Is Leaders' Talk Cheap?

Earlier this year, two sociologists provoked a probing debate about the integrity and value of interviewing as a research method.  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 Sociological Methods & Research.  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.  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.

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. 

Respondents to the original piece closely engaged this issue of ‘ABC’, or Attitude-Behavior Consistency.  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.  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.  Moreover, even if words and actions are sometimes specifically inconsistent, individual level data can sometimes illustrate more general patterns of action worth highlighting.

To their credit, Jerolmack and Khan don’t reject interviews entirely but instead call for greater methodological pluralism in research.  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.  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. 

This is not only an issue for researchers of business and management research and analysis but for readers and practitioners.  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?  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.  

Connecting Individual Attitudes with Organizational Behaviors

The words of leaders are typically taken by readers and listeners as reliable expressions of their behaviors – past, present, or future.  The credibility of those words, and those speaking or writing them, is crucial, of course, and turns back to the fundamental challenge of ABC.  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.

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.  Even as leaders speak, the connection to collective behavior – as summary, explanation, cause, plan – remains opaque amidst so many possible causes.  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.

Research and Access in Business and Organizations

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.  To generate wider explanations of the situations and interactions in organizational life requires multiple research approaches.  Yet in most corporate settings, these are impossible for outside researchers and analysts to pursue.  Confidentiality, distraction, and the priorities of time and other resource allocation typically limit or preclude more robust access to people and situations.   

The usual response to this lack of access is to judge leaders’ words by specific indicators of their organizations’ performance.  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.  This makes certain sense.  After all, we invest in some firms, say Alibaba, because of the value they can deliver or promise to customers and in the marketplace.  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. 

Interviews as Public and Professional Performances

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.  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.  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.

Ultimately, an ethical aspect emerges here: do we trust what leaders say?  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?  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.

Authorities, Elites, and Celebrities

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.  We choose to interview or otherwise solicit the perspectives of leaders in the first place because of their experience or position, expertise or accomplishment.  Yet that very appeal to authority can limit the thoroughness of the interview and consequently the integrity of the verbal data emerging from it.

At a practical and human level, interacting with very senior or elite leaders involves unequal power relations that can be difficult to navigate.  Consider the prospect of interviewing Richard Branson or Sheryl Sandberg or Martin Sorrell.  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.

Caveat Lector

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.  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.  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.  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.

'Creativity Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces that Stand in the Way of True Inspiration', by Ed Catmull, with Amy Wallace (Random House)

At first glance, the new book about Pixar, Creativity, Inc., 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.  

Pixar President Ed Catmull, with Amy Wallace, has produced something much, much more.  It’s one of the half-dozen best books that have been written about creative business and creative leadership.  Ever.

The “Thoughts for Managing a Creative Culture,” which close the volume, themselves offer a master class in creative leadership.  From managing fear and failure in an organization to protecting new ideas and imposing productive limits, these are 33 gems.  Yet with characteristic sagacity, Catmull makes clear how these principles should be viewed as starting points rather than ends to be achieved.  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.” 

Particularly impressive here is an insistence on linking ideas about creative work to behaviors (even ones that ultimately fail).  Many of the ideas here, from fearless ideation and collaboration to tireless communication, are not surprising.  However, they are made compelling through tales of their implementation.  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 Toy Story taught him the value of bringing together product managers with artists and technicians.

That specific lesson and value also highlights a feature of Creativity, Inc. that is unusual in today’s surplus of writing on creativity and innovation across industries and markets.  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.  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.  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.

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.  Catmull separates his book into four parts: “Getting Started,” “Protecting the New,” “Building and Sustaining,” and “Testing What We Know.”  The third section begins with a thoughtful summary of several “models” employed by people at Pixar as their bases for successful creative work.  The section then concludes with his recollection of the first days after the 2005 merger with Disney and how Pixar’s creative culture evolved.  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.

Reading Creativity, Inc., 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.

Learning and Leading

For many leaders, the commitment to learning – both their own and that of their workers – is a given.  We all recognize the value of learning, after all, embracing different experiences and perspectives and encouraging opportunities for our teams or organizations to learn more about our work or ourselves so we can perform more effectively.  Yet in an age of ongoing change and disruption, how do we learn most effectively?  Beyond our ready willingness, what do we focus on in order to become better creative leaders?

We may cite various familiar examples to orient our own approaches to learning.  Steve Jobs, for instance, relied on a constant curiosity that provided learning and, in turn, the capacity to connect disparate elements, like applying the calligraphy he learned in college to computer fonts used first in Apple computers.  Creativity is “connecting things,” he memorably said, and to do so requires learning them in the first place.  

Likewise, as digital technologies have transformed businesses and relationships, it seems fairly straightforward that learning how to navigate them requires the regular refreshing of technical skills and social practices.  To empower us all to use these technological tools and platforms more effectively, we might highlight the dramatic re-working of various formal professional training and educational practices, from internal organizational training to external schooling.  Underpinning this re-training for others, leaders must themselves learn about how training should be designed and customized to maximize the learning of others.

Reflecting on the complexity of learning for leaders – and the necessity of their learning to learn better – yields several other helpful approaches.

• Learning (to Fail) Quickly

No one running a business today can afford to encourage his or her workers simply to fail.  Leaders must balance the benefit of learning with the sometimes very real costs of inevitable failures.  Too often, failing fast or often is parroted as a goal of creative projects or organizations without a fuller recognition of how learning needs to be built essentially into that process.  We ritually talk about the value of “learning to fail quickly,” in other words, when describing how to nurture innovation and creativity.  More apt, perhaps, is the way creative industry consultant and coach Charles Day puts it: we should leave out the middle two words in order to emphasize the more fundamental priority of learning quickly.

•       Adaptive Learning

Learning quickly requires sensitivity to the different kinds of failure that leaders and other creatives experience in business.  In other words, when focusing on failures, in particular, we need to adapt and learn differently from different situations.  While intuitively obvious, such a need for adaptability ultimately is about a general openness to learning regardless of specific situation.  For example, Harvard professor Amy Edmondson recently identified several different types of failure, such as those that are preventable in predictable scenarios or systems, deviations from system specs, and the unavoidable failures that arise in complex systems or scenarios.  Based on these types, leaders and organizations can better enable learning by (1) getting past blame, (2) establishing clear if varied reporting and communications systems processes, and (3) instituting consistent modes of analysis of failures, and (4) determining opportunities for experimentation.

•      Learning Organizations

Edmondson’s approach to enabling learning across different types of failure extends an important, two-decades-old emphasis on learning across the organization as a key to creating competitive advantage.  In 1990, Peter M. Senge published The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice ofthe Learning Organization, a groundbreaking call for thoroughgoing openness to learning at every level of organizations about operational improvements and efficiency.  For Senge, whose thinking was shaped partly by a fascination at the time with “Total Quality Management” and continuous process improvement, leaders were the designers, teachers, and finally stewards of learning.  As such, they need to be in service to the learning of others as well as the organization as a whole.  This service is powerful and far-reaching: learning across organizations is not so much about problem-solving as bridging the natural creative tension that exists between vision and current reality – and supporting leaders’ efforts to build creative cultures and collaboratively realizing organizational goals.

•       Learning to be Introspective and Self-leading

Analyzing and learning from the complexities of their organizations is essential for creative leaders but it is not enough.  Equally necessary is introspection and making self-reflection an ongoing leadership practice.  This is often particularly challenging for those already successful at analytical or creative work: such high potentials are often unprepared leaders who must develop new capacities at the speed of business.  One powerful approach to connecting reflection to action is the authentic leadership thinking of Bill George, former CEO of Medtronic and author of True North.  In this and other works, George calls upon leaders to identify their core beliefs and values, as discoverable in their own life stories, as guideposts to leading richer and more successful lives, both professional and personal. 

Continual and thoughtful learning may be a cliché in life but it needs to be a concrete and very real driver of the work of effective leaders.  In his classic, On Becoming a Leader, management guru Warren Bennis captures well how knowing the world and knowing the self serve as cornerstones to a foundation for successful leadership.  Distilling so much of others’ insights on learning for business leaders, he recommends three active, ongoing steps:

1. Look back at your childhood, adolescence and use your experiences to make things happen in the present;

2. Consciously seek the kinds of experiences that will improve and enlarge you; and

3. Take risks, knowing that failure is vital and inevitable.

Valuable advice for creative leaders to embrace as a basis for better learning – and leading.

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.

Essential Ideas about Creativity in 2011 (I): Steve Jobs - Perfectionism, Process, and Tweaking

One of the persistent themes of writing about creativity and creative leadership in 2011 has been that creativity is less about generating new and original notions, product or services and more about tweaking or associating existing ones in unfamiliar ways. That theme isn't entirely new itself, of course, but it runs against a fairly common conception of creativity as primarily being about novelty or originality. More unsettling to some is that the theme undercuts a kind of romance with creativity as the enchanted purview of a select group of individuals using their special gifts to produce momentous, paradigm-shifting breakthroughs. Instead, the values identified by various commentators and researchers as essential to creative success are keen observation, associational thinking, and dogged persistence in building processes that implement innovation.

This theme rose to prominence in various ways during the past year. In this post, I comment on how perfectionism and the tweaking of processes of innovation were highlighted in writings about Steve Jobs and Apple. In a future post, I'll cite several other recent writings that similarly focus on the promise of more efficient associating, re-working and even copying of existing ideas and products -- creatively.

The news story of the year in creative industries and leadership was the death of Steve Jobs. Yet even before his passing in early October, the practices that he and Apple employed so successfully were being closely parsed by analysts. Among many conclusions, two stand out. The first is evident throughout Walter Isaacson's masterful biography of Jobs, which tracks in often minute detail the CEO's obsessive control over product development even as Apple's ranks swelled over the last decade to tens of thousands of employees, many of them highly and often singularly skilled (http://amzn.to/uAcUVW). But it is even more apparent in Adam Lashinsky's controversial piece on the company's inner workings from the May 23 issue of Fortune, was Jobs' obsessive attention to detail (http://bit.ly/p1ciml).

This perfectionism was often exercised through a nearly dictatorial management style. All major decisions, and many minor ones, were made at Apple by Jobs himself and failures of underlings were greeted by thunderous, even disdainful critique by the CEO. In an era when quick, cheap, and smart failure is championed and the inherent messiness of creativity is recognized across creative industries and beyond, such a style is striking in its incongruousness -- and often left for us to explain away as an unavoidable by-product of Jobs' genius.

For leaders of creative industries, however, it was another journalistic piece, by Malcolm Gladwell, that spoke more directly to Jobs' success as an entrepreneurial virtuouso. Running in the May 16 issue of The New Yorker, "Creation Myth" celebrated Jobs as a second- or even third-mover whose true gift was envisioning how to apply or re-work existing technologies in unprecedented ways (http://nyr.kr/k7FKms). In other words, if one accepts that innovation, to be successful, must begin with ideation and completed with implementation, Jobs was an implementer nonpareil. While this begs the question of whether the associational thinking or insightful flash constituting implementation is itself importantly idea-driven, the argument positions Jobs less as a techno-wizard and more as a transcendant marketer. Citing the key example of the Apple co-founder's popularization of the mouse and graphical user interface following his visit to Xerox PARC, where he first observed prototypes for both, Gladwell ultimately holds "the truth of innovation" as occurring in the rough-and-tumble of business rather than the "messy world of creativity" in the research lab.

Months later, in his review of Isaacson's biography of Jobs that doubled as a obituary, Gladwell would put a finer point on his remarks about innovation by calling Jobs, with admiration, "The Tweaker" (http://nyr.kr/uPvSQQ). "The visionary starts with a clean sheet of paper, and re-imagines the world. The tweaker inherits things as they are, and has to push and pull them toward some more nearly perfect solution." Gladwell's next sentence makes his point unmistakably: "That is not a lesser task." Almost certainly not, but for many it still seems out of sorts with the romantic, world-changing image of the creative genius re-imagining the new through the power of his will.

Such a characterization of Jobs, both before and after his death, hardly diminished the veneration of the man or celebration of all he accomplished. Yet more interesting, perhaps, is the question of how the emphasis on perfectionism, tweaking, and implementing is relevant to the rest of us and to our understanding of the creative processes and creative leadership beyond Apple. More on that to come.