival of smart products, the need for overhauling talent
management and learning, the ascendant roles of IT and CIOs in organizations,
and many more topics in order to portray an emerging future.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></div>
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One of Tapscott’s gifts has been the consistent ability to
examine such topics in detail while also conveying but not overstating their
greater significance.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As a prolific and
consistently insightful analyst and commentator on the digital transformation,
his work falls, for me, into four overlapping areas of interest: (1) the “net
generation” to which he’s devoted several books starting with <i>Growing Up Digital</i>; (2) mass collaboration, openness and sharing, probably most
familiar from his 2006 bestseller, <i><a href="https://www.blogger.com/%3Ciframe%20style=%22width:120px;height:240px;%22%20marginwidth=%220%22%20marginheight=%220%22%20scrolling=%22no%22%20frameborder=%220%22%20src=%22//ws-na.amazon-adsystem.com/widgets/q?ServiceVersion=20070822&OneJS=1&Operation=GetAdHtml&MarketPlace=US&source=ac&ref=qf_sp_asin_til&ad_type=product_link&tracking_id=jdasl-20&marketplace=amazon&region=US&placement=1591843677&asins=1591843677&linkId=N75JEV6DB4LTIXMX&show_border=true&link_opens_in_new_window=true%22%3E%20%3C/iframe%3E" target="_blank">Wikinomics</a></i> (co-written with Anthony
D. Williams), and its recent sequel; (3) the more explicitly business-focused
books, beginning his earliest publications on office automation and clearly
elaborated in the 2003 <i>T<a href="https://www.blogger.com/%3Ciframe%20style=%22width:120px;height:240px;%22%20marginwidth=%220%22%20marginheight=%220%22%20scrolling=%22no%22%20frameborder=%220%22%20src=%22//ws-na.amazon-adsystem.com/widgets/q?ServiceVersion=20070822&OneJS=1&Operation=GetAdHtml&MarketPlace=US&source=ac&ref=qf_sp_asin_til&ad_type=product_link&tracking_id=jdasl-20&marketplace=amazon&region=US&placement=0743246519&asins=0743246519&linkId=A7KHLKNXPNUVKEZE&show_border=true&link_opens_in_new_window=true%22%3E%20%3C/iframe%3E" target="_blank">he Naked Corporation</a></i>; and his integrative
writings on the digital society and economy, of which <i>The Digital Economy</i>
is still the most penetrating.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Whatever
the specific object of discussion or analysis, though, the wider contexts and
deeper humanity of technological, business and social change remain an unmistakable
priority for him.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></div>
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Re-read today, that balance and breadth still set apart <i>The
Digital Economy</i>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Contemporary
analyses of all things digital, particularly in business and management
writing, tend to lack his sensitivity to broader human or social contexts – at
least contexts expressed with balance and without hyperbole.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In the original chapter on leadership,
Tapscott opens with a quote from Internet pioneer Vint Cerf about the Internet
being “like the wilderness of the Wild West,” both inevitably awaiting the
imposition of systems and civilization but always retaining “some interesting
wilderness areas to visit.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That
metaphor was ubiquitous in the late 1990s.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Yet the opening section of the chapter, in which he discusses how
difficult are paradigm shifts and journeys into the ”wilderness” of the unknown
for “leaders of the old,” remains as valid as ever a commentary on human nature
and the challenges of profound change. <o:p></o:p></div>
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To Tapscott’s credit, little of the new material is
self-congratulatory.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The Preface to the
Anniversary Edition offers a valuable summation of the book’s major ideas and
the extent to which they have come to pass – or not.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Throughout, the new commentaries preceding
each chapter provide valuable extensions and illustrations from the last twenty
years of the nascent ideas proposed in the original text.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The updates on the “The Internetworked
Business” chapter, for example, draw on insights (specifically, the seven
business models) from <i>Wikipedia</i> in order to frame the importance of
developing and implementing a coherent strategy for advancing the social
economy, workplace, and marketing.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Tapscott also rebuts critics who claim he has been a digital
Polyanna by downplaying or ignoring the “dark side” of the transformed
economy.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Especially compared with some
of his mid-1990s contemporaries, the tone and treatment of possible digital
futures in these pages is balanced.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Recalling many of the visions of the time, both utopian and dystopian
and often charged with Millennial hope or uncertainty, <i>The Digital Economy</i>
was less a futurist tract than an exploration of social and economic
possibilities grounded in actual (or emerging) technologies and human
practices.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That the author foresaw
accurately so much of what has developed in the years since the book first
appeared is testament to his sensitivity to the ways businesses, societies and
especially people engage new technologies and change more broadly.<o:p></o:p></div>
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The original text does contain some obviously glaring
misses.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A few are small and forgettable,
as with the insistent use of the “Internetwork” and, especially, “I-Way” (for
“Information Highway”) as the digital basis and engine of future progress.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Others, notably the significant treatment accorded
to privacy issues late in the book, require fuller annotation in the new
edition.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Citing “Big Brother” and
(corporate) “little brothers” as threats, the conclusion in 1995 was to take
greater care with the information we give away.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Two decades later, as Tapscott acknowledges in his new comments, individuals
are thoroughly connected by social media, Big Data, surveillance and geospatial
systems, and many other institutional networks and technologies, shifting the
onus much more to institutions and owners of data to manage data and their
privacy appropriately.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></div>
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The next and final chapter of <i>The Digital Economy</i> addresses
the “new responsibilities” of business.
Here, the author writes most directly about “societal transformation”
and how the many technologies and transformations he has catalogued can help
re-cast the role of corporations in society and even the future of democracy. Then, closing his retrospective comments,
Tapscott writes that “this Anniversary edition is not intended to be a history
text.” Strictly speaking, he is right. Yet when framed by the new material, the
original text can still serve a very similar and valuable purpose, namely, to
give an illuminating longer view of two decades of changes, small and large,
wrought by the digital economy and experienced by each of us – and still to
envision a future marked by immense promise and some peril. </div>
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David Slocumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11148276375463185535noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5982798117993395166.post-59687827525766142792014-11-19T04:47:00.002-05:002014-11-19T06:04:11.323-05:00Vulgar Creativity<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">“Companies constantly
tell us about their commitment to excellence, implying that this means they
will make only top-shelf products. Words like quality and excellence are
misapplied so relentlessly that they border on meaningless….To ensure quality,
then, excellence must be an earned word, attributed by others to us, not
proclaimed by us about ourselves.” <o:p></o:p></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 4;"> </span>--Ed
Catmull (with Amy Wallace) in Creativity, Inc.<u><o:p></o:p></u></i></div>
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Catmull and Wallace’s recent account of Pixar’s decades-long
journey is an impassioned call for individuals and organizations not just to
speak their core beliefs and values but to act on them consistently and
imaginatively.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Many of these beliefs,
from quality and excellence to “trust the process” and “story is king” are
familiar invocations of business intent and purpose.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Yet running through <i>Creativity, Inc.</i>
is the crucial insight that repeating such words and phrases can actually provide
false confidence and be counter-productive if they ring hollow and are not put
into practice. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
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Probably the word with the most potential to mislead is
“creativity” itself and Catmull and Wallace’s book can be read as a 368-page
illustration of how an ongoing, collective, and enacted focus can make the
commitment to that value real and dynamic.
At a time when “creativity” and “innovation” appear everywhere in
corporate pronouncements, doing more than parroting the words is a consistent
challenge for leaders and organizations.
I have written about this <a href="http://onforb.es/1oZXrvy" target="_blank">elsewhere</a>, as have others, like Shane Snow, who goes so far as assert, “<a href="http://linkd.in/1o6oPd8" target="_blank">If you have tocall yourself innovative, you’re probably not.</a>” </div>
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Beyond taking care with one’s own usage of these basic
terms, a question arises about the recognition by others of a given
individual’s or firm’s creativity or innovation.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>These are enormously slippery concepts,
varying across cultures and industries and markets.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The novelty, freshness or utility celebrated in
one situation or context can be viewed as familiar or even clichéd in
another.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As a result, we might
reasonably ask, How can creativity become an “earned word, attributed by others
to us”?<o:p></o:p></div>
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One answer is to consider what I call “vulgar creativity” in
assessing and practicing imaginative activities and production.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The qualifying word, “vulgar,” has several
meanings and historical resonances that are vital to approaching that
process.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>While not one-dimensional, the
term can nevertheless help to orient our thinking and actions around creativity
in businesses and elsewhere.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></div>
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“Vulgar” derives from the Latin word for “common people” and
originally was used to describe their ordinary, everyday uses of things or
ideas.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A “vulgar tongue” in the Middle
Ages thus meant the actual or vernacular language of a people as opposed to an
official or elite one. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Over the last
century, sophisticated social and cultural theorists from Walter Benjamin to
Terry Eagleton have criticized “vulgar Marxism” for reductionist readings of
Marx and Engels that claim ideology (including art and creative work) is simply
determined by economic structures.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There’s
irony, for some, in such bemoaning of a common people’s understanding of Marx,
who, after all, sought to empower them.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>More importantly, though, the example casts in relief two distinct (if
often overlapping) meanings conveyed by the term, vulgar – namely, of being of
the people and ordinary <i>and</i> of oversimplification, edginess, and even
crudeness.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></div>
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That everyone is, or has the potential to be, (more) creative
has become an article of faith for many in the twenty-first century.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Sir Ken Robinson is a persuasive and
much-admired exponent of this view.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He
concentrates on how schools “kill creativity” in order to illuminate alternative
ways that they, and other organizations including businesses, can cultivate and
liberate individual imagination. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>By
helping unlearn the standardized “command and control” approaches to learning
that predominate in education, he calls instead for a diverse, individualized
and organic approach to encouraging students to thrive.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Rather than a select, chosen creative few,
Robinson’s presumption is that these changes will foster the curiosity and unleash
the ability to experiment existing in us all.<o:p></o:p></div>
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It is here, however, that the second meaning of vulgar can
re-emerge and complicate our celebration of universal creativity.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Conventionally, creative activity involves plunging
into the unknown, engaging unorthodox thinking, experimenting continuously, and
incorporating a bit of irreverence (to use advertising legend Sir John
Hegarty’s term).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Yet those drives,
particularly in business, are often reduced to simplistic taglines or formulaic
processes.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Even worse, the admirable
goal of nurturing greater creativity too often turns merely on unfettering
individual free thinking or expression.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Supporting creativity, in other words, becomes about removing as many
filters, structures or other constraints as possible rather than building a
diverse, stimulating, and organic environment that cultivates individual and
group learning and imagination.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></div>
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Simply unfiltering individual expression or behavior may
have individual value in terms of personal fulfillment or happiness (or other indirect
benefits to organizations or groups), but it does not necessarily provide the
makings of a wider and more sustainable creative culture.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The British scholar of creativity, Margaret
Boden, once distinguished personal from historical creativity by observing that
what is novel to one individual at any given moment is often not to the wider
society or across history.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>While that
personal creative expressiveness should be nurtured, it also needs to be
differentiated from what is new, surprising or useful for larger communities,
markets or societies.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></div>
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To be mindful of vulgar creativity is to recognize both the
ordinary, democratic potential of creativity and, in business, particularly, its
social or organizational reality and dynamics.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>The point is not to judge worthy those efforts at fostering creativity affirmed
by crowds or markets and dismiss others.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>However, it is to acknowledge that, too often in business, attention to
creativity and innovation is reduced to celebrating novelty without value or facilitating
individual expression without wider purpose.<o:p></o:p></div>
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In 1982, film and cultural commentator J. Hoberman published
“Vulgar Modernism,” an article in which he argued that many popular, even apparently
tasteless productions like Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis comedies, Tex Avery
cartoons and <u>Mad</u> magazine, engaged some of the same mid-twentieth
century aesthetic, institutional and social questions as the Modernist art of
Picasso, Manet, and bebop.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Hoberman was
seeking to make sense of the post-World War II years in which a fraught
relationship between popular and “high” cultures was being renegotiated.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Invoking the “vulgar” became a way to
approach the rich and productive tensions marking the practices of mainstream
media and audiences.</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Only a few years later, pioneering adman Bill Bernbach
observed, “Is creativity some obscure, esoteric art form? Not on your life.
It’s the most practical thing a businessman can employ.” For Bernbach then, and continuing in business
today, the successful approach to creativity should be similarly broad and
shaped by productive tensions – between espoused beliefs and substantive
actions, customer needs and firm purpose, and organizational processes and
individual imagination. In its embrace
of such crucial tensions, “vulgar creativity” can provide another reminder to leaders
of the value of empowering more universal creativity while always grounding that
effort in the world they see and aspire to change. </div>
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<o:p></o:p></div>
</div>
David Slocumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11148276375463185535noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5982798117993395166.post-48112436373291951612014-10-16T04:08:00.000-04:002014-10-16T04:08:19.340-04:00Is Leaders' Talk Cheap?<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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Earlier this year, two sociologists
provoked a probing debate about the integrity and value of interviewing as a
research method.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Colin Jerolmack and
Shamus Khan, respectively of New York University and Columbia University &
Berlin School of Creative Leadership (Steinbeis University), launched their
broadside in the May 2014 issue of <u><a href="http://bit.ly/ZvVJba" target="_blank">Sociological Methods & Research</a></u>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>While this methodological deep dive and
accompanying critical discussion were made in the context of a specific
discipline, the challenges mounted have relevance for research in all fields where
interviews are widely used.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>For
management and business studies, in particular, in which interviews of leaders
are often central to substantiating and defending accounts and insights of
organizational and industry practice, such questioning has potentially
far-reaching implications.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
Though Jerolmack and Khan’s
argument is dense and sophisticated, one of their major concerns is captured in
what they call the ‘Attitudinal Fallacy,’ which claims that correlations of
reported attitudes with situated behavior are never high enough to presume
equivalence. ‘Attitudes are poor predictors of action’, they contend, and since
interviews are shaped by and convey subjects’ attitudes, they constitute an
inherently unreliable approach to researching the reality of these individuals’
actions.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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Respondents to the original piece
closely engaged this issue of ‘ABC’, or Attitude-Behavior Consistency.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>For instance, Karen Cerulo, a researcher of
cognition and culture at Rutgers, acknowledged the longstanding discrepancy or
word and action while nevertheless urging that critics don’t overstate the
problem.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Sometimes what people think or say
does inform what they do, she notes, and so we should still value, if with more
circumspection, the content of interviews.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Moreover, even if words and actions are sometimes specifically
inconsistent, individual level data can sometimes illustrate more general
patterns of action worth highlighting. <o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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To their credit, Jerolmack and Khan
don’t reject interviews entirely but instead call for greater methodological
pluralism in research.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Rather than
relying entirely or disproportionately on interviews, in other words, they urge
increased deployment of ethnographies, deep or participant observation,
qualitative data gathering, little or big data, and holistic analysis.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In research on business and leadership,
especially, questioning the integrity of interviews and calling for multiple
research methods compounds the challenge of gathering data and insights about
individuals and organizations.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
This is not only an issue for researchers
of business and management research and analysis but for readers and
practitioners.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Ask yourself: How many recent
books or articles on leadership or effective business practice have you read
that rely on interviews, typically of successful leaders about their beliefs
and experiences, to advance a distinctive insight or approach? <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Content drawn from interviews or other
first-person sourcing of business leaders’ viewpoints is especially common,
indeed is a major selling point, in popular business writing and journalism. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Connecting Individual Attitudes with Organizational Behaviors<o:p></o:p></b></div>
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The words of leaders are typically taken by readers
and listeners as reliable expressions of their behaviors – past, present, or
future.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The credibility of those words,
and those speaking or writing them, is crucial, of course, and turns back to
the fundamental challenge of ABC.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>While
we may debate whether Marissa Mayer’s online strategy for Yahoo! is the right
one, for example, we accept that her words capture what she and the company are
actually doing.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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Yet the matters of credibility and consistency are
further tested by the break between individual claims or characterizations and
the often widely disparate actions of organizations.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Even as leaders speak, the connection to collective
behavior – as summary, explanation, cause, plan – remains opaque amidst so many
possible causes.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As much as we want to
ground our understanding of corporate and collective reality in personal attitudes,
explaining corporate or organizational behavior demands wider attention to
persons, situations and the actual interactions between them.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Research and
Access in Business and Organizations</b><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
Jerolmack and Khan identify another
shortcoming, the ‘Accounting Fallacy’, to emphasize the fallibility of individual
accounts and self-reporting and how they cannot accurately stand in for
analyses of actual behavior.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>To generate
wider explanations of the situations and interactions in organizational life requires
multiple research approaches.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Yet in
most corporate settings, these are impossible for outside researchers and
analysts to pursue.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Confidentiality,
distraction, and the priorities of time and other resource allocation typically
limit or preclude more robust access to people and situations. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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The usual response to this lack of
access is to judge leaders’ words by specific indicators of their
organizations’ performance.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Rather than methodological
pluralism in research about corporate actions, particular outcomes – like
products, services, and financial, innovation or creative results – become the
basis for assessing those words.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This
makes certain sense.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>After all, we
invest in some firms, say Alibaba, because of the value they can deliver or
promise to customers and in the marketplace. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Yet even in a world of inevitably incomplete
information, attributing the successful or failed results of complex
organizational behavior to individual words is a poor substitute for ascertaining
more robust and varied understanding of the actual collective situations
producing the results.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Interviews as Public and Professional Performances<o:p></o:p></b></div>
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Another source of uncertainty in
trying to connect the words of leaders to their organizations’ actions is the recognition
that many interviews, whether public or ostensibly not, are performances.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Both the carefully crafted pronouncements of
leaders and their closely managed professional personae affect whatever claims
researchers and others may be able to make about them.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Even when the words may not correspond to
actual behaviors of the organization, present or past, they may nevertheless be
presented in the interests of the company, its brand management, and public
relations.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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Ultimately, an ethical aspect
emerges here: do we trust what leaders say?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>And even if we recognize that some words may be exaggerated (recall
Steve Jobs’ ‘reality distortion field’), do we justify that hyperbole in terms
of other ends, like increasing shareholder or market value or hyping and
delivering new products? <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>While the trust
issue exists in all interviews, where we can question the correlation of
self-reports of behavior, the test of consistency between words and actions
becomes all the more complicated when leaders may be trying to achieve multiple
ends and speak to multiple audiences in the same interview.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Authorities, Elites, and Celebrities<o:p></o:p></b></div>
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If the interview responses of
leaders are shaped by a range of organizational interests, the interactions
with researchers and others that prompt these responses can be strongly
impacted by the status or reputation of the leader himself or herself.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We choose to interview or otherwise solicit
the perspectives of leaders in the first place because of their experience or
position, expertise or accomplishment.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Yet
that very appeal to authority can limit the thoroughness of the interview and
consequently the integrity of the verbal data emerging from it. <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><o:p></o:p></b></div>
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<br /></div>
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At a practical and human level, interacting
with very senior or elite leaders involves unequal power relations that can be difficult
to navigate.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Consider the prospect of
interviewing Richard Branson or Sheryl Sandberg or Martin Sorrell.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Establishing the kind of access, trust and
rapport so important for substantive exchanges and then producing meaningful
data is particularly challenging with the involvement of subjects like these who
possess great seniority, reputation, and even celebrity.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Caveat Lector</b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="line-height: 150%;">Taken together, these
considerations suggest that interviews with leaders, since they typically concern
collective or corporate behaviors as well as those leaders’ reports of their
own individual actions, would benefit from more multidimensional analysis and
layered understanding of their accounts.</span><span style="line-height: 150%;">
</span><span style="line-height: 150%;">While this call resonates with Jerolmack and Khan’s general imperative
to expand the range and integration of methods employed in researching social or
corporate action, it takes on special significance in a field of research where
leaders’ words are accorded such value and prominence.</span><span style="line-height: 150%;"> </span><span style="line-height: 150%;">For external researchers of organizations,
gaining meaningful access and developing robust contextual understanding of the
special situations (and constraints) of organizational life are ongoing
challenges.</span><span style="line-height: 150%;"> </span><span style="line-height: 150%;">For readers of business and
management research as well as more popular analyses reliant upon the words of
leaders, the methodological debate should prompt us to question, constructively
but more diligently, the accuracy of the claims leaders make about their own
actions as well as those of their organizations.</span></div>
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<o:p></o:p></div>
</div>
David Slocumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11148276375463185535noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5982798117993395166.post-56718253754571561782014-10-10T15:39:00.001-04:002014-10-10T15:39:29.238-04:00Move Fast (Together) and Fix Things: Some Lessons of Crisis Leadership<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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Early this summer in Tokyo, I had the opportunity to hear an
insightful presentation on the media and social responses to the March 2011 earthquake,
tsunami and Fukushima Daiichi nuclear reactor meltdown.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The session was part of a Berlin School of
Creative Leadership Executive MBA module in Asia and the presenter was an
alumnus of that program, Yukio Nakayama, who serves as Executive Creative
Director at the Dentsu advertising agency.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>After providing general background on the events, Yukio’s account
focused on how Dentsu adapted the Internavi system, which provided everyday
on-demand traffic information to individual drivers in Honda vehicles, to
generate public mapping of road usage and access through Twitter and Google in
the early days of the crisis. Extending
the Internavi system and data on 311 is an inspiring example of how creative
solutions to crises can emerge with the right leadership.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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Before sketching out possible broader leadership lessons of
the episode, we should be clear about what we mean by “crisis.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Helpful here is Herman “Dutch” Leonard’s call
to distinguish routine from novelty.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We
can’t, Harvard professor Leonard believes, treat a true crisis as simply an
“overgrown routine situation.” <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This problem
of misperception occurs even in conscientious crisis preparation and planning
efforts, when the underlying approach is to deploy more of the same kinds of
resources (like police, medical, and food, reconstruction, data management) as
during normal, non-crisis times.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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We need also to take care to differentiate crises of the
order of what happened in Japan in 2011 from crises faced by many
organizational and business leaders.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As
important, even existential, as the latter may be for some firms, their crises
lack the social, cultural and economic scale and sweeping life-and-death risks
of 311. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That said, in assessing such an
immense event, we might nevertheless extract some principles that bear on the
still complex decision-making and communications challenges faced by business
leaders. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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Explaining how Dentsu adapted Internavi’s capabilities
within 20 hours for public benefit, Yukio illuminated several key tenets of successful
leadership.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>These began with a
situational awareness that enabled his colleagues to recognize the difference
between the exceptional character of 311 and routine accidents or congestion.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Also necessary was an understanding of how to
build sudden collaborative structures across diverse institutions and
constituencies. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Preparation was
essential, but, again, had to be of the appropriate type: while simulations and
scenarios were fine, developing and testing capabilities for cooperation across
organizations and with the public proved more helpful once the nuclear disaster
occurred.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Those capabilities, more
specifically, included how to enable improvisation and, in this case, address and
communicate quickly the problem of producing accurate traffic and road
information.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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The development of Internavi is a great example of
decentralized intelligent adaptation at a societal level.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Structurally, that decentralization involved
non-hierarchical or top-down relationships among multiple public and private
institutions enabled by technology. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The
intelligent adaptation was likewise marked by an ongoing and effective process
of inquiry that facilitated collaborative problem-solving and communications.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Such tenets and tendencies are hardly unique to the Japanese
experience, of course.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In the 2013 Boston
Marathon Bombing Response [MBR], analysts found the successes of a variety of
responders benefited from similar values of situational, collaborative, improvisational
and inquiring leadership.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In fact, <a href="http://bit.ly/1q9cyj8" target="_blank">the preliminary findings of the National Preparedness Leadership Initiative</a>,
released in April 2014, identified five foundations of the intelligence and
leadership that shaped the Boston MBR:<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
1) An overriding objective that:
forges unity of mission and connectivity of action; is compelling enough to
override standard practices as needed; and obviates bureaucratic obstructions,
distractions or bickering.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
2) A spirit of generosity that
rallies groups and individuals to assist one another and overcome constraints
of resources, know-how or tools to achieve the paramount mission, expressed as
“Whaddya got? Whaddaya need?”<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
3) Respect for the responsibilities
and authorities of others, described as “staying in one’s lane” while assisting
others to succeed in their lane to accomplish mission-critical duties and
tasks.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
4) Neither taking undue credit nor
pointing blame among key players, oftentimes portrayed as “checking your ego at
the door.”<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
5) Genuine inter-personal trust and
respect developed well before the event so that existing and dependable
leadership relationships, integrity, and camaraderie can be leveraged during
the event, often described as “don’t wait for an emergency to exchange business
cards.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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The preliminary report discussed these findings as a
positive instance of “swarm intelligence,” which is more generally understood
as the collective behavior of decentralized, self-organized systems.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The concept initially arose with efforts to
analyze and explain complexity in multi-agent systems, from bacterial growth, ant
colonies and fish schooling to robot interactions and artificial intelligence.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Among the usual precepts of swarm
intelligence are diversity, independence and decentralization.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In contrast to other approaches to group
interactions and behavior, the concept also recognizes that too much internal communication
can make the group as a whole less intelligent.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
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Analyses of responses to 311 in Japan and the Boston
Marathon bombing offer valuable insights for leaders about how to work
effectively in complex, decentralized systems dealing with novel and
fast-changing situations.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Yet their
lessons, important as they are, tend to focus on the macro-level of
institutional relationships or group dynamics and on the resulting
decision-making, action and communications.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>While they recognize how essential are collaborative and trusting interpersonal
relationships, in other words, it was beyond the scope of the analyses to
examine more closely how individual leaders should behave to ensure the best
collective decision-making and actions.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
That research is ongoing elsewhere, perhaps most notably at
the Center for Collective Intelligence at the MIT Sloan School of Management.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Among the key factors of collective
intelligence that have been identified there thus far is “social perception,”
that is, the ability to discern someone else’s thinking and emotions.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“When it comes to the effectiveness of
groups,” said Thomas Malone, head of CCI, <a href="http://bit.ly/1gwkqvK" target="_blank">in a recent interview</a>, “we are what
we see in each other.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Beyond empathy,
this social perceptiveness involves discernment of others as well as a kind of
ongoing awareness of, and commitment to, the versatility of thinking and
equality of contributions across the group.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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A final level of leadership to be addressed in coping with
crises involves the leader himself or herself.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Not surprisingly, perhaps the best guidance in this regard comes from
Bill George, the former Medtronic CEO and current Harvard Business School
professor of management practice who wrote <i><a href="http://amzn.to/1q9cqQG" target="_blank">Seven Lessons for Leading in Crisis</a></i> in 2009.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>While much of the
book addresses larger aspects of crises, it does so from the leader’s
perspective (e.g., “dig deep for the root cause” or “blending internal and
external communications”).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>However, at
least two of George’s lessons, including the first, concern the leader’s own
self-understanding: “Face reality, starting with yourself” and “You’re in the
spotlight; Follow True North.”<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Recognizing one’s strengths and weaknesses and remaining
true to one’s values and purpose are enablers of leadership success in all situations.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>However, in crises, such self-understanding
and authenticity in decisions and actions are vital.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>George goes on to ask, “Will you stay focused
on your True North or will you succumb to pressure?”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The pressure and stress of crises derives
from many causes, notably the novelty, complexity, and urgency of the dynamic situations
they present.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Retaining the presence of
mind to think, act and work with others according to one’s own values while
responding to those situations is a consummate leadership challenge.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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Whether they are at the scale of 311 and the Boston Marathon
Bombing or of a single organization whose local world has been turned upside
down, crises are crucible experiences that define leaders. Yet perhaps counter-intuitively, an abiding lesson
of the responses to these massive events is that more effective leadership
resulted from individuals ceding control, sharing responsibilities, and openly
collaborating and communicating with others.
Rather than relying on a single authoritative leader taking unilateral
actions and decisions, success emerged from individuals humbly willing to
contribute to decentralized leadership and decision-making, to work
collectively with a common purpose, and to learn together to solve novel
problems.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<o:p></o:p></div>
</div>
David Slocumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11148276375463185535noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5982798117993395166.post-56882248669846432812014-09-29T17:08:00.000-04:002014-09-29T17:08:19.390-04:00Recommended Readings for Creative Leaders for Fall 2014<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Georgia; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Thus far in 2014, we have seen at
least two additions to the short bookshelf of essential readings for creative
leaders: Pixar CEO Ed Catmull’s account (with Amy Wallace) of building and
sustaining a successful creative culture,<i> Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming
the Unseen Forces that Stand in the Way of True Inspiration</i>; and Harvard
Business School Professor Linda A. Hill’s masterful guide to leading successful
innovation across organizations, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Collective
Genius: The Art and Practice of Leading Innovation</i> (written with Greg Brandeau,
Kent Lineback, and Emily Truelove). Other recent highlights included <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Connected by Design: Seven Principles for Business
Transformation through Functional Integration</i>, the outstanding work about
new ways to create value through brand ecosystems, by Barry Wacksman and Chris
Stutzman of the legendary creative agency, R/GA; Stanford professors Robert I. Sutton
and Huggy Rao’s major study of how to build up businesses successfully, <i>Scaling
Up Excellence: Getting to More Without Settling for Less</i>; and Arianna
Huffington’s manifesto for re-defining well-being, work and success, revisionist
study of talent and creativity, <i>Thrive</i>: <i>The Third Metric
and Redefining Success and Creating a Life of Well-being, Wisdom, and Wonder</i>.</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: Georgia; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #500050; font-family: Georgia; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">The fall book season is now upon us
and promises further new and relevant titles. These will include analyses of marketing,
China, and Google, a handful of titles on innovation, ranging from practical implementation
guides to a longer history, and, perhaps most far-reaching, reflections on the
changes wrought by digital technologies to individuals and society. All contain
insights valuable to the work and lives of creative leaders.</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: Georgia; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><br style="mso-special-character: line-break;" />
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Georgia; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">1) Ulrich
Boser, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Leap: The Science of Trust and
Why It Matters</i> (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt/New Harvest, September 16)</span></b><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Georgia; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"> <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Georgia; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">Traveling from rural Rwanda to corporate America, and from
paying taxes to using technology, Boser argues that individuals are hard-wired
for trust and trustworthiness and that emphasizing and restoring trust can
benefit us as humans as well as our institutions and communities. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Georgia; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"><br /></span></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Georgia; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">2) Richard
Branson, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Virgin Way: Everything I
Know About Leadership</i> (Penguin/Portfolio, September 9)</span></b><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Georgia; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"> <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 15.0pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Georgia; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">The iconic CEO and entrepreneur, already author of a
best-selling autobiography and books on business, here describes his key
leadership principles like good listening, keeping things simple, remaining
iconoclastic, motivating people, and having fun along the way. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Georgia; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 15.0pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Georgia; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">3)
Nicholas Carr, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Glass Cage: Automation
and Us</i> (Norton, September 29) <o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Georgia; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">Carr, the consistently trenchant analyst of technological change
who wrote <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Shallows: What the Internet
is Doing to Our Brains</i>, here offers a thoughtful and sometimes disturbing
account, grounded in science and poetry alike, of the ways that our increasing
reliance on technology is affecting our happiness and re-shaping our humanity. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Georgia; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 15.0pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Georgia; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">4)
Lawrence A. Cunningham, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Berkshire Beyond
Buffett: The Enduring Value of Values</i> (Columbia Business School Publishing,
October 21) <o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Georgia; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">An extraordinary portrait of the fifty direct subsidiaries of
Berkshire Hathaway, investment guru Warren Buffett’s $300 billion conglomerate,
told through the companies’ distinct stories and the vital values like
integrity, autonomy, entrepreneurship and a sense of permanence that they, and
Buffett, share. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Georgia; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"><br /></span></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Georgia; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">5) Tom
Doctoroff, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Twitter Is Not a Strategy:
Remastering the Art of Brand Marketing</i> (Palgrave MacMillan, November 11)</span></b><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Georgia; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"> <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Georgia; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">The Asia CEO of the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency, Doctoroff
uses characteristic wit and decades of experience to take on the twin hypes of digital
media and the China market and to offer insightful principles for successful customer
engagement and integrated brand marketing.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Georgia; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"><br /></span></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Georgia; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">6) Stewart
D. Friedman, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Leading the Life You Want:
Skills for Integrating Work and Life</i> (Harvard Business Review Press,
October 7)</span></b><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Georgia; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"> <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Georgia; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">Wharton professor Friedman, building on his excellent study, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Total Leadership</i>, uses examples ranging
from Sheryl Sandberg to Bruce Springsteen to move from familiar calls to
balance competing work and life commitments toward taking steps, instead, to
integrate our passions and values across the domains of work, home, community,
and the private self.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Georgia; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"><br /></span></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Georgia; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">7) Nathan
Furr and Jeff Dyer, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Innovator’s
Method: Bringing the Lean Startup into Your Organization</i> (Harvard Business
Review Press, September 9)</span></b><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Georgia; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"> <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Georgia; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">How can business leaders better manage the uncertainty intrinsic
to prototyping and experimentation? Picking up from Dyer’s bestselling guide to
generating ideas, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Innovator’s DNA</i>
(written with Hal Gregersen and Clay Christensen), this new volume focuses on
proven techniques that allow start-ups and established firms to commercialize
ideas successfully.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Georgia; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"><br /></span></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Georgia; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">8) Walter
Isaacson, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Innovators: How a Group of
Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution</i> (Simon &
Schuster, October 7)</span></b><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Georgia; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"> <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Georgia; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">Isaacson, the biographer of Ben Franklin, Albert Einstein, and
most recently, Steve Jobs, has penned a sweeping history of digital
technologies, the computer and internet, beginning in the mid-nineteenth
century, with Lord Byron’s daughter, and tracing the innovative thinking,
creative leadership and energetic collaboration to the present day. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Georgia; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"><br /></span></span></div>
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<b><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Georgia; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">9) Langdon Morris, Moses Ma and Po Chi Wu, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Agile Innovation: The Revolutionary Approach
to Accelerate Success, Inspire Engagement, and Ignite Creativity Hardcover</i>
(Wiley, September 22) <o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Georgia; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">Two leading innovation thinkers and
consultants (Morris and Ma) and an engineering professor (Wu) have written an excellent
(and overdue) guide to how agile techniques, like process acceleration, risk
management, and fuller team engagement, have fostered successful innovation for
leading businesses and can be put into practice elsewhere. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Georgia; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;"><br /></span></div>
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<b><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Georgia; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">10) Alexander Osterwalder, Yves Pigneur, Gregory Bernarda,
Alan Smith, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Value Proposition Design: How
to Create Products and Services Customers Want</i> (Wiley, October 20)</span></b><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Georgia; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;"> <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 15.0pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Georgia; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">Using the same engaging visual
approach as their groundbreaking <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Business
Model Generation</i>, which pioneered the business model canvas, Osterwalder et
al focus on the most important of the canvas’ building blocks, the value
proposition, and enable readers to work through seven key principles for better
designing what matters to customers.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Georgia; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 15.0pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Georgia; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">11) Shaun
Rein, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The End of Copycat China: The Rise
of Creativity, Innovation and Individualism in China</i> (Wiley, October 20) <o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Georgia; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">A leading consultant and commentator on the Chinese society and
economy, and the author of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The End of
Cheap China</i>, Rein analyzes current large-scale shifts in China from
investment toward consumption, and from copying to innovation, that require a
strategic re-thinking by investors and creative leaders doing (or wanting to
do) business there.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Georgia; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 15.0pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Georgia; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">12) Paul
Roberts, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Impulse Society: America in
the Age of Instant Gratification</i> (Bloomsbury, September 2)</span></b><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Georgia; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"> <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 15.0pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Georgia; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">A troubling, cross-disciplinary account of how individual
pursuits of consumption, pleasure, and immediate rewards, advanced by new
technologies and compromised ethics, have evolved in a new and pervasive ‘culture
of narcissism’ — that journalist Roberts nevertheless closes on a hopeful note
of how we can pull back and change.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Georgia; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 15.0pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Georgia; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">13)
Jonathan Rosenberg and Eric Schmidt, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">How
Google Works</i> (Grand Central/Business Plus, September 23).</span></b></div>
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<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Georgia; line-height: 15pt;">Google’s former SVP of Products and ex-CEO reveal how the global
tech company has grown by doing things differently, like hiring multitalented
‘smart creatives’ and leading with the recognition that ‘consensus requires
dissension,’ in order to continually create new products and serve consumers in
a fast-changing environment.</span></div>
</div>
David Slocumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11148276375463185535noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5982798117993395166.post-82312757275400799142014-09-13T16:44:00.002-04:002014-09-13T16:46:11.837-04:00Dave Trott and the Challenge of Creative Thinking (While Still Learning)<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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Dave Trott is a British advertising legend. He’s written two books and keeps a lively and
provocative <a href="http://davetrott.co.uk/" target="_blank">blog</a>. He also regularly
speaks to industry audiences, including a talk to EMBA participants at
the Berlin School of Creative Leadership I was privileged to hear. I am a regular reader and admirer of his
work.</div>
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<o:p></o:p></div>
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Trott’s writings tend to be anecdotal and provocative.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He doesn’t offer recommendation lists or
how-to guides for doing better creative work or building creative organizations,
preferring to share observations, stories and occasional advice on generating
original work in an increasingly fraught brand marketing landscape.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A recurrent priority is celebrating the
creative muse while also defending it against the ever-growing onslaught of
business demands, formulaic processes, and formal education.<o:p></o:p></div>
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His August 12 blogpost on ‘<a href="http://bit.ly/1wkCIaI" target="_blank">How “Learnings” Prevents Thinking</a>’ captured
this priority nicely.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As the title
conveys, the post discusses how learning can impede and constrain creative
thinking.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In particular, Trott discusses
learning a ‘terminology’, that is, a set of terms that serve as agreed-upon ‘metaphors’
or shorthand for different activities.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>The problem with such learning for him is that once learned, the meaning
of the terms can become ‘impenetrable’ and ‘accepted as fact’.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Learnings here lead to the adoption of terms
and meanings that ‘no one ever questions’.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>The result is that the questioning so fundamental to original thinking
is foreclosed.<o:p></o:p></div>
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As an educator, I found myself both agreeing with Trott’s
pragmatic argument but also being professionally unsettled by it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>After all, I’ve spent years striving to
impart or, at least, enable creatives and other leaders to achieve learning in
the belief that it will improve them and their creative work.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Pausing over the blogpost, and returning to
his two books, <u><a href="http://amzn.to/1wkDEfo" target="_blank">Creative Mischief</a></u> (2011) and <u><a href="http://amzn.to/1wkDyUS" target="_blank">Predatory Thinking: A Masterclass in Out-Thinking the Competition</a></u> (2013), I asked
myself whether the education or training or ‘formal’ inputs I provide were
possibly hindering the thinking of my creatives and executives.</div>
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<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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Trott’s provocation is hardly the first of its kind, of
course.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Others have rightly questioned
the influence, often negative, of educational processes and systems on
creativity and imagination.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Perhaps most
familiarly, and cogently, <a href="http://bit.ly/1wkDRPA" target="_blank">Sir Ken Robinson</a> has called for reforms in education and training to
unleash and encourage rather than repress and inhibit imagination and creative
thinking.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></div>
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While Robinson’s primary focus has been on the schooling of
children, his broader insights have great relevance to adults and,
particularly, their organizations, like the corporation.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The systems, specializations, and processes
that shape and define businesses and many other organizations appear to constrain
original thinking and creativity in ways similar to rote learning and
memorization in schools.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Longstanding has been the perceived discrepancy
between the imperatives of business efficiency, productivity, and the bottom
line and the possibilities of more open-ended innovation, risk-taking, and
creative thinking.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Recently, however, more and more businesses have begun to
recognize that some systems or processes can be necessary and even contribute positively
to creative thinking and original outputs.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Adaptable and human-centered approaches, like agile or design thinking,
for example, seem to support both organizational and individual needs for sustained performance and growth.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Such processes
form less a discordant constraint than a productive tension enabling people to
reflect and question as a basis of their own creative work and contribution to
a larger, collective endeavor.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></div>
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In the words of Trott’s post, the processes allow
individuals precisely to question the terminology they use together.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is worth observing that many of the terms
he mentions are trendy and deserve not only to be questioned but potentially cast aside
entirely for overuse.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The list is
(sadly) long: ‘Brand audit, cluster groups, segmentation, penetration, CRM,
SEO, CSR, ROI, KPI, UGC, integrated, transactional, native-advertising,
value-added, differentials, core-competency, ideation, hygiene-factors,
demographics, psychographics, profile-testing, deliverables, storytelling,
narrow-casting, acquisition, content, data-capture, rate card, deep-dive’.<o:p></o:p></div>
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In my own work with creatives and other leaders, a core
belief is indeed to question the basic terms of business whose deeper and more
complex meanings are discussed too infrequently in individual settings,
situations, and contexts.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Among these are talent,
business model, strategy, culture, technology, operations, and finance.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Particularly at a time when being successful
creatively often means having the capabilities to generate creative business
solutions for clients and customers, such fundamental terms should not only be
engaged but interrogated as a source of potential advantage.<o:p></o:p></div>
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So perhaps, as an educator, I stand closer to Dave Trott
than I had initially imagined upon reading his post. Rather than simply assigning or parroting
fixed meanings, the ‘learning’ we should strive for is open-ended, adaptive, and committed to
the ongoing interrogation of ‘terminology’ and the possibilities of any
situation. That process also seems a
promising one to encourage more consistently unconstrained creative thinking in
business and beyond.</div>
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<o:p></o:p></div>
</div>
David Slocumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11148276375463185535noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5982798117993395166.post-2534959052985918472014-08-30T04:00:00.000-04:002014-09-13T16:46:49.488-04:00The Other Cross-Cultural Leadership<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<i><span style="line-height: 150%;">The following is adapted from remarks
given at the August graduation of the 2014 Executive MBA class of the Berlin
School of Creative Leadership. </span></i><b><span style="line-height: 150%;"><o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="line-height: 150%;">One of the great assets of any global academic or training
program is the national, regional, social or economic diversity of its
participants. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In its still relatively
young EMBA program alone, the Berlin School of Creative Leadership has enrolled
participants from over 50 countries.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>At
the most basic level, that diversity helps individuals to expand their
individual networks and to join (or deepen their place in) a global community
of creative professionals.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Another positive
outcome is the enrichment of the learning of individuals from different markets
around the world through the sharing of experiences, insights and
challenges.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>More specific to the
creative communication industries, which are undergoing extraordinary
transformation, diversity among participants enables greater access to specific
tools and strategies for navigating changing technologies, customer and client
relationships, and business models.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="line-height: 150%;">Facilitating the exchange of experiences and fostering the
professional relationships among participants is a key responsibility of executive
programs.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Ordinarily, this includes
teaching major approaches to ‘cross-cultural leadership’ as part of the EMBA
curriculum.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The research, tools and
models for understanding conventional national and cultural differences remain
vitally important to the success of creative leaders. </span><span style="line-height: 150%;">Many of these are more widely familiar:</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
</div>
<ul style="text-align: left;">
<li><span style="line-height: 150%;">High- and low-context communications, anthropologist Edward
T. Hall’s classical approach to understanding how much or little implicit
knowledge is required in different cultures to communicate information
effectively.</span></li>
<li><span style="line-height: 150%;">Key dimensions to cultural interactions, identified through
longstanding research by Dutch social psychologist Geert Hofstede, and including
Individualism/Collectivism, Feminine/Masculine, Power Distance, Uncertainty
Avoidance, Indulgence/Restraint, and Long Term/ Short Term Orientation. (Fons
Trompenaar’s succeeding model of national culture has seven related dimensions
as well as five orientations for the ways in which people dal with each other.)</span></li>
<li><span style="line-height: 150%;">Richard D. Lewis, the founder of the Berlitz language
schools in East Asia, Finland and Portugal, whose model focuses, in simple
terms, on whether those in given countries or regions pursue individual tasks
using linear or sequential logic, focus on relationships and pursue multiple
tasks simultaneously, or follow strategies that seek solidarity and harmony.</span></li>
<li><span style="line-height: 150%;">Perhaps most ambitiously, the GLOBE project conceived by Wharton
professor Robert J. House (and building on Hofstede’s model), offers both an
inventory of nine cultural competencies and six specific leadership competencies
that vary across ten societal clusters.</span><span style="line-height: 150%;">
</span><span style="line-height: 150%;">These include charismatic vs value-based, team orientation, and participative
leadership.</span></li>
</ul>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="line-height: 150%;">Taken together, these approaches convey the complexity and
richness of communication, interaction, and, especially, leadership in a world
still demanding of profound sensitivity in thought and action to social,
cultural and national differences – that is, to an early twenty-first century
world that is anything but flat.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="line-height: 150%;">Yet another aspect of diversity among creative professionals
is not so often addressed: the diversity of roles and professions among those
who increasingly are drawn together to collaborate.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In the traditional creative industries, for
example, everyone does not have the word ‘creative’ in their title.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Amir Kassei, the Global Chief Creative
Officer of DDB, the advertising agency, uses the helpful label ‘creatively
minded’ to include those without other formal validation but who still
contribute to creative activities.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Australian
researchers Peter Higgs and Stuart Cunningham advanced the idea of a ‘creative
trident’ several years ago, breaking out employment in creative versus support
activities in creative industries as well as creative occupations in other
industries.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In their recently published
collection, <i><a href="http://amzn.to/Y0kqwA" target="_blank">Creative Work Beyond the Creative Industries</a></i> (Edward Elgar
2014), Greg Hearn, Ruth Bridgestock, Ben Goldsmith, and Jess Rodgers argue for
greater attention to the third group of workers employed in creative
occupations or contributing creative services outside the traditional creative
industries.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="line-height: 150%;">In a world where cross-functional and interdisciplinary
teams are not only increasingly the norm but looked to as a source, in their
very diversity of perspectives and experiences, of original thinking and
innovative work, the challenge for leaders is to recognize and yoke together
such differences successfully.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Just as
leaders need to mindful, attentive and sensitive to the different communication
and leadership expectations and norms existing across geographic borders, in
other words, so they should be attuned to the attitudes, perspectives, and expectations
about working together brought by different kinds of creative professionals and
practitioners.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Just as Brazilians are
sensitive and adapt to different ways of working together with those in
Singapore, to take on example, writers need to be sensitive and adapt to the
different ways of working productively with programmers.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="line-height: 150%;">Effectively combining differing technical expertise,
aesthetic preferences, and mental models has long been at the heart of creative
business.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The tension – for some, a
paradox – between the chaos of creativity and the order of business or
management has not only been a challenge to be overcome but a source of the
‘creative friction’ (to use Michael Eisner’s words) needed to generate fresh
ideas.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A ready historical example, drawn
from the ‘creative revolution’ of the 1960s in the advertising industry (as
well as others), involved surmounting the ‘great wall’ between creatives and
suits without losing entirely the productive opposition it represented. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="line-height: 150%;">A similar struggle with the tensions arising from teaming
those with different professional or aesthetic languages, perspectives and
expertise has also long existed among creatives themselves.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As eager as were the first adopters of Bill
Bernbach’s revolutionary coupling of art and copy, finding success in work
together wasn’t easy or straightforward.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>The very first team of art director and copywriter, the legendary Bob
Gage and Phyllis Robinson, whom Bernbach took with him from Grey Advertising
when DDB was founded, were enthusiastic about the new model but often struggled
with its implementation.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As committed as
the two were, their interactions, which were meant to be shaped by constructive
conflict, were often bruising.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But they
ended up producing exceptional and, often, timeless work.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="line-height: 150%;">To extend that example to the present, many are calling for
an expansion or other re-constitution of the core teams in advertising.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>For some, it should be ‘art, copy and
code.’<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>For nearly all, there is a
reckoning that some version of an interdisciplinary, cross-functional or hybrid
team adds value through its combination of multiple points of view, beliefs,
and experiences.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Copywriting, design, digital,
and production, even planning and strategy are among the familiar roles
typically mixed and combined in hopes of generating the best creative outcomes.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="line-height: 150%;">Looking beyond marketing services or brand communications,
the value of recognizing different skills, experiences, and mental models
appears in even sharper relief.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Contemporary design and architecture firms, for example, regularly
integrate a wide range of experts to help shape their work.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>At IDEO, cultural anthropologists observe human
behavior, kinesiologists study bodily movement, mechanical engineers contribute
to the exploration of how physical solutions might be crafted.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Foster & Partners, one of the world’s most
renowned architecture firms, likewise employs a full array of professions,
including acoustics specialists, aerospace engineers, mechanical engineers, and
visual or plastic artists.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="line-height: 150%;">Of course, there is a crucial balance to be struck here – and
also a risk to be acknowledged and averted.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Even as we identify individuals as belonging to certain groups or
professional cultures in order to be more sensitive to their needs and wants
and well-being, we take the risk of viewing them one-dimensionally,
simplistically.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The writers do this and
the digital guys do that.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Even with the
best of intentions, we may reinforce or fetishize categories of professional
work or culture out of proportion.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As
with national or regional cultures or sub-cultures, we may stereotype
unfairly.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Individuals are not simply one
thing or, despite a professional skillset or mindset or pedigree, alike in many
ways.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="line-height: 150%;">Put differently, it is not only a matter of recognizing and
coordinating different skills or knowledge or perspectives in developing
creative solutions to business challenges.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Rather, the deeper task and responsibility of leadership is to understand
that individuals with apparently different professional skills or technical
expertise have often developed through very different experiences.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Their conceptions of what teamwork is, what
successful outcomes or IP rights should be, how creativity relates to business,
indeed their beliefs about and attitudes toward authority and the free market
and are all also potentially distinctive.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Ultimately, the mental models and what management scholar Tarun Khanna
calls the ‘<a href="http://bit.ly/Y0kwEe" target="_blank">contextual intelligence</a>’ of those approaching creative work from
different professional perspectives warrants closer and sustained engagement by
leaders.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="line-height: 150%;">That is the basis of the other cross-cultural
leadership.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The cultures and
sub-cultures – that is, the shared attitudes, preferences, beliefs, and values
but also common actions – of different kinds of creative workers deserve more attention.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The more leaders recognize and remain mindful
of those differences, and of the multiple creative contexts brought to bear by
their increasingly varied creative talent, the better they will be able to
guide and enable the rich diversity of teams and organizations toward
accomplishing shared goals together.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="line-height: 150%;">The challenges faced by leaders of creative teams and
organizations only continue to increase as markets grow more complex,
traditional relationships are transformed, and the skills of workers become
more varied.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Everyone brings distinct
tools, skills and knowledge, often from across disciplines and functions, which
need to be integrated in working together on a task or project.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But perhaps even more importantly, everyone
also brings different expectations, mental models, and solving problems
together.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="line-height: 150%;">Among the guiding tenets of effective creative leadership
today are ongoing self-reflection and self-understanding and the central importance
of forging a vision and purpose around which creative teams and businesses can
rally and work.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Increasingly, as leaders
bring together disciplines, functions and technologies to generate better and
better creative solutions for clients and customers, those leaders also need to
be more attentive and adaptive not merely to the skills brought by diverse creative
workers but their different beliefs, intelligences, and ways of working.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="line-height: 150%;">Such attentiveness and adaptability has the makings of a new
alliance or social contract between creative talent with different attitudes, experiences,
and expectations. It also presents an immense
opportunity for creative leaders willing to understand and engage more fully the
many distinct creative cultures represented in their teams and organizations. <span style="font-size: medium;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
</div>
David Slocumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11148276375463185535noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5982798117993395166.post-72759376363846680732014-08-22T05:41:00.000-04:002014-08-22T06:14:39.819-04:00'The Alliance: Managing Talent in the Networked Age,' by Reid Hoffman, Ben Casnocha, Chris Yeh (Harvard Business Review Press, 2014)<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<div class="MsoNormal">
The implied social contract that has long existed between
larger companies and their workers is evolving.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Often described (by company leaders, at least) as like that of ‘families’,
the relationship between individual employees and firms has typically been defined
in terms of short-term performance and behavioral targets and the rewards or
sanctions that can result.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In many
places, this relationship has become increasingly one-sided, with mounting
obligations of service and performance for individual employees but few
corresponding obligations besides financial compensation to the employee by the
firm.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Recognizing that lack of reciprocity and mutual benefit in
the relationship between employees and firms, many leaders are increasingly
developing innovative workplace policies and practices.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Some of these involve radical restructuring
of corporations themselves, as Tony Hsieh has pursued at Zappo’s by shifting
authority from hierarchy to ‘<a href="http://bit.ly/1nhQvFt" target="_blank">holacracy</a>’, a fractal and democratic governance
system focused on a specific purpose (like customer service).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Others have similarly rethought the central
activity of organizational decision-making, like at <a href="http://bit.ly/1nhQq4C" target="_blank">Dark Horse</a>, the
Berlin-based design firm, where ‘sociocracy’, or so-called circular organizing
among equals, relies on consent rather than autocrat governance.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>More generally, as Richard Sheridan captures
in <u><a href="http://amzn.to/1nhQcuk" target="_blank">Joy, Inc</a></u>. (Portfolio 2013), his inspiring account of Menlo
Innovations, the imperative for many leaders today is to instill more flexibility
and agility in their management of talent as a way to foster a happier and (hence)
more productive workplace. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
As these examples suggest, many current and prominent
attempts are at newer and smaller businesses, where experimentation and
thoroughgoing change are perceived to be easier to implement.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In <u><a href="http://amzn.to/1nhPVHH" target="_blank">The Alliance</a></u>, the new book written
by LinkedIn Chairman and co-founder Reid Hoffman, Ben Cosnacha and Chris Yeh, the
guiding argument is that talent development and management need to be
reconsidered and recast across businesses of all sizes and ages and in all
industries and sectors.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The familiar macro-level
drivers of such reworking include sweeping changes in the economy, blurring of
industry boundaries, and transformations of talent markets.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Yet what is more compelling in the call of
Hoffman and his co-authors is their practical and hands-on approach to engaging
and empowering employees in order to enable mutual value creation benefitting
both individual talents and the firm.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
At the heart of the book is the idea of a ‘tour of duty’ for
individual employees. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Hoffman recounts
using this approach at LinkedIn to get beyond conventional talk about loyalty
or commitment and instead to agree upon specific terms with employees for deals
lasting two to four years.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The LinkedIn
tours replaced open-ended arrangements that might have included fixed-term
contracts but did not acknowledge the rhythms of growth and development experienced
by both employee and company.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>These more
traditional arrangements also tended to leave vague or unspoken the
expectations of both sides about the future and, especially, the possibility of
continuing association.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Crucially, tours
of duty recognize that after a given tour, individual employees often better
serve themselves <u>and the company</u> by going elsewhere.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Rather than being a source of insecurity or
instability, the transparent and shared understanding of what individual and
firm can expect from each other, and for how long, powerfully engenders trust
and encourages greater productivity and well-being.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
No one model or approach fits all talent situations or
organizations, of course, and one of the strengths of the book is that the
‘tour of duty’ model is both itself flexible and one of several options for
shoring up and enhancing relationships between individual employees and
businesses.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Recognizing that ‘stars’ are
different from other employees or that age and industry variations may warrant
different treatment, for example, may be intuitively obvious but are also often
difficult steps for leaders to implement when dealing with real people.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Both in the main text and in several
concretely helpful appendices, which offer sample statements of alliance as
well as exercises on how to ensure alignment of individual and organizational
expectations and goals, Hoffman and his co-authors illuminate the practical
steps that leaders can take to design, launch and sustain successful talent
management alliances.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
What finally distinguishes <u>The Alliance</u>, however, is
its attention to the broader contexts of the networked age indicated in the
subtitle. However provocative and
practically useful to individual leaders and employees in dealing with each
other more openly and reciprocally, the book recognizes how far-reaching is the
potential of optimizing internal company as well as external networks for
growth. Put differently, while the alliance
between individual talent and company may be a productive breakthrough for
both, even more consequential are the individual and industry networks that today
enable unprecedented connections between people, ideas and opportunities. These connections provide the basis for
individuals and companies to invest in each other and develop mutually defined
and beneficial relationships. Thanks to
the excellent work of Hoffman, Casnocha and Yeh, we now have a clear,
insightful and practically-oriented guide to building new and network-supported
alliances with talent that have the potential to transform our leadership, our
employees, and our businesses.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<o:p></o:p></div>
</div>
David Slocumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11148276375463185535noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5982798117993395166.post-48420875962296293792014-07-27T17:22:00.001-04:002014-07-27T17:22:35.837-04:00Building New Strategies with Lessons of the Past<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<div class="MsoNormal">
At last month’s Cannes Lions festival, I had the privilege
of participating in a session with advertising legend Chuck Porter on “building
new strategies for creative excellence.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>The session was organized by the Berlin School of Creative Leadership around
the contrast between strategic insights drawn from the successful creative work
of his agency, Crispin Porter + Bogusky, and more orthodox strategic approaches
associated with Harvard Business School Professor Michael E. Porter (no
relation).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In preparation, my Berlin
School colleague, Professor Paul Verdin, and I had drafted a <a href="http://www.berlin-school.com/fileadmin/Redaktion/documents/Berlin_School_Porter_vs_Porter_White_Paper_2014.pdf" target="_blank">White Paper</a> on the
topic.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The session and paper yielded several conclusions about new
priorities for building strategy for creative excellence.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>For example, while acknowledging the greater need
for flexibility and speed in decision-making today, we identified the persisting
importance of making adaptive commitments to brand values and strategic
priorities.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Likewise, we identified
other crucial principles: serving communities of participation, building trust
through storytelling, and finally recognizing accumulative value creation
rather than pursuing competitive advantage for strategic success.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Overall, we proposed a fundamental shift from
the traditional, largely adversarial orientation focused on competitors to an
emphasis on value creation through the engagement of customers.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
In doing so, the White Paper picked up on several currents
of thought about the evolution of strategy.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Customer-centricity, involving better understanding and engagement of
customers as well as enhancing capabilities for serving customers, is one such
stream.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Another is the transformation of
traditional value chain and scale economies by digital technologies and an
information economy whose creation, distribution, and transaction costs have an
entirely different structure.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Perhaps
best-known, to use the title of Rita Gunther McGrath’s 2013 book, is “the end
of competitive advantage.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Rather than
achieving a long-term, stable and sustainable market position in a well-defined
industry, following Michael Porter, the new world of strategy is marked by
developing a portfolio of transient advantages able to capture shifting
“connections between customers and solutions.” <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
At same time as the Cannes festival, another debate around
innovation and disruption began roiling.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Jill Lepore, a professor of history at Harvard (in the Faculty of Arts
and Science, not Business School), published a withering <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2014/06/23/140623fa_fact_lepore?currentPage=all" target="_blank">piece</a> on the
contemporary “gospel of innovation” in <i>The New Yorker</i>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“The Disruption Machine” took on the
prevailing model of disruptive innovation associated with Clayton Christensen,
another Harvard Business School faculty member.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>His theory contends that while an incumbent firm seeks to maintain its market
advantage through sustaining, or incremental, technological innovations, it is
often overtaken by new entrants whose disruptive innovations, typically offered
at lower-cost and with lower-performing technologies, end up remaking the
market and leading to the failure of the incumbent firm.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Lepore alleged the theory, which she
extracted primarily from Christensen’s groundbreaking 1997 <i>The Innovator’s
Dilemma</i>, mistakenly explained the emergence of new technologies and the dynamics
of firms.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In doing so, she also
personalized the critique by questioning the integrity of his research and his
claims about the theory’s ability to predict market failures. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In a <i>Bloomberg BusinessWeek</i>
<a href="http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-06-20/clayton-christensen-responds-to-new-yorker-takedown-of-disruptive-innovation" target="_blank">interview</a>, Christensen responded briefly and quizzically both about the
personal nature of the attack and the lack of actual difference in their
questioning of innovation.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Much commentary and side-taking has ensued. Many pieces noted how “disruption,” in
particular, had become an overused shorthand for innovation-driven (some would
say, -fixated) entrepreneurs and businesses.
On Vox.com, for instance, Timothy B. Lee’s <a href="http://bit.ly/1mRlpb2" target="_blank">post</a> was tellingly titled,
“Disruption is a dumb buzzword. It’s
also an important concept.” Kevin Roose similarly wrote on nymag.com that,
<a href="http://nym.ag/1mRlQCf" target="_blank">“</a><span style="color: #111111; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><a href="http://nym.ag/1mRlQCf" target="_blank">for actual disruption to work best,‘disruption’ has got to go.”</a> </span><span style="color: #111111; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> Some comments took on the larger state of innovation in
both business and management studies.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In
the <i>Financial Times</i>, Andrew Hill thus made the <a href="http://on.ft.com/1mRkOWS" target="_blank">case</a> for a more measured
use of the theory of disruption, citing its relevance to analyzing corporate
failures like Kodak and Blackberry.</span> </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
While Christensen has understandably been at the heart of many
of these discussions, Michael Porter’s place has also been important.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>On <u><a href="http://onforb.es/SZBPSx" target="_blank">Forbes.com</a></u>, Stephen Denning wrote
that Lepore had been “the assistant to the assistant of Porter” and he then
cast her attack in terms of the conflicting views of Porter and Christensen. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Specifically, this meant distinguishing the
strategic goals of maximizing shareholder value and creating and maintaining
customers.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The recent imbroglio around
disruption is a “symptom,” in Denning’s word, of a more far-reaching debate
around core assumptions of contemporary management and business.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
In fact, among the most important lessons of the Lepore-Christensen
exchange seem precisely the value of reflecting on and wrestling with one’s own
guiding principles and assumptions in business leadership.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That lesson was also a basis of the Porter
vs. Porter White Paper and Cannes session.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Such questioning can include:<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
1. <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Language</b> <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Too often, as with “disruption,” we use or overuse language
without fuller explanation or understanding.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Sometimes context is lacking.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>For
those in creative and marketing communications, for instance, Jean-Marie Dru,
now the Chairman of the TBWA Worldwide advertising agency, developed the
distinct concept and specific creative methodology of “<a href="http://www.tbwa.com/disruption-2" target="_blank">disruption</a>” at the same
time as Christensen in the mid-1990s.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>More generally, as I wrote in a recent <a href="http://jdsviews.blogspot.de/2014/05/saying-innovation-or-creativity-is-not.html" target="_blank">post</a>,
we don’t take adequate care in our everyday usage of key words like innovation and
creativity to ensure clear and effective communication of their meaning in
given situations.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
2.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Assumptions and Contexts</b><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
If the language around disruption or innovation would benefit
from greater care and precision of usage, the assumptions underpinning that
language can likewise have greater impact when more fully understood.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This is not to suggest, of course, that any
discussion of innovation should revert to exploring the finer points of
Christensen’s (or Porter’s) research.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It
is, however, to posit the value of stepping back and assessing the larger ideas
behind, or wider implications of, specific potential decisions, actions or
strategies.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Some of the best
commentaries on Lepore and Christensen, like <a href="http://bit.ly/TQSBE1" target="_blank">John Hagel’s</a>, are illuminating exactly
because they analyze seemingly familiar ideas more acutely and pose bigger
questions. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
3. <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Beyond Prediction</b><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
One of Lepore’s major critiques in “The Disruption Machine”
is how poorly Christensen’s model predicts business success or failure due to
disruptive innovation. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Similarly, in the
Cannes session, Chuck Porter observed how our White Paper about his agency’s
creative work amounted to “backfilling” explanations for earlier strategic and
creative work that may not be practically useful going forward.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Any prediction or forecasting for an
increasingly uncertain future is obviously challenging.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Yet predicting the future is not the only
standard or purpose for analyzing and modeling the past.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Even more, as Lepore herself allows (in
quoting a recent <i>New York Times</i> <a href="http://bit.ly/Vhff9N" target="_blank">report</a> on innovation), “disruption is a
predictable pattern across many industries” – patterns being a matter of deeper
understanding and far different from concrete predictions about future performance
at specific firms. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
4. <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Models and
Theories – and Learning</b><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The distinction is essential.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As an educator who uses historical cases and models,
my priority is often to connect particular examples to wider patterns.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>However, the purpose in doing so is not the
connections themselves but to help build individuals’ capacities for effective
analysis and action.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Those capacities
are enabled by learning multiple examples and experiences, models and patterns,
<i>and</i> developing the discernment and agility to use them, as appropriate, to
make sense of different situations and contexts. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Models and theories, like that of disruptive
innovation, are always only potential means for conducting analyses. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Rather than ends in themselves, we should look
to them to help us improve our thinking, sharpen frames of reference, and
ultimately serve as aids to better understanding, decisions, and
problem-solving.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></div>
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David Slocumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11148276375463185535noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5982798117993395166.post-5241391883064162732014-07-04T15:36:00.003-04:002014-07-04T15:58:50.706-04:00Review of 'Collective Genius: The Art and Practice of Leading Innovation,' by Linda A. Hill, Greg Brandeau, Emily Truelove & Kent Lineback (Boston: Harvard Business Review Press, 2014)<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">The Introduction to <i>Collective Genius: The Art and Practice of Leading Innovation</i> calls for a
different kind of leader who creates organizations both willing and able to
innovate. From that innocuous opening,
this new study quickly moves to engage the challenges and complexities confronting
those wanting to enable innovation. Much
of the complexity is captured in six paradoxes – from “support” and
“confrontation” to “bottom up” and “top down” – that create ongoing
tension. These are then summarized in a
“fundamental paradox” between “unleashing” and “harnessing” the talents in an
organization. Through the dozen case
studies that follow, these paradoxes demonstrate not only the potential of
different kinds of leaders but the value of different kinds of <i>thinking</i>
about leadership in fostering and driving innovation.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">In less capable hands, such a reliance on paradoxes or tensions
in describing leadership might reflect indecisive or incomplete analysis.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>For Linda A. Hill, Greg Brandeau, Emily
Truelove, and Kent Lineback, it instead conveys with evidence and assurance the
complicated realities of new organizational forms and behaviors.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In fact, despite its presentation of a series
of individual leaders, the book establishes a category of its own that yokes
together the best of conventional analyses of leadership and innovation.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The result is an invaluable guide to enabling
collaboration and collective behavior at a time when innovation and creative
problem-solving are increasingly the norm.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">The first major section of <i>Collective Genius</i>
addresses how leaders create a <b>willingness</b> to do the hard work of
innovation.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There are three major
challenges here:</span></div>
<ul style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit; text-indent: -0.25in;">
<li><span style="font-family: inherit; text-indent: -0.25in;">Purpose: Why we exist</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: inherit; text-indent: -0.25in;">Shared Values: What we agree is important</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: inherit; text-indent: -0.25in;">Rules of Engagement: How we interact with each
other and think about problems</span></li>
</span></ul>
<span style="font-family: inherit; text-indent: -0.25in;">
</span>
<div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Defining these elements helps to create a context in which
others can innovate. </span><span style="font-family: inherit;">Looking at
Volkswagen and Pentagram, the design agency, the authors offer practical
instances of encouraging risk-taking, trying new ideas, and building solutions
together to form a greater sense of community.</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">The second major section takes on how leaders can create the
<b>ability</b> to do the hard work of innovation.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is also defined in three aspects: </span><br />
<ul style="text-align: left;">
<li><span style="font-family: inherit; text-indent: -0.25in;">Creative Abrasion: The ability to generate ideas
through discourse and debate</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: inherit; text-indent: -0.25in;">Creative Agility: The ability to test and
experiment through quick pursuit, </span><span style="font-family: inherit; text-indent: -0.25in;">reflection and </span><span style="font-family: inherit; text-indent: -0.25in;">adjustment</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: inherit; text-indent: -0.25in;">Creative Resolution: The ability to make
integrative decisions that combine disparate or even </span><span style="font-family: inherit; text-indent: -0.25in;">opposing ideas</span></li>
</ul>
</div>
</div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Together, these organizational skills correspond to the
major elements of the innovation process – collaboration, decision-based
learning, and integrative decision-making.
</span><span style="font-family: inherit;">Tracking efforts at Pixar, eBay in Germany, and Google, the authors offer
examples of how practically these skills can be operationalized and also
integrated with each other. </span><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Amidst all the discussion of innovation processes and
organizational behavior, how exactly do leaders fit here?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They may be visionaries – but don’t have to
be.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Even if they are, they don’t hold
forth and inspire from the mountaintop.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Instead, the role of the leader is re-cast again and again in these
pages.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Vineet Nayer, of HCL, is a
“social architect”; Larry Smarr of Calit2, “a dot-connector extraordinaire”;
and managers at Google, according to then CEO Eric Schmidt, “aggregators of
viewpoints, not dictators of decisions.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>What is consistent in <i>Collective Genius</i> is that traditional
formal authority gives way to nimble orchestration, informal facilitation, and
contributions to community-building.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">The real hero for Hill and her co-authors, as a result, is less
the individual than the innovation eco-system.
Successful leaders, they conclude, work to create innovation
environments “in which the unique <i>slices of genius</i> in their organization
are rendered into a single work of <i>collective genius</i>.” Moreover, and this is ultimately the
book's most illuminating lesson, that collective genius not only yields more
sustainable innovation but transforms leadership itself. </span></div>
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<o:p></o:p></div>
</div>
</div>
David Slocumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11148276375463185535noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5982798117993395166.post-30432901695859677712014-06-20T18:03:00.000-04:002014-06-21T01:37:23.696-04:00Building New Strategies for Creative Excellence: Michael Porter vs. Chuck Porter<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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On Thursday evening, June 19, I had the privilege of
presenting ideas for 'building new strategies for creative excellence' at the Cannes
Lions International Festival of Creativity. The session grew out of a
White Paper with the same title co-authored with my Berlin School of Creative
Leadership colleague, Professor Paul Verdin. Guiding both session and paper were a series of contrasts drawn between the strategic thinking of Harvard Professor Michael Porter and the strategy Paul and I identified in the words and work of advertising legend Chuck Porter. (The full paper is
downloadable <a href="http://bit.ly/1quxJAv" target="_blank">here</a>.)<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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The Executive Summary reads:<o:p></o:p></div>
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Strategy is changing amidst volatile markets, disruptive
technologies, and transformed customer and public relationships. Contrasting
some of the major tenets of traditional strategic thinking, an analysis of the
work and words of Chuck Porter enables the mapping of several key principles of
a new strategy of creative excellence. These include 1) forming an
adaptive commitment to strategic intent and ongoing public engagement, 2)
fostering communities of participation as part of generating a wider cultural
conversation of creative work, 3) building trust through imaginative, often
offbeat and interactive storytelling, and 4) moving beyond competition to
highlight the value emerging through creative breakthroughs or
community-building.<o:p></o:p></div>
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The following images give a further sense of the contrast we draw between the 'Five Forces' model of industry competition that shape firm strategy of Michael Porter and the emergent Forces that enable value creation we associate with Chuck Porter.</div>
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David Slocumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11148276375463185535noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5982798117993395166.post-39438714919509171582014-06-14T03:07:00.003-04:002014-06-14T03:07:27.487-04:00Cannes Lions as Global Creative Leadership Classroom<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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The <a href="http://bit.ly/1p3UE1J" target="_blank">Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity</a> held
each June is the world’s leading celebration of brand communications and
creativity. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The official programme of
the week-long festival combines a dizzying array of industry and agency
showcases, formal seminars, lectures, workshops, teaching academies, and award
shows.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Arguably even more happens
unofficially, with agency and holding companies gathering their global talent
and leadership, often with clients, in meetings and parties, and with informal business
meetings and social gatherings occurring around the clock.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
For each of the last five years, the <a href="http://bit.ly/y3CzcL" target="_blank">Berlin School ofCreative Leadership</a> has partnered with Cannes Lions to offer the premiere
educational programme among the many held at the festival.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The <a href="http://bit.ly/1p3V8ot" target="_blank">Cannes Creative Leaders Programme</a> (CCLP) begins
with six intensive days of leadership training in Berlin followed by six days
of the festival curation and closed-door sessions with industry leaders in
Cannes.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>While individual faculty,
industry speakers and sessions provide many specific insights to programme
participants, CCLP also emphasizes how more generally to learn from the
festival itself – from Cannes as a model classroom for creative excellence. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The result is a fresh approach to sustaining
creative and intellectual stimulation both within individual businesses and at
other idea and creativity festivals.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
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<div class="MsoNormal">
Here are a handful of the touchstones we urge participants
to adopt in making the most from the festival:<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraph" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: Symbol; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">·<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";">
</span></span></span><!--[endif]--><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Relevance<o:p></o:p></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
Why should I care about what’s said
or shown on the stage at Cannes when we are pursuing creative excellence?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It’s a large question but an essential one:
beyond the hype and personality cults and justifiable admiration for strong imaginative
work, what is relevant to my own creative leadership and why?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Is a brand, client or consumer problem being defined
and an original solution being plotted, one or both of which may be relevant to
my own situation (either now or in the foreseeable future)?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Direct relevance and applicability are not
the only tests of value, of course, but particularly in sessions featuring
high-profile individuals or agencies, we do well by asking what concretely are
the ideas or insights being shared and how are they relevant to our own
work.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Too often, on big stages in Cannes
and elsewhere (from other live events like MIPTV for television professionals to
online offerings like TED), we partake in what I call “popcorn creative
thinking” – easy and even enjoyable to consume in the moment but failing to
provide any real nourishment or impact. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The more we question relevance and value, the
more sharply we gather knowledge and insights from others that can help to make
us better leaders.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
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<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: Symbol; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">·<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";">
</span></span></span><!--[endif]--><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Inspiration<o:p></o:p></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
Part of what animates Cannes is a
core tenet of creative leadership and all creative work: inspiration.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We’re inspired by the examples of new
standards of work that move the industry forward and even improve society, the
innovative solutions to business and human problems, and the perspectives of
leading voices and thinkers.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Inspiration
doesn’t always readily pass the relevance test, but it is vital to advancing
creative excellence.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The challenge is to
know how to take the inspiration of a Cannes session or speaker (or, again, those
at any number of other events) back home to enrich our own work.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Sometimes the answer is as simple as
reflecting on what kind of inspiration we’re experiencing.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In its <a href="http://bit.ly/1p3ViMA" target="_blank">2012 CEO survey</a>, IBM looked closely at
what constituted inspirational leadership and revealed five major
characteristics: creating a compelling vision, driving stretch goals, hewing to
shared principles, exercising enthusiasm, and guiding with expertise.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>By asking that additional question – how <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">specifically</i> are we being inspired? – we
increase the likelihood of taking away practical knowledge of how to sustain
the inspiration of the moment and use it to lead others.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: Symbol; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">·<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";">
</span></span></span><!--[endif]--><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Idea Events
<o:p></o:p></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
Part of the attraction, even magic,
of Cannes Lions is that it happens only once a year.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Thousands gather from around the world and
produce a singular, energetic mass of industry voices, experience and
successful work.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The festival
consequently becomes what anthropologists call a “tournament of values,” a site
where the priorities of a community, here of global creative communication
professionals, determines its leading values, standards and priorities.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Tracking closely which values – or ideas,
debates, challenges, and kinds of work – are highlighted and celebrated helps
further our understanding of the shape and future of the industry.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Viewed this way as a hothouse of industry ideas,
however, Cannes Lions also becomes a model for us as individual leaders to
stimulate thinking and engage diverse ideas more consistently.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Put in more practical terms, how do we as
creative leaders construct similar opportunities for our teams or businesses to
learn from and be inspired by multiple voices and engage in industry-defining
debates and conversations?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Many
organizations, large and small, from BBDO’s Digital Lab to Pixar University,
have institutionalized such continuing engagement with diverse and innovative
ideas.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The question remains for us, how
are we doing so in ours?<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraph" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: Symbol; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">·<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";">
</span></span></span><!--[endif]--><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Creativity
Voyeurism<o:p></o:p></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
Common to testing relevance,
sustaining inspiration, and continuing engagement with diverse ideas is the
challenge of actively taking home the experiences and insights of Cannes and
making them a part of our own creative leadership practice.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Again, not all lessons or experiences of
Cannes Lions or other events can or should be immediately applicable (some of
what happens in Cannes should indeed stay in Cannes…).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But too often, the big names, the
trend-setting work, and the fresh ideas – and a kind of romance with creativity
they often come to represent – can turn us into passive viewers and admirers.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As an educator of professionals and
executives, this tendency casts light on a special imperative for me in any
setting in which I work: what will you do with what you’ve learned?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>For creatives, the added burden of what I
call “creativity voyeurism” can dull our capacity to embrace and transfer the
rich diversity of ideas we experience.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Put simply, often the greatest challenge of participating in Cannes
Lions or any idea festival is to act concretely and locally after the event is
over.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraph" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: Symbol; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">·<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";">
</span></span></span><!--[endif]--><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Making
the Story Your Own<o:p></o:p></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
We have the good fortune to be
living in (and hopefully contributing to) a golden age of creativity and
innovation in business. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>From reading <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Fast Company</i>, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Inc. </i>and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Entrepreneur </i>to
following our favorite TED-talks and video blogs to attending Cannes Lions and
SXSW, we are awash in tales of creative leadership, bleeding-edge practices,
and innovative possibility.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Yet the
voyeurism I’ve mentioned, while allowing us to be cocktail-party conversant in
what our creative heroes are doing, can easily leave us doing little if any
comparable work ourselves.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>One of the
exercises we do in CCLP is to respond to sessions, speakers or experiences at
Cannes Lions by creating our own individual stories about them.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They may be stories we would tell our bosses,
our clients, our friends or loved ones and they may speak to the opportunity,
awe or even irrelevance of the ideas or experiences.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But what’s crucial is that the stories of
creativity become <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">ours</i>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In the crucible of storymaking, we at least
begin to transfer the creative leadership, learning and experience of others to
ourselves.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In that way, we take a
critical step toward making real <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">for us </i>the
extraordinary ideas, insights, excitement, and possibilities of Cannes. <o:p></o:p></div>
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David Slocumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11148276375463185535noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5982798117993395166.post-42992845933504662572014-06-05T01:33:00.002-04:002014-06-05T01:41:16.830-04:00'The Soft Edge: Where Great Companies Find Lasting Success,' by Rich Karlgaard (Wiley)<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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For Rich Karlgaard, publisher of <u>Forbes</u> and writer of
its “Innovation Rules” column, businesses able to create and sustain success do
so by balancing attention and development of a strategic base, a hard edge and
a soft edge.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Each of those edges is
constituted, in turn, by five elements.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Historically, managers have tended to focus
on the hard edge as the basis of business success, favoring its more clearly
concrete and measurable focus on speed, cost, supply chain, logistics, and capital efficiency in decision-making and the fight for organizational
resources. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The soft edge, by contrast,
has until recently been viewed, as secondary, fuzzy and, yes, soft, values that
are nice to have but not at the core of lasting success.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Karlgaard’s new book, <u>The Soft Edge</u>,
seeks to re-set those priorities. <o:p></o:p></div>
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Most of the book is taken up exploring the five deep values
of the soft edge.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><b>Trust</b> between leaders
and their teams, and colleagues more generally, is needed to create grit, the ability
to sustain interest in and effort toward very long-term goals (as advanced by
Angela Duckworth).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><b>Smarts</b> takes the idea
of grit and contends that it helps to accelerate and sustain learning, both
learning new things and solving novel problems and applying the outcomes of
learning. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><b>Teams</b>, marked by chemistry,
passion and grit, are where the hard work of combining and building on
different perspectives and shared values take place.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><b>Taste</b> is the discernment that guides the
design process, a broader sensibility that deploys teamwork to generate abiding
experiences for customers.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><b>Story</b> is the
source of persuasion in the market but also of purpose and motivation for teams
and organizations, even when those stories are increasingly told better by
outsiders, like customers, and data.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Of the five values, taste is perhaps the book’s most
distinctive contribution for leaders seeking to build brands, organizations,
and lasting success.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Karlgaard breaks
out that sensibility into function, form and finally meaning, indicating how
all three must combine to create “an emotional engagement” or demonstrate “the
significance and associations customers experience with a product” or
service.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The resulting complex and
well-integrated experience flies in the face of classical business ideas like
building economies of scale, as he acknowledges, shifting focus from pursuing
cost advantage over competition to delivering more substantially to
customers.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Summing up this priority, Margit
Wennmachers of Andreesen Horowitz is quoted to say, “taste is a matter of really
understanding your customer on a very, very fundamental level.” <o:p></o:p></div>
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Using the example of Specialized Bicycle’s data analysis of
wind resistance in designing high-performance bicycles, Karlgaard argues how
leaders should seek to combine design, creativity and data for memorable
experiences today.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>One of the
commendable features of <u>The Soft Edge</u> is its consistent attention to how
the tools of the digital age and the knowledge production and management that
makes those tools all the more important have altered the business landscape.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In fact, the book closes with a sustained
discussion across the five values of how important is the collaboration of CMOs
and CIOs for businesses to be successful amidst the increasing complexity of messaging
and marketing platforms shaped by sensors, computers, and analytics.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Specifically how and when to apply the values of the soft
edge, particularly in coordination with <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>each
other and the elements of the other edges, is mostly not discussed here.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Nor is there an elaboration of the
potentially distinct approaches to developing soft edge values and, again,
their balance, with other core elements of lasting value, in different kinds of
businesses, particularly creative ones.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Even at its most evocative, as in the closing call for leaders to
operate in the “elusive sweet spot between data truth and human truth,” the
book also leaves largely open the matter of how to work in that zone effectively.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>More than once while reading, I hoped that a Soft
Edge “Workbook” might soon appear to help leaders and others to take and
implement the wealth of practically helpful thinking here.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(Several related tools, including a free
self-assessment of individual leadership needs and opportunities related to the
values of the soft edge, are available online at <a href="http://bit.ly/TJRWFg">http://bit.ly/TJRWFg</a>).<o:p></o:p></div>
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Yet even without additional guidance for implementation, the
model of organizational success in <u>The Soft Edge</u> provides many useful
spurs to those striving to improve their businesses.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Producing and sustaining high performance
depends of striking the right balance of hard and soft skills in given settings
and situations.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Karlgaard’s useful
insights and varied business examples offer a valuable resource for leaders
committed to thinking deeply about and engaging in their own organizations the
too-often-neglected values of the soft edge.<o:p></o:p></div>
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David Slocumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11148276375463185535noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5982798117993395166.post-85586433607293602442014-05-24T05:04:00.000-04:002014-05-24T05:04:08.455-04:00Saying 'Innovation' or 'Creativity' Is Not Enough<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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“What’s the opposite of innovation?,” the joke begins.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A tart punchline quickly follows: “Innovation
consultants.” <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
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Since I teach, coach and sometimes consult on innovation and
creative leadership, that cynical joke gives me pause.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Consultants of all kinds are easy marks, of
course, whether they are from well-known global firms or one-person shops.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But it is innovation, as an idea and,
increasingly, the basis of a cottage industry for consulting, advising,
coaching and even counseling, that is the real target here.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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Isn’t innovation good, though?, we ask.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Doesn’t thinking, designing, building and
leading for innovation enable firms of all kinds to create and capture value? <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Doesn’t imaginative collaboration, teaming, and
organizing lead to breakthroughs that can transform businesses, industries and
even markets?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Doesn’t innovation
ultimately benefit individuals by encouraging and nurturing self-awareness,
empathy, courage, and growth – human values that help contribute to personal
fulfillment?<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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All true.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Yet that very
sweep and sprawl of meanings is part of the problem.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Innovation is everywhere, from social and political agendas and corporate mission and
vision statements to strategic positioning and brand marketing priorities to team charters
and individual performance goals.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Likewise, creativity, often in adjectival form, has become a necessary
qualifier for nearly all aspects of management and operations: leadership,
strategy, talent management, organizational design, customer or client
relationships, collaboration, and teamwork.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Even creative accounting has become a worthy aspiration (just not “too”
creative…).<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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The expanded usage, to be sure, reflects some far-reaching
and very real economic and historical shifts that have recently foregrounded
aspects of creativity and innovation for individuals, firms and larger
economies.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I myself often assert that
“creativity is the new normal” to underscore the unprecedented opportunities,
even necessities, facing businesses in a world where technology is transforming
old and new industries alike.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>My
question here is whether the words themselves, asked to say so much in their
varied and continual usage, increasingly end up saying little or nothing at
all.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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There is no shortage of models, frameworks and typologies
attempting to break out and define more precise and different meanings. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Classic distinctions of “innovation,” many well-drawn
by some of our most astute observers and analysts of business and management,
tend to delve deeply into specific areas. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We might think here of Clayton Christensen on disruptive
innovation, Gary Hamel on management innovation, and Vijay Govindarajan on
reverse innovation.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And so many other
qualifiers of the word have become commonplace: incremental, radical, architectural,
modular, technological, knowledge, product, process and so on.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Much more typically, though, both
“innovation” and “creativity” are used generically by firms themselves,
consultancies, the popular and business press, the blogosphere, and even some
academic research to burnish a diverse but finally vague range of insights,
tools and management practices.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Having an excess of overlapping and alternative tools and models
is fine, of course, for leaders on the ground who use them to gain greater
insights about, or to address directly, specific situations.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That assumes, however, a thorough familiarity
with these different innovative approaches and how (or, more fundamentally, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">if</i>) to apply them usefully to those
specific situations.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Here we might
return to the question of innovation consultants.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What is the precise form of expertise they
offer?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Launching start-ups based on
original ideas, developing new products or services for established firms,
redesigning work processes, nurturing creative people or cultures, re-drawing
business models?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Maybe all of those.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Or maybe none.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The challenge is finding the right fit of
specific capabilities and experience from the growing constellation of
offerings made using the same terms.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
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How did our usage of “innovation” and “creativity” spiral
out of control?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>From recent history, we
might start looking in the 1980s-1990s.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>The redefinition of creative work, industries and economies, began then
in the UK and was furthered elsewhere by analysts like Richard Florida, who repositioned
creativity as a driving force in the (re-)development of cities, societies and
economies. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>More generally at the same
time, though hearkening back to the early 20<sup>th</sup> century writings of Joseph
Schumpeter, a doctrine of “innovation economics” emerged in the work of a
diverse group of theorists and analysts to argue that knowledge, innovation and
entrepreneurship are not outliers but essential to economic growth and
productivity.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
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Yet probably nothing has had as great an impact as the
profound developments that have occurred in Silicon Valley (and the larger technology
economy to which it has been central). <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Combining a mythology of individual ingenuity, a culture of business entrepreneurship,
and a demonstrated potential for world-changing invention, Silicon Valley has
become a vital source for popular and corporate imaginings of creativity and
innovation.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Even as the technologies
produced there have transformed lives, societies and economies around the
world, the thinking and language of openness, risk-taking, start-ups, and
innovation has spread as far.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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Amidst the concern that tech firms are in the midst of
another financial bubble, with unjustifiably high market valuations potentially
ready to burst, I see another Silicon Valley bubble in play.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It involves the inflation of certain ways of
thinking and talking about innovation that originated in and around tech firms.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">language
bubble</i>, or what we might otherwise see as an internally-referencing echo
chamber, grows through a continuing series of blogposts, websites, magazine
articles, and books that largely re-package the same practices, policies and
behaviors as being conducive to innovation and creativity.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
What would Google do?, we ask.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A loose grouping of ideas and beliefs and
leading practices have come increasingly to represent current thinking about
how all organizations, regardless of industry or market, can best cultivate
innovative and creative work.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Much of
this is enormously positive, both fulfilling for people and productive for
organizations.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In the process, the
larger popular and practical discourse around Silicon Valley-style innovation
has grown and grown.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>One consequence is
what Bill O’Connor, of Autodesk, calls “innovation pornography,” in which too
many people become voyeurs, rapturously watching others innovate without doing
so themselves.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Another is the myth that
creativity and original thinking can solve any problem or develop an idea the
world will eventually embrace.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
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While I do believe fully in that problem-solving and even society-transforming potential, my point is that the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">generic </i>superpower of creativity or innovation will not be the
force to do so.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Rather, it is by
understanding how creativity and innovation, even with all their inherent
messiness, disorder, and indirectness, need specific situations and contexts in
order to flourish and effect meaningful change.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Innovation and creativity, writ large and generic, are not strategic silver bullets.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
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A challenge I regularly pose to executives is to ask themselves
“the follow-up question” about key words they use to characterize themselves or
their firms.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>So once they’ve identified
their core values, for example, they need to probe more deeply what those
values mean to them and the situations in which they’re working.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Trust, growth, inspiration, and purpose are all
admirable values.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Yet they can mean very
different things to different people and in different leadership
situations.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What do those words mean to
you, I ask, and why are they so important?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Innovation and creativity, I contend, warrant the same depth of
reflection and elaboration.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
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To begin, you might ask yourself such questions as:<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraph" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: Symbol; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">·<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";">
</span></span></span><!--[endif]--><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">What are
your benchmarks or examples when you speak of innovation? How relevant are they
to your existing situation – and your people, culture, industry, market(s), and
customers?</b><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Even the most inspiring
general cases of innovation – think of Edison’s light bulb, the Manhattan
Project, or the pirates at Apple who developed the Macintosh – may have no
relevance to the innovation that’s right for you, now.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Choose your examples, the stars that guide
you, wisely and appropriately.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraph" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: Symbol; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">·<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";">
</span></span></span><!--[endif]--><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Going
further, which examples of successful innovation and creative work <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">outside of Silicon Valley</i> (especially
the usual suspects like Apple, Google, and Facebook) do you reference and seek
to emulate?</b><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>While there’s much to
admire, learn and adopt from the tech firms that have over the last two decades
been so successful, their policies and practices may not be directly helpful to
firms of various sizes across industries and at different stages of growth. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Instructive examples are everywhere.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>To wit, I recently worked with the leader of
a tech start-up whose breakthrough thinking emerged, counter-intuitively, from
the practices of a century-old manufacturing firm.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraph" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: Symbol; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">·<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";">
</span></span></span><!--[endif]--><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">And if
you’re in an established firm, how many of your benchmarks come from start-ups?</b><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Yes, you can and should likewise learn and
draw from the approaches and actions of entrepreneurial start-ups, and elements
of models like Eric Ries’ Lean Start-Up, but only if they’re applicable to and
align with your own specific goals.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraph" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: Symbol; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">·<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";">
</span></span></span><!--[endif]--><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Is your
entire organization, from people and performance metrics to strategic goals and
resource allocation, guided by the same fuller understanding of innovation –
that is, what you’re pursuing together, how, and why?</b> <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Managing the language of innovation requires
both thoughtful consideration and development across organizations <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">and </i>ongoing effective communication.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The only leadership work harder than creating
a collective vision for organizational innovation is sustaining the shared
understanding and motivation that will enable its successful execution.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraph" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: Symbol; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">·<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";">
</span></span></span><!--[endif]--><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Once
you’ve developed your own fuller understanding of what you mean when you say
innovation, ask if this is the innovation you and your team unit or firm <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">really</i> need.</b><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>All leaders need to forge the future and all
organizations need to change.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The
question is how best to do so.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Aligning
specific kinds of innovation with individual organizational needs, capabilities
and situations requires careful effort but is crucial.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
This isn’t just an academic exercise.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Thoughtful leaders have long recognized the
value of auditing their current innovation or creativity activities, needs and
capabilities.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As time has passed and
both words have been used more and more, it also seems increasingly useful to conduct an
innovation and creativity <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">language</i>
audit.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What do you mean when you say that
innovation is a core value or a strategic priority?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What does specifying creative talent
development mean for the shape and orientation of a HR processes or
organizational learning?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>More generally,
how does innovation or creativity practically differentiate decisions,
behaviors and results?<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
More than five decades ago, Theodore Levitt wrote “Creativity
Is Not Enough,” one of the most famous articles in the history of marketing
management.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Today, the words of his title
arguably resonate in distinct ways.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The ubiquity
of “innovation” and “creativity” in the language of business and management is threatening
to empty them of meaning.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Increasingly,
neither is sufficient to convey the vision, inspiration, newness, value, and
strategy that drive a given leader, unit or firm.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
How do we change that?
One use at a time. By doing the
hard work of understanding and clarifying the newness, utility, value and
change that we really envision and seek in specific situations. Each of us needs to help take back the power of
the words. Next time you say or write “innovation”
or “creativity,” pause. How would you
qualify those key words? Or how else,
beyond using placeholders, would you make your point? Most simply, what do you really mean when
you say and act on “innovation” or creativity” – and are you making that important
meaning clear to others?</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<o:p></o:p></div>
</div>
David Slocumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11148276375463185535noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5982798117993395166.post-51357743013849053402014-05-01T02:05:00.000-04:002014-05-01T02:33:45.529-04:00'Creativity Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces that Stand in the Way of True Inspiration', by Ed Catmull, with Amy Wallace (Random House)<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<div class="MsoNormal">
At first glance, the new book about Pixar, <i>Creativity,
Inc.</i>, seems like a deluxe version of the account of creative enterprise and
management with which we have become increasingly familiar. With war stories of perseverance and eventual
success in the market, hard-won advice on how to overcome obstacles to
creativity (as promised in the subtitle), and a concluding set of leadership
principles, my first impression was that this would be an entertaining if
inspiring victory lap for a storied creative organization. </div>
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Pixar President Ed Catmull, with Amy Wallace, has produced something much, much
more.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It’s one of the half-dozen best
books that have been written about creative business and creative
leadership.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Ever.<o:p></o:p></div>
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The “Thoughts for Managing a Creative Culture,” which close
the volume, themselves offer a master class in creative leadership.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>From managing fear and failure in an
organization to protecting new ideas and imposing productive limits, these are 33
gems. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Yet with characteristic sagacity,
Catmull makes clear how these principles should be viewed as starting points
rather than ends to be achieved.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Indeed,
the book’s last words are to avoid confusing the process with the goal and
always to remember that that goal is “making the product great.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></div>
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Particularly impressive here is an insistence on linking
ideas about creative work to behaviors (even ones that ultimately fail). <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Many of the ideas here, from fearless ideation
and collaboration to tireless communication, are not surprising.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>However, they are made compelling through
tales of their implementation. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The tenet
of intensive, democratic collaboration appears here as the belief in anyone being
able to talk to anyone else at Pixar about their work, for example, and Catmull
conveys it in his memorable recounting of how <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Toy Story</i> taught him the value of bringing together product managers
with artists and technicians.<o:p></o:p></div>
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That specific lesson and value also highlights a feature of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Creativity, Inc.</i> that is unusual in
today’s surplus of writing on creativity and innovation across industries and
markets.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>With product managers, computer
engineers and programmers, filmmakers and artists, Pixar has been blessed but
also burdened with the necessary coordination of distinct creative
cultures.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Catmull’s open and supportive leadership,
evidenced throughout the book, has surely been a crucial factor in the success
of this ongoing collaboration of different kinds of workers.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But his account, which consistently celebrates
Steve Jobs and John Lasseter (among others), underscores how leadership among
partners with complementary if distinct capabilities and even creative
backgrounds can add value to a creative organization.<o:p></o:p></div>
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The overall arc of the book, tracing the development of
Pixar through nearly four decades, foregrounds a daunting challenge for all
leaders: how to sustain creative vitality and excellence over time.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Catmull separates his book into four parts:
“Getting Started,” “Protecting the New,” “Building and Sustaining,” and
“Testing What We Know.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The third section
begins with a thoughtful summary of several “models” employed by people at
Pixar as their bases for successful creative work.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The section then concludes with his
recollection of the first days after the 2005 merger with Disney and how
Pixar’s creative culture evolved.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Drawing together the personal and organizational aspects of creative
work in this way is itself instructive; describing how he led this evolution
over years yields even more valuable insights.</div>
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Reading <i>Creativity,
Inc.</i>,<i> </i>one can easily appreciate Catmull’s
gifts as a leader whose style – deft, open, humble, caring, trusting,
purposeful – has built, shaped and sustained an exceptional creative culture. At the same time, his account of Pixar’s
ongoing success demonstrates the importance of having brought creative analysis
and implementation to the dynamic complexity, of shifting markets and changing
technologies, facing all organizations today.
That combination of effectively bringing creativity to his leadership
challenges and leadership to his firm’s creative work is rare. So is Catmull and Wallace’s exceptional new
book.</div>
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David Slocumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11148276375463185535noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5982798117993395166.post-3046304058752546582014-04-24T01:20:00.001-04:002014-04-24T01:20:38.788-04:00The Rise of the Creative Leader<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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To speak of a creative leader, or manager, is for some a paradox: creativity is chaotic and unrestrained while leadership is orderly and controlling, and setting the two together makes for an uneasy, potentially volatile combination.<br /><br />It was not always thus. A century ago, as businessmen entered the twentieth century seeking to differentiate themselves by building modern enterprises, the most respected outcomes of creative thinking and problem-solving took the form of order and process. The giants of the age were Henry Ford, whose automobile assembly line had revolutionized manufacturing production by changing and regimenting human behaviors, and Thomas Edison, a tireless inventor who sought constantly to make his process of experimentation and invention more systematic.<br /><br />The evolution since has been fitful, swinging between the exigencies of commerce, with its demands for planning and predictability, and the realities of art, or creative production, with its requisite freedom and openness to exploration. The 1960s were particularly compelling years for this antithesis. The Romantic legacy of creativity as authentic self-expression, being true to oneself and one’s vision of the world, contrasted sharply with the rigidity of social conventions and corporate constraints. Opening a fictional window on this golden age of American advertising, the AMC television drama <span style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">Mad Men</span> has shown how that contrast led to the setting apart of creativity in its own departments, appreciated but anomalous, a necessary function of business to be tolerated and closely supervised.<br /><br />Rightly admired for its historical accuracy, the series’ repeated celebration of the effectiveness of creative advertising also casts light on the apparently contradictory nature of real-life business creativity during the era. Business does not succeed in spite of creativity and free-spirited creative individuals but rather thrives because of their imaginative work. As a result, it would seem, successful leaders of creative enterprises may be less chaperones and disciplinarians than coaches and co-conspirators in their shared endeavors. Looking back at actual advertising agencies of the time, like Doyle Dane Bernbach (DDB) in the US with its pioneering teams combining art directors and copywriters, reveals the reality of such a shared sense of creative possibility.<br /><br />The last two decades have seen nearly all businesses embrace innovation and creativity as central missions, at least at a high level, with leaders expected to serve as imaginative guides. Designated ‘creatives’ still do essential work in brand communications (or marketing services) industries like advertising and beyond, say, in the design areas of manufacturing firms. But more and more, creative production and excellence have become collective affairs with attention to the effectiveness of collaboration throughout businesses. For many, an equally dramatic realization has been that the most far-reaching instances of creativity involve organizational or process innovations rather than more obvious new product or service offerings. Hearkening back to Ford’s assembly line or DDB’s restructuring of traditional agency teams, these changes attest to the value and reach of leaders capable of the implementation of original thinking.<br /><br />Technology-driven industries have been especially important to shaping this recent change in thinking about business creativity and many leadership icons of our time – Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, Jack Ma – have worked there. Yet creative leadership today is not simply about technological wizardry. At Apple, Jobs’ creative genius was to envision and market new horizons for emerging technologies and existing industries alike (going back to the company’s beginning, his skills were complemented by co-founder Steve Wozniak’s technical abilities in programming). The reverberations of new media and technology firms have been profound: the emergent approach to creative leadership often combines the Silicon Valley start-up ethos, traditional creative industry openness to expressiveness and exploration, design thinking, and the sheer need of all businesses to become more innovative to remain competitive and serve customers better.</div>
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The terms, leadership and management, of course are not entirely interchangeable. There are many distinctions drawn between the two, both functional (e.g., the manager administers what is; the leader innovates what will be) and cultural (Americans like to speak of leadership, Brits and other prefer management). One of the best-known is that managers focus on systems and structures while leaders focus on people. That particular distinction made good sense in the industrial era, when both managers and leaders were crucial, respectively, to organizing work and workers efficiently and to ensuring that the firm was effective, that is, competitive in the marketplace. However, in the 1990s, legendary management consultant and educator Peter Drucker recognized that such lines were increasingly blurring and less helpful in the information economy, in which the overriding task is to “make productive the specific strengths and knowledge of every individual.” Today, we might fairly extend Drucker’s insight to our own economy in which creativity is the new normal for businesses.<br /><br />Understandings of creative productions and industries themselves have likewise changed dramatically during this time. The groundbreaking classification and mapping of the creative industries by the UK Department of Culture, Media and Sport first launched in 1997 has ushered in far-reaching reassessments of the status of creative activities, work and organizations around the world. While having the result of raising the profile of creative activities, such attention has been criticized by some for reducing the value of those activities to the purely economic. Richard Florida’s influential <span style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;"><a href="http://amzn.to/1hmuq9h" target="_blank">The Rise of the Creative Class</a></span> (2002) claimed with comparable reach that the presence and work of creative talent could foster openness and ultimately attract business and capital to post-industrial cities. Even as the stakes of leadership in such scenarios grow far beyond individual firms or agencies, the core relationships between individuals with creative skills and talents and those seeking to marshal and direct them and their activities appear to become less oppositional and more fluid.<br /><br />If creative leadership can no longer be readily understood through the tension between order and chaos, commerce and self-expression, what should be our orientation for its future? Returning to the words “creative” and “leadership” themselves, freighted as they are with history, offers some guidance. Together, they suggest bringing novel thinking to complex leadership challenges and at the same time deploying strategic prioritizing and decision-making to creative opportunities. Rather than antitheses, the words can convey a necessary balance and even symbiosis that support a sustainably successful creative business. No creative leader could ask for more.<br /><br /><em style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">This piece was originally written for <span style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">House Magazine</span> and also appears as a "Berlin Brief" on the Berlin School of Creative Leadership <a href="http://bit.ly/y3CzcL" target="_blank">website</a>.</em></div>
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David Slocumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11148276375463185535noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5982798117993395166.post-40335477480200792392014-04-07T03:14:00.000-04:002014-04-24T01:45:05.986-04:00Recommended Readings for Creative Leaders for the First Half of 2014<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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The new year has seen the publication of another crop of
probing and provocative titles on economics, business and society. Driving the most sustained public discussions
thus far have been works on the inequalities driven by and increasingly
defining the current economic system.
Thomas Piketty’s <i>Capital in the
Twenty-First Century </i>(Belknap Press) is the magnum opus here, focusing on
economics, with Matt Taibbi’s <i>The Divide:
American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap</i> (Spiegel & Grau)
looking also at the social ramifications of inequality in the United States. Michael Lewis’s <i>Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt</i> (Norton) arguably looks at one
source of this growing disparity by examining the seeming advantage of
professional, high-frequency traders over the rest of the public in financial
markets.<i> </i> </div>
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On the specific topics of creativity, leadership, and
organizational and business success, 2014 has also already yielded some helpful
titles. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Some of these are narrowly cast,
for example, Ben Horowitz’ <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Hard Thing
about Hard Things: Building a Business When There are No Easy Answers </i>(Harper
Collins), which offers sage if targeted advice on starting a business, or Nick
Udall’s “creative rollercoaster” model presented in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: #262626; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">Riding the Creative Rollercoaster: How Leaders Evoke Creativity,
Productivity and Innovation</span></i> (Kogan Page).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Others speak more generally to leaders across
creative businesses and industries.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Following my listing last fall of useful books (<a href="http://onforb.es/19CsYft)">http://onforb.es/19CsYft)</a>, here is another
baker’s dozen of recommended reads from the start of this year that speak to
the work and lives of creative leaders.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Once
again, they comprise a diverse list, written by industry voices, journalist or academics
and providing a wealth of insights, models and concrete advice.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<b><span style="color: #262626; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;">(1) Julian Barling, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The
Science of Leadership: Lessons from Research for Organizational Leaders</i> (Oxford
University Press)<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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Barling, an organizational behavior professor at Canada’s
Queen’s University, explores some central debates about leadership – whether
leaders are born or made, the relevance of gender, the import of followership –
by reference to mostly psychological research conducted over the past two
decades. The result is an accessible and frequently illuminating tour of the
evidence shaping and underlying popular if often superficial debates. Perhaps
most directly relevant to many readers will be the question (and layered
answer) about the effectiveness of leadership development programs.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<b><span style="color: #262626; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;">(2) Warren Berger, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">A More
Beautiful Question</i> (Bloomsbury)</span></b><span style="color: #262626; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #262626; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;">What if companies had mission questions rather than mission
statements? Looking closely at some of our most creative organizations,
including Google, IDEO and Netflix, journalist Berger (who wrote the excellent <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Glimmer</i> on design thinking) describes
the importance of generating a culture of inquiry and learning. The result is
potentially paradigm-shifting: rather than assuming great leaders, creatives, innovators,
and entrepreneurs possess the distinctive ability to provide clear answers, the
book proposes that asking the right questions might be a more fundamental
skill. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span style="color: #262626; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;">(3) Adam Bryant, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Quick and
Nimble: Lessons from Leading CEOs on How to Create a Culture of Innovation</i> (Times
Books)</span></b><span style="color: #262626; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #262626; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;">Offering consistently insightful glimpses of today’s leadership
challenges and innovations, the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">New York
Times</i> ‘Corner Office’ column of interviews with executives appears twice
weekly. In the second book drawing from his work on the column, Adam Bryant
highlights lessons in innovation, change and, especially, building creative
cultures. The result is a crisp summary of current leadership practice
illustrated with helpful real-life examples of effective teams, increased
respect, better conversations, and ongoing learning by leaders and
organizations alike.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span style="color: #262626; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;">(4) Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of
Brilliant Technologies </i>(Norton)</span></b><span style="color: #262626; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #262626; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;">How are digital technologies – from hardware and software to
networks and data sets – fueling exponential growth and profound social and
economic change? Two leading thinkers from MIT explore the forces reinventing fields
as diverse as medicine, retail, and transportation and having far-ranging
implications for creative collaboration, business leadership and policy-making
alike. Maybe most importantly, these dramatic changes will enable and necessitate
a revamping of our educational system in ways that both leverage new
technologies and prepare people for the transformed economy.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span style="color: #262626; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;">(5) Ed Catmull and Amy Wallace, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces that Stand in the Way of
True Inspiration</i> (Random House)<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<span style="color: #262626; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">Catmull, co-founder and President of Pixar
Animation Studios, one of the world’s most admired creative businesses, shares
insights and proven techniques for harnessing talent, forming teams and structuring
organizations, and producing fresh and original work. Mining his company’s
illustrious production history for instructive episodes and helpful examples,
he and Wallace devote special attention to the challenges of building and sustaining
a creative culture.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Their closing list
of principles alone constitute an essential master class in creative
leadership. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span style="color: #262626; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;">(6) Lynda Gratton, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The
Key: How Corporations Succeed by Solving the World’s Toughest Problem </i>(McGraw-Hill)</span></b><span style="color: #262626; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #262626; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;">Professor of management practice at the London Business School and
founder of the Hot Spots Movement, Gratton has produced a fresh model for
scaling impact and innovating for good. ‘The Key’ is to coordinate the latest
approaches to organizational design and talent development with purpose-driven support
for broader communities. The outcome, she argues, is business organizations
capable of confronting and solving global problems like rampant unemployment
and climate change.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span style="color: #262626; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;">(7) Arianna Huffington, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Thrive:
The Third Metric to Redefining Success and Creating a Life of Well-being,
Wisdom, and Wonder </i>(Harmony)</span></b><span style="color: #262626; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #262626; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;">Exhausted and sleep-deprived, Arianna Huffington fell and
injured herself in 2007.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Amidst a
battery of medical tests and soul-searching, she came to realize that there was
more to success than money and power and that she – and we – needed a third
metric for celebrating our lives, maintaining our sense of wonder, prioritizing
our relationships, and remaining compassionate and generous. Combining personal
details of her own journey with the latest psychological and sleep research,
Huffington has produced a manifesto for redefining well-being, work and
success. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span style="color: #262626; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;">(8) Keith Reinhard, </span></b><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: #262626; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;">Any Wednesday</span></i></b><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="color: #262626; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;"> (Any
Wednesday)</span></b><span style="color: #262626; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #262626; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">An original Mad Man, Reinhard was an
advertising creative legend before orchestrating the merger that formed Omnicom
and becoming the CEO of DDB Worldwide. For more than two decades, he penned
brief weekly memos filled with wit, wisdom and advice to all his employees. This
collection of 104 of those pieces both shares some of his favorite insights for
inspiring creative excellence and demonstrates one way he put consistent creative
leadership into accessible and effective practice.</span><span style="color: #262626; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span style="color: #262626; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;">(9) Simon Sinek, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Leaders
Eat Last: Why Some Teams Pull Together and Others Don’t </i>(Portfolio)</span></b><span style="color: #262626; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #262626; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;">Sinek is the perceptive, best-selling author of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Start with Why</i> (your company exists and
should be meaningful to your customers and society…).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Here, he turns to the crucial questions of
how leaders can foster and support safety, trust and cooperation inside that
organization as well as greater kinship with customers. While citing
evolutionary biology and brain chemistry research, the book ultimately argues
for the fundamental leadership values of hard work, empathy and sacrifice as
bases for providing a safe environment for people to grow and succeed. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span style="color: #262626; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;">(10) Biz Stone, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Things a
Little Bird Told Me: Confessions of the Creative Mind</i> (Hachette)<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<span style="color: #262626; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">The co-founder of Twitter offers a creative
memoir of his career in Silicon Valley (thus far), starting at Google, helping
to pioneer both blogging and podcasting, and then launching the social media
platform.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In the process, he explores
the nature and potential of ingenuity and imagination, reflecting through his
personal experience on vulnerability, failure, empathy, ambition,
collaboration, and creative culture. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The
result is an enjoyable and inspiring read that both reveals Stone as a genuine
creative leader and summarizes many of the key lessons of building successful
business enterprises today. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span style="color: #262626; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;">(11) Douglas Stone and Sheila Heen, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Thanks for the Feedback: The Science and Art of Receiving Feedback Well
</i>(Viking)</span></b><span style="color: #262626; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 15.0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="color: #262626; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;">The authors of the invaluable <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Difficult Conversations</i> take on an equally challenging aspect of
work and life in this new volume: how (well) do we receive feedback? Extending
some of the principles of their earlier work to being less defensive and
building richer relationships to engaging the feedback of others, Stone and Heen
also show how to gather and process honest insights about oneself.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The result is a book that very practically
enables the development of greater self-awareness and deeper learning so
helpful to becoming more effective leaders.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 15.0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<b><span style="color: #262626; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;">(12) Robert Sutton and Hayagreeva Rao, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Scaling Up Excellence: Getting to More Without Settling for Less</i> (Crown
Business)</span></b><span style="color: #262626; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 15.0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="color: #262626; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;">This is a major work based on a decade’s research by two
Stanford professors on the pervasive challenge of spreading and multiplying
success in organizations. Looking across industries, and from small start-ups
hoping to grow to mature large firms seeking to avoid stagnation, Sutton and
Rao offer insights and proven practices for ‘scaling up’ farther, faster, and
more effectively. In the process, they provide actionable advice on such vexing
issues as balancing individual and organizational needs, replicating successful
mindsets, and eliminating destructive behaviors.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 15.0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<b><span style="color: #262626; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;">(13) Barry Wacksman and Chris Stutzman, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Connected by Design: Seven Principles of Business Transformation </i>(Jossey-Bass)<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<span style="color: #262626; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">R/GA is one of the world’s most
consistently successful creative digital agencies. Wacksman, its Chief Growth
Officer, describes how the agency has been a pioneer in helping develop new
business models featuring highly interactive eco-systems of interrelated
products, digital services, brand loyalty and continuous customer engagement. He
then goes on to identify how such ‘functional integration,’ achieved by valued firms
like Apple, Nike, Amazon, and Activision, can be understood according to
principles ranging from ‘Utility is Relevance’ to ‘Lead like the world depends
on it.’</span></div>
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David Slocumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11148276375463185535noreply@blogger.com0