Leadership and Luck: Fortune favors the hard-working (and decisive and flexible and trusting...)

In "More luck than judgment," in today's Financial Times, Morgan Witzel draws together a range of perspectives about luck and its place in business and leadership. Many of the varied voices in the piece circle around the familiar understanding that those who commit to hard work and preparation make their own luck. However, an important finer point involves the need not only to prepare but, as (entrepreneur) Julian Richer says, to "tak[e] advantage of opportunities." In other words, luck involves not only the hard work of preparation but also the good judgment allowing for recognition of opportunity, and, crucially, the capability to make decisions pursue or seize that opportunity.

For leaders, complicating the familiar understanding of hard work or preparation for luck in this way can be valuable. Hard work is too broad. We do better to think of smart work marked by the capability to recognize opportunity and then the decisiveness to act upon it. Analysis, recognition and decision-making can thus be acknowledged as discrete aspects of "hard work" that can, in turn, be honed if we are to maximize our preparation for luck.

At the same time, Witzel closes his piece by referencing Machiavelli's Prince and how luck, fortuna, will nevertheless remain elusive. Luck may reward preparation but it is also finally outside the control of individuals, however hard-working or capable. The further attribute he therefore recommends for leaders is flexibility. By adopting a willingness not only to take decisive action when opportunities present themselves but to do so with agility, openness and trust, leaders may most fully benefit from the lucky chances (hopefully) surrounding them.

Where will you find your ideas? The Ideas Economy and Moving beyond TED

In the Financial Times this weekend, April Dembosky writes about Richard Saul Wurman, one of the creators of the TED conference, and his new WWW event:  http://on.ft.com/SXqtXS .  WWW doesn't stand for anything specific; instead, it refers to a list words starting with "W": "wanderlust," "warming," and "wizardry" -- evidently in order to emphasize the fertile openness of the events to generating new ideas.  Besides being very expensive, charging $16,000 per person, the new event has a distinctive format of conversations between two high-profile speakers.  Dembosky devotes most of the piece to Wurman and, despite alienating many he's left behind at other events like TED (which he sold in 2001), what has been his successful career at organizing such conferences.

What's more compelling about the story, though, is how Wurman has so successfully operated as an entrepreneur of ideas.  The 21st century ideas economy has thrived through the development and interaction of communities energized by extraordinary transformations in business and society but enabled by new communication technologies and a circuit of on-the-ground events.  While TED is, again, the best known of these platforms for producing and circulating ideas -- familiarly, both in person for those who can pay entry fees of $7500 and (over time) online for others at no cost -- many, many other events are what make the economy thrive.  These range from local unConferences and cross-industry workshops to South by Southwest and the World Economic Forum.  While many of the events draw together the creative class and technorati, they have varying political and industry priorities.  But together, they have tapped into and accelerated a contemporary drive to innovate and to understand the changes re-shaping business today.

The title of Dembosky's piece, "Life after TED," has an obviously specific meaning in offering its profile of Wurman.  Yet it also broaches two broader topics.  One is the matter of what comes after TED, either because that particular event is becoming, for some, too slickly-produced or even running out of speakers.  An illustrative critique of TED, by the consistently insightful Evgeny Morosov, appeared recently in The New Republic (http://bit.ly/NNmpgi).  More important than TED or its prospects, however, is a fuller comprehension of the ideas economy itself and how we should understand it as a driver of creativity and change in business and society.  (The very term, "ideas economy," is for some associated with The Economist and its excellent series of global events, http://econ.st/PloKL8 -- but that is taking the term too narrowly.) 

The compelling question -- not least for those, like me, with deep roots in the traditional academy -- is what is the future of the wider ideas economy and the dense fabric of events and communities supporting it?  In other words, what will be the shape and dynamics of how we produce, share and act on ideas in the future?  By better understanding the process and structure of how we engage ideas, we arguably will be a step ahead in producing and building on better ones.

Collaborating Better

In a recent piece in the Financial Times (FT, March 15, 2012), Ross Tieman addresses the challenge of moving effectively “from teamwork to collaboration” (http://on.ft.com/AvTvF4). Successful collaboration today, he observes, requires a fuller capacity, often guided by emotional intelligence, to work with individuals with different backgrounds, areas of expertise, and geographical location. Being a good team player is no longer enough in a time when teams and the situations or projects with which they engage are so varied and complex.

It’s a sensible conclusion but the real value of Tieman’s remarks emerges when teasing out two of the issues he raises. The first is simply the power of reflecting on the overuse of ‘teamwork’ or collaboration’ as an easy fix for whatever ails an agency or project. Familiar imperatives like hiring more team players or collaborating better across functions or even organizations can indeed be helpful but also often fail to provide any specific value or concrete way forward. The challenge is to be willing to pause in order to determine which specific forms of or approaches to collaboration will best serve the needs of a given project, partnership, or situation.

A second issue, complexity, has increasingly emerged as a basis for re-casting various longstanding approaches to management and leadership. Despite numerous definitions of complexity, the current emphasis on the term turns fairly consistently on a lack of predictability. By this logic, while complicated situations or projects may involve multiple elements or participants operating over a long period of time, their evolution and outcomes remain largely predictable. With complex situations, however, the different elements in a system or situation are interdependent and, as such, eventually defy predictability over time. A familiarly helpful contrast is between the traffic light operating in a complicated setting and the air traffic control system operating in a complex one.

Tieman references Pam Jones and the research on leading complex teams she has helped to conduct (often with Vicki Holton) for nearly a decade at the Ashridge Business School (UK). Their work has identified a range of different types of teams – ad hoc, multidisciplinary, dispersed geographically, working on complex projects, multicultural, spread across organizational boundaries, virtual and rarely meeting, and so forth – that are often overlapping and defy the formulation of any single approach for team members or leaders to succeed. Instead, they explore how different skills and competencies, many rooted in greater communication, willingness to share responsibility, and ultimately expand their emotional intelligence, can help develop more adaptable teams and leaders. Such exploration accords with some of relevant works from US management scholars, including Morten Hansen’s richly researched yet wonderfully practical Collaboration (2009) and Vijay Govindarajan and Chris Trimble’s guide to building the right teams for experimentation and execution, The Other Side of Innovation (2010).

Reflecting on the specific conditions confronting organizations and their teams and engaging more fully with the complexity of contemporary teams are two behaviors that will reward leaders of organizations and teams alike. In creative communication industries, where a long tradition of productive teams already exists, the call is often for more collaboration and teamwork, especially across increasingly blurring organizational boundaries. As research has shown and more popular pieces like Tieman’s reinforce, the more meaningful call should not necessarily be for more but for better collaboration – better-suited to environmental conditions and team member capabilities, better-aligned with organizational and strategic resources and priorities, and better-recognizing the complexity and interdependency characterizing today’s dynamic markets.

[This post will also appear in the forthcoming April newsletter of the Berlin School of Creative Leadership, at http://www.berlin-school.com/]