Putting more open leadership into practice: A great interview example

One of the fundamental tenets of contemporary leadership thinking, particularly the leadership of creativity and innovation, is the value of ceding control and empowering others -- subordinates and peers, customers and clients alike.  Enabling others through a greater understanding of what they find fulfilling and inspiring them to do what organizations need to be done become every bit as important for leaders as aligning structural capabilities and adapting to fast-changing environmental and marketplace conditions.  More open leadership (to use Charlene Li's term) becomes the basis for greater creativity, efficiency, communication, and overall worker and organizational well-being.

The idea seems both supported by research into the most successful and innovative corporations of the last two decades and by intuitive acceptance as the kind of approach we as leaders should be able to take.  This is potentially more effective leadership that's at once kindler and gentler.  Everybody wins.  Yet as I've repeatedly realized in working with executives, the challenge to the idea is putting it into practice.  That's not an unusual challenge with leadership and management ideas, rules or tips, of course, but the shift in mindset required of more open leadership makes its consistent, practical implementation particularly difficult.

So I was especially pleased when, in reading a recent blogpost by Anthony K. Tjan, an excellent example of how this changed mindset and more open approach to leadership could be illustrated and practiced.  Tjan wrote at the end of last week on the HBR Blog Network about what he called, "The Most Important Job Interview Question" (http://bit.ly/Pw4fNb).  Most interviews, he noted, involve "one-way questioning" about candidates' past jobs, skills, work ethic and other attributes that ultimately speak to the question of "Why should you matter to us?"  The more vital question and practical question, Tjan proposes, is "If you were given this opportunity, would you take it?" And the reasons why.

It's a great, brief idea to tuck away for your next job interview.  But more generally, it's also a very concrete example of shifting a leadership mindset to focus on others.  In doing so, the leader cedes control and in exchange takes an important step toward building more robust relationships and more fully embracing others' values and what they might mean to an organization.  

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.

How Innovative Leaders Lead Innovative Organizations

The current issue of Forbes features a ranking of the world's most innovative companies (http://www.forbes.com/sites/innovatorsdna/2012/09/05/how-innovative-leaders-maintain-their-edge/ ). The list itself is instructive and inspiring and refreshingly international.

At least as important, though, are the issue's introductory comments, which make clear that a crucial commonality among the innovative companies is the presence in them of innovative leaders.  That may seem at first unsurprising or even obvious: of course organizations are oriented or defined by their leadership.  But Forbes gets more specific and identifies several key traits and tendencies that leaders use to help their organizations build and sustain an innovation premium.  These include the "3P's": that is, the capability of effective leaders to continually leverage people, processes, and philosophy.

The introduction goes on to reference a favorite study of mine that has quickly become a standard in analyzing and discussing innovative leadership: Dyer, Gregerson, and Christensen's The Innovator's DNA from 2011 (http://innovatorsdna.com/).  The five "discovery skills" outlined in the book are associating, questioning, observing, networking, and experimenting and they reveal both individually and collectively how innovative leaders successfully differentiate themselves and their organizations.  Many of the companies on the Forbes list, from Infosys to Estee Lauder to Amazon, feature innovative leaders who practice some if not all of these skills.  (Dyer and Gregerson collaborated with Forbes on the list.)

Leadership guidelines like the 3Ps or the five discovery skills are not sufficient in themselves, of course.  Their significance comes from being drawn from research and the successful examples of literally thousands of leaders and organizations.  But the true value of these insights about innovative leadership is to be found in how other and especially emergent leaders embrace the potential of the practices, reflect on and analyze their relevance to other organizations, and finally implement them in creative and effective ways.

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/]

Doctors, Artificial Intelligence, and Creating Competitive Advantage: Reflect on Your Ways of Thinking (Differently)

When I ran the teaching and learning center at New York University, the NYU Medical Center was engaged in an ambitious development program to improve faculty teaching and student learning. At its core was the recognition that doctors today employ algorithmic thinking.

Put simply, doctors make diagnoses that are more and more precise when they have more and more input, like symptoms or test data, to assess. So if you tell your doctor you have headaches and chest pain, she may list one hundred possible ailments. But if you add another symptom, like tingling in your hands and feet, her list is reduced to 50 possibilities; another symptom, like a strong reaction to salty food, takes her list down further to 15 or 20. With blood or other tests, she ultimately is able to narrow your possible ailments to 2 or 3. The doctor thus analyzes your symptoms and other input in combination, processing them algorithmically to produce the most likely explanation for their occurring at the same time.

This way of thinking in medicine is explored in a fascinating piece by Vinod Khosla that appeared in TechCrunch:

http://techcrunch.com/2012/01/10/doctors-or-algorithms/

On its face, the piece approaches medical thinking as a challenge for Artificial Intelligence designers. It asks whether the future will see diagnoses generated through the algorithmic processing of increasingly precise inputs and rendered without the help of doctors as we know them today. What will be the response of medical profession and medical education, Khosla asks, to the potential emergence of Artificial Intelligence that enables more and more precise algorithms for diagnosing ailments? What will they do -- and, by extension, how might their way of thinking change?

While that's certainly a worthwhile question in itself, my reading of Khosla's piece is more general: if doctors indeed practice algorithmic thinking, what other ways of thinking are practiced in other professions? Is there an entrepreneurial way of thinking, for example, that empowers creativity through associating typically dissimilar elements? Or a leaders' way of thinking that reconciles the analysis of complexity in organizations or environments with the emotional sensitivity required to inspire and motivate others? And so on.

The point, of course, is not to put people or professions in simple categories or assume that everyone in a particular category thinks the same way. Rather, the potential advantage of identifying distinct ways of thinking for those in business or other competitive situations is to be able to think differently. Michael Porter, Harvardian guru of competitive strategy, says the "granddaddy of all mistakes" is going down the same path as everyone else and thinking somehow you can achieve better results. One way to forge and follow a different path is to reflect on your current way of thinking and then to try another way of thinking and see what value that can create.