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.

More on Nurturing Innovation and Celebrating Piracy: Will the Chinese Steve Jobs be a Pirate?

If the challenge of making sense of (and advancing) innovation I raised in my last post is evident anywhere today, it is in China.  Christopher Beam's current column in Slate, "The Chinese Steve Jobs is Probably a Pirate" deftly probes which types of innovation we celebrate, which we condemn, and the murkiness of trying to distinguish them.

In the case of China, an important layer is obviously nationalistic: while we lionize our own pirates (of Silicon Valley, for instance), we readily demonize others, especially when they may seem to play in an economic system with different rules.  Yet Beam's piece is particularly useful for its reference to venerated American innovations, from Thomas Edison's phonograph to Hollywood movies, that were copied or at least adapted, updated, and improved for the mass market.  The Chinese, by this argument, have learned well the priority of implementation over invention long employed with great success by American innovators.

Put differently, the Chinese have recognized the potential value of being a second- or late-mover and tweaking existing products to exploit opportunities in the current market rather than seeking merely to invent entirely new products or markets.  As many commentators, notably including Malcolm Gladwell, noted following Steve Jobs' passing last fall, it was just this kind of re-thinking, packaging and marketing of others' inventions at which the Apple co-founder was a virtuoso.  Not unrelatedly, the other feature of successful Chinese innovation has been the use of the country's massive labor force to manufacture products cheaply.  Again, citing only the example of Foxconn as a crucial link in Apple's (and other "Western" corporations') supply chains, we can observe how blurred and uneasy are any boundaries we may want to draw between pioneering innovation and piracy.

Nurturing Rebels and Unlocking Innovation: The Creative Turn in Business and Leadership

The CMO of frog, Tim Leberecht, recently wrote, "How to Nurture Your Company's Rebels, And Unlock Their Innovative Might" http://bit.ly/Uz6btM (the same piece appeared at FastCo. Design). Despite its brevity, the post gathers a range of examples and sources, from innovation communes and Ashoka Changemakers to Roger Martin and U2, of a telling shift underway today to embrace oppositional thinking in business. Both in cultivating internal opposition to enhance innovative outputs and in driving a more fundamental resistance to business as usual across industries, leaders and organizations are increasingly supporting varied creative processes that seek to disrupt the status quo.

For those in the creative or some R&D-intensive industries, especially, this approach and attitude to gaining competitive advantage may not seem new. But there are at least a couple significant developments in play here.  The first is nothing less than an historical transformation of the status of creativity and innovation in business. That's a far-reaching claim, of course, and one I've developed in my own teaching and consulting on creative leadership (and that Chris Bilton has also made). Essentially, the idea is that the last two to three decades have seen a dramatic reversal of the longstanding containment - or even marginalization - of innovation within organizations whose priority had been increasing efficiency, lean operations, and rational problem-solving. The change in mindset, epitomized by innovators in Silicon Valley and outlined most familiarly in the writings on disruptive innovation by Clayton Christensen, is now embraced across industries and beyond, including the non-profit and public sectors (think "creative cities").

Leberecht's post offers a range of examples of successful contrarian practices, small and large, as noted, and concludes by recommending three possible actions for those wanting to make internal oppositions within their organizations productive.  They are:

1. Create safe spaces
2. Make sure that internal opposition is constant
3. Embrace passive and active opposition 

These are sensible enough, though anyone wanting think more deeply about how to develop and deliver on this capability for this creative internal opposition should read Roger Martin's The Opposable Mind.

As important as is the call for more creative and productive internal opposition, it's a second development that I find potentially even more provocative and consequential. The image introducing Leberecht's post is a Jolly Roger and the spectre of piracy threads through his examples of creative opposition. Yet in celebrating the misfits and the rebels whom organizations and even project teams rely on for daring innovation and value-creating differentiation, the old challenge of successfully containing and incorporating oppositional thinking re-emerges. When Leberecht urges launching the development of creative opposition by asking such questions as, What is your company's black market?, in other words, one can easily extend the answer beyond that which is productive for particular organizations. Consider hacking, for example: while there are now "hackers for good," this has become a safely contained and manageable (and, by some individuals, often profitably self-marketed) subset of a larger category of creative rebels, many of whom are not "good" and indeed have proven themselves menacing.  

This is more than semantics. To think more deeply about disruption or opposition leads to the discussion of how essential creative destruction is to genuine innovation in organizations, industries and markets. Even more, though, to speak of creative leadership or innovation in terms of piracy and rebellion should necessarily take account of the boundaries of those organizations, industries and markets -- and also acknowledge the hackers, pirates, rogue traders, dark pools, black markets and more that exist beyond them. Their global rise over the last two to three decades of technological change and globalization has been every bit as dramatic - and illuminating about the nature of innovation - as that of loyal opposition whose work remains internal to corporations or industries.  

Warren Bennis on Leadership and Character ... and A Key Insight about Reflection

Like so many, I'm an admirer of Warren Bennis's thinking about leadership.  In his current Bloomberg Business Week blog posting, Bennis writes briefly on leadership and character: http://buswk.co/P6dOqc .  His question is whether business schools can teach character or, put even more basically, whether character can be taught to or learned by leaders.  A fascinating and provocative topic.

Referencing a course on global business leadership by Brandeis Professor Bob Thomas, Bennis writes that there are two overarching principles to engage in character awareness and building: "assessment/reflection and action/reflection."  The blog post concludes with the "Five C's" that Thomas's learning model for reflection is organized around: Crucibles, Commitment to Practice, Combination, Coaches, and Community.  While that model itself is valuable, the main insight I took from the post has a significance beyond the question of character, per se.  It's about the centrality of reflection to good leadership and, even more, the necessity of engaging in both assessment and action in order for reflection to be optimally successful.

Many leaders recognize the importance of reflection and introspection as necessary activities in their own leadership practice.  Too often, though, that reflection only takes the form of self-assessment.  Extending reflection into action allows leaders to build community and even to change "some corner of the world," starting with their own.

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.