The Other Cross-Cultural Leadership

The following is adapted from remarks given at the August graduation of the 2014 Executive MBA class of the Berlin School of Creative Leadership. 

One of the great assets of any global academic or training program is the national, regional, social or economic diversity of its participants.  In its still relatively young EMBA program alone, the Berlin School of Creative Leadership has enrolled participants from over 50 countries.  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.  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.  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. 

Facilitating the exchange of experiences and fostering the professional relationships among participants is a key responsibility of executive programs.  Ordinarily, this includes teaching major approaches to ‘cross-cultural leadership’ as part of the EMBA curriculum.  The research, tools and models for understanding conventional national and cultural differences remain vitally important to the success of creative leaders.  Many of these are more widely familiar:

• 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.
• 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.)
• 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.
• 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.  These include charismatic vs value-based, team orientation, and participative leadership.

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. 

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.  In the traditional creative industries, for example, everyone does not have the word ‘creative’ in their title.  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.  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.  In their recently published collection, Creative Work Beyond the Creative Industries (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.

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.  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.  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.

Effectively combining differing technical expertise, aesthetic preferences, and mental models has long been at the heart of creative business.  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.  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.

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.  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.  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.  As committed as the two were, their interactions, which were meant to be shaped by constructive conflict, were often bruising.  But they ended up producing exceptional and, often, timeless work.

To extend that example to the present, many are calling for an expansion or other re-constitution of the core teams in advertising.  For some, it should be ‘art, copy and code.’  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.  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.

Looking beyond marketing services or brand communications, the value of recognizing different skills, experiences, and mental models appears in even sharper relief.  Contemporary design and architecture firms, for example, regularly integrate a wide range of experts to help shape their work.  At IDEO, cultural anthropologists observe human behavior, kinesiologists study bodily movement, mechanical engineers contribute to the exploration of how physical solutions might be crafted.  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.  

Of course, there is a crucial balance to be struck here – and also a risk to be acknowledged and averted.  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.  The writers do this and the digital guys do that.  Even with the best of intentions, we may reinforce or fetishize categories of professional work or culture out of proportion.  As with national or regional cultures or sub-cultures, we may stereotype unfairly.  Individuals are not simply one thing or, despite a professional skillset or mindset or pedigree, alike in many ways.

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.  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.  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.  Ultimately, the mental models and what management scholar Tarun Khanna calls the ‘contextual intelligence’ of those approaching creative work from different professional perspectives warrants closer and sustained engagement by leaders.

That is the basis of the other cross-cultural leadership.  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.  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.

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.  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.  But perhaps even more importantly, everyone also brings different expectations, mental models, and solving problems together.

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.  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.

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. 

Leading, Fast and Slow

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg likes to say that the company aims to ‘move fast and break things.'  In a 2012 letter attached to the company’s pre-IPO filing to the SEC, he wrote, ‘the idea is that if you never break anything, you’re probably not moving fast enough’ and ‘moving fast enables us to build more things and learn faster.'  Zuckerberg at the time called the more general attitude guiding his company, ‘The Hacker Way,’ ‘an approach to building that involves continuous improvement and iteration.’  The words capture what has increasingly become an article of faith in contemporary business: faster is not only better but necessary to gain and sustain advantage and possibly even to survive. 

Like much of the business and management thinking we embrace today, particularly around innovation, the Facebook example grows from the experience of start-ups, and more specifically that of programmers and coders, in technology.  (We could even arguably apply a broader term, ‘The Silicon Valley Way’ – whether actually practiced there or not – to make clear the benefits of going fast.)  Again, from Zuckerberg: ‘as most companies grow, they slow down too much because they're more afraid of making mistakes than they are of losing opportunities by moving too slowly.’  Cast at this level of generality, these are useful words for any organization seeking to grow and prosper.

The question less frequently asked is how leaders should put such an overarching imperative to work fast(er) into practice – particularly across different kinds of businesses and industries.

One sensible approach has been to break down the way businesses work, whether they are a start-up or in maturity, and assess the different stages.  In this way, Eric Ries’s LeanStartup movement looks closely at the product development process in order to eliminate unnecessary or wasteful practices and to prioritize value-producing ones.  Concretely, this approach translates into the faster development of offerings to address the needs of customers and the earlier release of what Ries calls a ‘minimum viable product’ to the market.  Ries’s work has had greatest impact on tech companies, with Dropbox, Intuit and the social learning site, Grockit, among those that publicly acknowledge their successful adoption of Lean Startup principles.  Speed here saves time and investment dollars by building on better customer feedback and performance indicators and by driving a development process that supports continuous (re-)deployment of improved products.

Speed throughout this process is essential.  Yet not all stages in the startup or general product development processes are necessarily equivalent, and as Roger L.Martin recently suggested, rapid, iterative prototyping may perhaps be the most vital.  While that doesn’t mean other stages, like advance research and metric formation or follow-up decisions, should be slow, it does raise the question about the optimal relative speeds of various stages of the product development or other processes.  A commonsense conclusion to draw is that every firm, indeed every product development or related process, is different and discrete stages of development should benefit from adaptable and often quick decision-making.  For Martin, reflecting on David Kelley’s pioneering design thinking work helping clients develop products at IDEO, such an approach has the potential benefit of delivering both customer value and a business client user experience.  To accomplish this, leadership must be capable of going both fast and slow (or, at least, slower) and of being able continuously to determine which pace is best when.

Business and management research and practice like that of Ries and of Martin offer valuable insights for enhancing those leadership capabilities.  Another, perhaps lesser-known voice here is John Sullivan, a talent management consultant and professor at San Francisco State, who has referred to himself as ‘Dr. Speed.’  He regularly blogs about the potential advantages of speed and even delineates 20 key components of organizational speed.  Smartly, these range from building a ‘culture of speed’ and integrating faster processes to measuring, rewarding and training for speed and change across organizations.

As a talent management specialist, Sullivan is particularly keen to highlight how the right people, trained to be fast, are critical to sustaining peak organizational performance.  His work brings to mind the example of Pixar, which is committed not only to expeditious learning but to bringing in ‘new blood,’ that is, to having the right talent in place to move quickly in achieving specific creative goals.  Sullivan’s lists of advantages and key components may, in fact, be most useful not as checklists to be pursued unqualifiedly, risking burnout or loss of morale, but more as bases for individual leaders to consider how best to incorporate speed customized to the needs and situations of their firms.  Slow may ‘kill organizations,’ as he puts it, but only the judicious acceleration and application of speed, with the right talent, to different aspects of business will allow them to thrive.

Better understanding the complexity of a startup’s or existing firm’s needs and how to use speed to address them is only part of the leader’s challenge.  Another is the deeper understanding of her or his own decision-making processes and the ways that speed shapes them.  Recent psychological, behavioral and neuroscience research have yielded some extraordinarily relevant results for leaders seeking to go beyond twentieth-century models of left brain-right brain thinking and to benefit from current approaches to cognitive processes.

Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman’s best-selling Thinking,Fast and Slow offers one such description of the two systems of the mind.  ‘System 1’ thought processes operate rapidly, intuitively, even automatically, and its decisions are based in immediate context, associative memories from our past, and emotional reactions.  ‘System 2’ thought processes are more deliberate, rational, and they require our effort to focus, pay attention and apply logic and evidence.  An important outcome of Kahneman’s five decades of work (much in collaboration with Amos Tversky) has been to undo the assumption that we humans are wholly rational actors and assess all the relevant information before logically making choices.  System 2 monitors and can override System 1’s inclination but that requires ongoing effort and energy we don’t always expend.  The relative speeds of the two systems, which give the book its title, also prompt Kahneman to be critical of System 1 decision-making.

In a very useful corrective, Scott Barry Kaufman and Jerome L. Singer argue that both systems or types of thinking styles have a range of positive and negative attributes to be recognized.  For example, while ‘experiential thinking’ (akin to System 1) is marked positively by empathy, spontaneity, emotional expressiveness, and intuition ability, it also has the negative attributes of naïve optimism, stereotyped thinking and unrealistic beliefs.  The ‘rational thinking style’ (System 2), meanwhile, possesses a positive worldview, realistic thing, self-esteem, and conscientiousness but is difficult to sustain and often has a dismissive style.  As they say, pointedly, ‘the key to both intelligence and creativity is the ability to flexibly switch between different modes of thought depending on the task demands.’  System 1 may generate various failures of reasoning and decision-making, in other words, but it also contributes to creativity – that which is both novel and useful.

Put differently, research shows that to be creative we need to be able both to concentrate intensely and engage current activities and to remain open-minded and notice our own conscious reactions.  Thinking fast and even breaking a few things, we might say, while still retaining some slowing awareness to ensure we move in the generally right direction.  For leaders, too, especially of creative talent, teams and organizations, such a balance of close engagement and meta-awareness, of speed and its intelligent, strategic deployment, seems essential. 

Recommended Readings for Creative Leaders to Close Out 2013

In the first half of 2013, we saw several new books that were not merely provocative but pioneering in the lessons and insights they offered to creative leaders. These included Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg’s manifesto for women in business, Lean In, Columbia Business School Professor Rita Gunther McGrath’s call for The End of Competitive Advantage in business strategy, economist Mariana Mazzucato’s iconoclastic analysis of the necessity of The Entrepreneurial State for successful innovation, Wharton professor Jonah Berger’s best-selling account of social transmission, Contagious, and psychologist Scott Barry Kaufman’s revisionist study of talent and creativity, Ungifted: Intelligence Redefined.

For the second half of this year, various new titles have appeared (or are scheduled to shortly) that can also speak directly to the work and lives of creative leaders. These range from in-depth popular accounts of successful creative firms to more scholarly approaches to entertainment, marketing, and creativity itself. All can contribute, however, to fostering more effective leadership and successful creative businesses.

1) Scott Berkun, The Year Without Pants: Wordpress.com and the Future of Work (Jossey-Bass) Blogger Scott Berkun’s lively account of working for a year at Wordpress.com, the world’s 15th busiest website, where he led a team of programmers and learned very practical ways to nurture a successful culture of creativity.

2) Nick Bilton, Hatching Twitter: A True Story of Money, Power, Friendship and Betrayal (Portfolio) Bilton, a New York Times reporter, tracks the growth of podcasting start-up Odeo and how it morphed into the $11.5 billion dollar Twitter, particularly following the relationships between the four mercurial founders.

3) David Burkus, The Myths of Creativity: The Truth about How Innovative Companies and People Generate Ideas (Jossey-Bass) Management Professor Burkus offers an accessible history of creativity dating from the ancient Greeks as the basis for exploring contemporary myths and, most usefully, techniques for improving business creativity in the future.

4) Niraj Dawar, Tilt: Shifting Your Strategy from Products to Customers (Harvard Business Review Press) To succeed in the world marketplace today, argues Ivey Business School Professor Dawar, firms need increasingly to look ‘downstream’ to where you interact with customers.

5) Dave Eggers, The Circle (Knopf) In this novel, the experiences of an idealistic protagonist who goes to work at the world’s most powerful internet company are the basis of a far-reaching meditation on work, privacy, democracy and knowledge in the wired era.

6) Anita Elberse, Blockbusters: Hit-making, Risk-taking and the Big Business of Entertainment (Henry Holt) Elberse, of Harvard Business School, describes how building an entertainment business around blockbuster products and stars has recently been and remains the surest way to long-term success.

7) Howard Gardner and Katie Davis, The App Generation: How Today’s Youth Navigate Identity, Intimacy and Imagination in the Digital World (Yale University Press) Gardner, the originator of the theory of multiple intelligences, and Davis discuss the increasing ‘app-dependence’ of technology users and its consequences for identity, relationships and creativity.

8) Jocelyn K. Glei and 99U, Manage Your Day-to-Day: Build Your Routine, Find Your Focus, and Sharpen Your Creative Mind (Amazon Publishing) The latest in the 99U book series, this collection offers actionable recommendations and techniques from the likes of Seth Godin, Dan Ariely and Stefan Sagmeister for developing successful creative practices in a distracted world.

9) Tom Kelley & David Kelley, Creative Confidence: Unleashing the Creative Potential Within Us All (Crown Business) The Kelley Brothers, founder and partner in the design firm, IDEO, offer an invaluable and entirely usable guide to proven practices of better creative thinking, doing and confidence-building.

10) Charlotta Mellander, Richard Florida, Bjorn T. Asheim, and Meric Gertler, The Creative Class Goes Global (Routledge) 11 years after Florida’s The Rise of the Creative Class transformed discussions of creative economies and urban planning with a focus on U.S. cities, this new work expands critical attention to the growth and development of the creative class in cities around the world.

11) Alexis Ohanian, Without their Permission: How the 21st Century Will be Made, Not Managed (Hachette) The reddit.com co-founder offers a paean to the endless opportunity of the open internet that is equal parts American Dream story (his own), start-up MBA, and two-fold plea to the government to keep the perfect marketplace open and to individuals to make the world better with innovation.

12) Robert Scoble and Shel Israel, Age of Context: Mobile, Sensors, Data and the Future of Privacy (Patrick Brewster Press) Tech journalist Scoble and consultant Israel describe the new five forces: mobile, social media, data, sensors and location – and the trust required for businesses to make them work – in a book project innovatively sponsored by the likes of Autodesk, Bing, and charity:water.

13) Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon (Little Brown) Journalist Stone’s detailed, revelatory (and controversial) account of the online retailer, its visionary founder, and how they seek to re-invent (again) the future of customer experience and the digital economy.