Leading Change: Handbook entry, Week 4

Well! What leaped out at me this week? Mostly a desire to get on with doing rather than thinking I have to say. Regardless of that I feel I must push aside the personal grievances that interrupt my academic life and get down to the business of earning marks.

The Prince (Machiavelli) is a provocative piece of literature that in my mind asks the question about how to lead but doesn’t really answer it. The central premise of the article was that it is better to be feared than loved, but to avoid being hated. In my view this is a bit simplistic as there are situations where fear is more likely to induce the desired behaviours and other situations where being loved will work best. The “avoid being hated” part of the equation is, to my mind, a note to self to be fair in your dealings with everyone and not to punish or reward without justification. How will this influence my style of management going forward? I guess I have to be mindful of the situational conditions and adjust the management style to reflect what is going on and where I want things to be going. As Professor Ahn said, it is easier to get a follower to obey your command in a crisis situation if they know that you would have taken the time to listen to their opinion if time was available. The follower has an obligation to have an opinion and the leader has an obligation to listen to it and understand it, however the leader is the one who makes the decision in the end and the follower has to follow it, but knowing that the leader heard and took account of their opinion.

“Unite my avocation and my vocation, as my two eyes make one sight” Robert Frost.

I like that one! It’s a simple concept really; doing something you love for your job. This is something I have not done in my working career and it is something that I mean to remedy. How will I do this? Simple. I am taking a great deal of notice of my strengths and weaknesses statistics from Seligmen and my Holland number as taught by the “What colour is my parachute?” book. I am going to use these figures as the basis for an entire life realignment between what I love doing and the skills I love using. Why? Because I believe that by getting better engagement with my good life and meaningful life that I can live a happier life. The thing I want to do is to use this approach to develop a role as a visionary leader in a visionary organisation, breaking out of the mould of the 9-5 computer geek for hire and doing work that makes a positive difference for a lot of people. Uniting these two forces can only lead to better outcomes where the whole is more than the sum of the parts.

The article by Manville & Ober is an interesting interpretation on the Athenian concept of citizenship. The Athenian model lead to better change management and the ability to adapt to change because of the way its processes allowed the appropriate expert to step up to the appropriate challenge. The system of allowing everyone time to participate in decision making and having a rota system for the leadership assured that a variety of viewpoints were obtained and lead to a balanced society with higher productivity, innovation and happiness than other monarchist models of the time. In fact the article explains how we actually have less democracy than the Athenians did, however this is balanced by the fact that we have emancipation and abolished slavery. What leapt out at me was the sense of ownership that citizens had, thus ensuring that they did try their best. In industries based on knowledge workers this is an important lesson because the current capitalist system does not reward the workers for their labours, the residual cash flows are always redirected back to the owners of the capital. My lesson from this is that to go some way to getting people to participate in your organisation above and beyond the call of duty, then ownership stakes are important to ensure that their capital is rewarded. After all, in knowledge based company the workers can leave at any moment and where is your capital then?

Finally, the case study of Magritek reinforces this idea that capital is not the money that you put in. In the case of venture capital companies it is the expertise that the partners can put into the company that makes the difference between success and failure. Initially I thought that a partnership with a technology based company of scale would help put them on the map and I was partially right. What they actually did was stick with the University funded model and get bigger so that they had a better bargaining position when they did start to draw in the VC firms. The outcome of all this is that I have decided that involvement with Venture Capital firms is a good way of getting out the career rut I find myself in, and probably provides the best possible opportunities for utilising the skills I have and becoming a real leader in business.

Creative Leadership: Visionary Leadership Challenge

For my visionary leadership challenge I decided to focus on Entrepreneurship. I arranged a half hour interview with Colin Harvey, an Entrepreneur in the Animal Health Sciences industry and founder of the company ANCARE. As a former computer geek in the IT Services Industry there were limited opportunities for entrepreneurship, vision, strategic thinking, changing vantage point or getting a big picture perspective business issues in my daily work. Even in the MBA program with its focus on theoretical frameworks and big picture issues such as governance, I haven’t found I am seeing the business world from the vantage point of a business person. With these things in mind I thought a good change of vantage point for me would be to talk to a real entrepreneur and see what I could learn about their vantage point, focus, perspective and vision.

The first key learning item I got from this interview was the importance of emotional commitment. Emotion is the key to marketing your products, but more than that it’s the key to being successful in everything you do. Harvey referred to the research of Baba Shiv at Stanford University who has done extensive research into the emotional components of the decision making process (Stanford Graduate School of Business, 2008). Harvey created an emotive response to his products in the target audience using television advertisements that emphasise the role of the farmer as a person who “cares for animals” rather than “farms animals”. At the simplest level, the idea is that people are more inclined to buy a product if they have an emotional reason for doing so, rather than relying on rational items such as price point. By competing in the emotional space you can charge a higher price for a product and people will actually pay more because they believe it’s making them happier. Harvey also talked about the role of emotion in the larger context of life and commitment. You don’t make good decisions when there is no e4motional commitment in them. From his point of view, life, success, wealth and all good decisions come about because of emotional commitment. If you don’t feel positive emotional commitment about something then it’s not the right thing to be doing. When describing the importance of this, Harvey referred to this equation which emphasises the importance of emotion in success:

A(S) = iE2

Where:

A = achievement
S = satisfaction
i = intellect
E = emotional commitment


The second key learning item I got from this interview is the importance of vision. Harvey refers to this as prescience and it’s the idea that you should be looking towards the future and working on solving tomorrow’s problems rather than the problems of today. Prescience focuses the process of innovation in a very logical way. If you know what tomorrow’s problem is going to be then you can create the product that will solve it. This demonstrates Harvey’s ability to focus on particular parts of this vision, marshalling resources to achieve it. This process of visionary leadership is also demonstrated by the way Harvey goes about running his business. The vision drives the strategy which in turn drives the annual objectives system.

The third key item I learned from this interview was the importance being able to articulate your vision to people. When Harvey was setting up his business in 1985, he sought out and brought on board people who related to this prescience idea, building a team of people who had the same beliefs and common goals. This demonstrates to me that he is the kind of leader who has a compelling vision, and who can articulate it in a way that gathers followers.

Finally, when asked if he was an optimistic person he said “always, you have to be”. This statement makes perfect sense when you are building products for a future that is uncertain because you really don’t know which of those products is going to be a winner. Based on the success Harvey has had I would say his vision, and the optimism with which he approaches business have served him very well and the lessons he has to teach are well worth listening to and internalizing. It’s also quite obvious that he hasn’t lost this optimism despite recently selling ANCARE to Merial. When I asked Harvey “If you were 10 years younger, would you have sold the company?” he replied with absolute certainty and total conviction “No, I would have worked on cracking the European market!”. As such I can only conclude that the New Zealand has not seen the last Harvey enterprise.

Throughout the interview I picked up an impression that Harvey is strong in all the aspects of visionary leadership, although he said he wouldn’t describe himself as such. Using the tools of prescience he changes his vantage point, searching out the possibilities of the future. He then focuses on innovations that solve specific problems in the future, leading to a strong competitive position. He puts the problems on the future into perspective, seeing them as opportunities not as things to avoid.


Interview Questions

Operations sold to Merial, what are the implications for IP with new product development?
• All IP has been sold to Merial, all future developments IP belongs to Merial.

Prescience? How do you go about forecasting? Get out there and ask farmers? Ask Universities?
• Solving tomorrow’s problems, focuses innovation.

Visionary Leadership? How often do you goal set? Do you stick to a plan or do you keep updating the plan to cope with change?
1. Vision
2. Strategy
3. Yearly Objectives

Competitive advantage: Marketing and Innovation?
• Both! Refer to Baba Shiv and his research on emotion in the decision making process.
• If you can’t develop an emotional connection to a product you are not going to succeed.
• If you don’t feel emotive about what you are doing in life you will not succeed, emotion is the key.
• Decisions that are made without emotional input are going to be bad decisions.
• Emotion is a better lever than price when making purchasing decisions.

Brand accessibility: by repetition do you mean increasing the rate of purchase or are you referring to the visibility of the brand? Marketing communications focus?
• Exceeding the sum of the parts. Putting the brand everywhere, repeating the messages, targeting the brand messages to the correct audience.
• Marketing communications needs to be able to establish the emotional connection. This is more challenging in some cultures than others e.g. Europe is easier that China.

Emotion as a tool in the decision making process: how do you build an emotive response to a drench?
• Farmers are not farmers, they are animal care workers. This gives you an emotional touch point.

Pricing, brand image and placebo effects: work in products market, don’t work in services market? What about HR?
• Harder to achieve in services markets than product markets. Lawyers get away with it and can charge very high prices if they are good at it. Emphasis on “they are really good at it”.

A(S) = iE2 : What’s the formula? Emotion is the cornerstone of success and satisfaction, how do you live that statement?
A = achievement
S = satisfaction
i = intellectual
E = Emotion

• Emotion is the driver. If you don’t have emotion then you don’t have commitment.

People management: ticks in all the boxes! Why do you think there is a brain drain? What is it about your leadership style that makes people want to follow you?
• People leave because it’s a small place, there’s no room and limited growth.
• People joined the organisation because they believed in the idea, they felt emotive about it and committed to the organisation.

Sell down: if you were 10 years younger do you think you would have sold? What are tax implications of what you wanted to do? Is success planning a problem for a lot of small but competitive businesses in NZ?
• No way! I would have kept the company and I would have worked on cracking the European market.
• China would not be the market of choice due to the challenges with marketing communications there.
• Succession is more a problem of scale and less a problem of skill deficit in NZ. If you get big enough then succession is not a problem.

Leading Change: Handbook Entry, Week 3

“Then, I said; the business of us who are the founders of the State will be to compel the best minds to attain that knowledge which we have already shown to be the greatest of all-they must continue to ascend until they arrive at the good; but when they have ascended and seen enough we must not allow them to do as they do now.

What do you mean?

I mean they remain in the upper world: but this must not be allowed; they must be made to descend again among the prisoners of the den, and partake of their labours and honours, whether they are worth having or not” Plato, The Republic (360 B.C.E.)

I’m very interested in the idea that ascent to enlightenment is not the end game in itself, but as Plato says, its purpose is to allow us to descend back into the darkness and understand the truth about the assumptions or shadows we find there. He argues that the leaders of the state should be taught the knowledge of truth and good, so that they know the realities of these things. This allows the leaders to descend back into the darkness knowing that these ideas are not shadows but real, and that their rule will be the better for it. The leaders also understand that it is less desirable to descend back into the darkness than to remain enlightened, endowing them with reluctance to rule which leads to them being, in Plato’s view, the perfect statesmen. This could be extended to say that knowledge of the truth makes them incorruptible. My personal take on this idea is that learning or the acquisition of knowledge is a wholesome task and that once one has gained knowledge it is better to share it and lead others towards the same understanding of reality, not to sit on a pedestal and hide in a life of luxury. When I lead in the future, it will be as a leader that seeks knowledge and takes it back to my followers.

Dr M. Ahn’s discussion of this passage took a different perspective. When we talked about Plato’s Republic he discussed the idea of how you would manage the change from darkness to light. His question was “how could you lead people through that change?” I guess the answer is that you have to go ands seek the true knowledge first, and then bring it back to those who are in the dark. In the realms of change management and its twin leadership this would be akin to developing that teachable point of view (T.V.P.). I could say that the guts of getting people to see the light in order for them to follow or backup your idea is down to the T.P.V. and how convincing it is. This relates back to the point from the first lecture about having empathy with the listener. If you can’t see the issue from their perspective and then you are probably not going to be able to shine the light on it and take them for a ride towards a truthful way of looking at the issue. It’s only now, after letting the little grey cells ponder this and then express themselves as a stream of consciousness as I bash out this journal entry on the keyboard that I finally get what Dr. Ahn was talking about.

How is all this applied? Look at a case study (the darkness). Look into the future and see what can be done (the light). Develop the Teachable Point of View (knowledge) and take it back to those still in the darkness and show them the light. Once you have them seeing the darkness from this perspective, provided they like what they see, then you should be able to sell the idea that change is needed and you can begin the process of moving towards the light. It all boils down to doing the hard work to get the knowledge and then selling it to those who haven’t seen it yet. My mission as a leader in the future is to work on the empathy and story telling so that I can be the one who sheds light on what has been and where to go next.

Plato thought that the ultimate knowledge was arithmetic and that would be the best knowledge to teach for the purposes of enlightenment. Based on that logic I had this amusing mental picture of animal intelligence researchers teaching gorilla’s mental arithmetic. Planet of the Apes for real!

After reading the Shackleton article, I now understand what Sir Edmund Hillary was saying when he made this quote:

“For scientific discovery give me Scott; for speed and efficiency give me Amundsen; but when disaster strikes and all hope is gone, get down on your knees and pray for Shackleton”

It’s a stunning example of good leadership. In the face of all the elements could throw at him, in the face of open mutiny of his followers and without any backup to help them out he held it together and saved his crew down to the last man. As Dr. Ahn pointed out, he never made it to the South Pole so the success of his expeditions could be openly questioned. Could he have made it to the South Pole if he had sacrificed his crew? We will never know. Scott made it and he did sacrifice his crew. Amundsen made it first and made it back to continue on with other adventures. Maybe all this proves is Englishmen have no place in Polar Regions and would have been better off leaving the Norwegians to it. I guess the lesson to be learned is about the leadership styles. Amundsen knew what the goal was and made a good plan to achieve it. Scott knew what the goal was but didn’t get the plan right and died as a consequence. Shackleton had the goal but when the plan fell apart he dealt with it. Amundsen had a fair share of his own stuff ups with some of his later ideas, like flying to the North Pole when aviation was in its infancy. Very few of those plans took off and he tried the same thing time and time again with little or no success, eventually destroying his status as a national hero.

The lesson in change management is that Shackleton could deal with the problem of plans going pear shaped. Sure the goal was not achieved, but hero status was assured by what he did achieve. He got there and back through impossible odds, showing a dogged determination to see his vision through. He lead by example, walked the talk and got his crew to believe they could do it to. That’s a quality leader. Sure he didn’t actually succeed, but the lessons in change management are still valid and I would like to become the kind of leader that can take disaster in their stride. Sometimes minimising damage is the greatest victory that you can walk away with when things outside of your control conspire against you.

Creative Leadership: Preliminary Self-Audit and Action Plan - The Six Faces of Leadership

Visionary – Direction – Where are we going? – Imagination
My rating: 5 out of 5
Where am I going? Success. What’s Success? Meeting my motivational needs. What are your motivational needs? Power, achievement, affiliation. Can you visualise yourself as a successful person doing that job? Yes I can. Can I tell stories that spark the imagination of others? Sometimes, but often I am not in the same empathetic frame for the listener and I to communicate. My communication skills need to be worked on in order to convey vision to others, open their imaginations and take them on the journey with me as a leader.
Action item:
Work on developing compelling stories that sells the vision to others. Build a teachable point of view – TPV.

Teacher – Development – How will we get there technically? – Information & Expertise
My rating: 3 out of 5
I have lots of transferable skills that would give me the basic tools to become successful at almost any job. The question is, do any of the jobs I want to do require additional specialist skills? Are there requirements for entry into those professions that I would have to meet? Unfortunately the answer is yes they do. Most professions have some entry level requirements in terms of education which have to be met to practice the profession. Law, Medicine and Engineering are all examples of these. I enjoy teaching and coaching those that are keen to learn and I adapt my teaching style to the student to try and give them something that meets there needs whilst still conveying the skills to them. I don’t enjoy teaching people who are not interested in learning or who are obviously bored and not listening.
Action Item:
Develop a plan for skill acquisition, learn them and test my mastery of those skills.

Ambassador – Representation – Who are we? – Interpersonal Skills
My Rating: 2 out of 5
In the communication game I have had sub optimal results. I find it difficult to empathise with the audience and put the vision into a frame that they understand. Part of this is to do with being very technical because it’s easier to explain your point of view to someone who has 90% of the knowledge that you do. In terms of communicating to strangers, I’m not that good at boiling the “who are we?” question down into a simple, bite size chunk that conveys out vision and values. I launch straight into a complicated technical discussion without going through the small talk.
Action Item:
Work on the communication style. Engage the listener with a simple emotional hook to get their attention, and then reel them in by telling the rest of the story. If they don’t bite then keep it to small talk because they are not the fish I am after.

Judge – Ethics - How will we get there ethically? – Integrity
My Rating: 5 out of 5
I don’t consider for one moment that I should be untrue to my values so I rate myself very strongly on this leadership face. That being said I can have trouble reconciling my values and the values of the organisation I work for. More often than not this is not because the stated values are different, but under the face of it the organisations values are written on the wall but not in people’s actions. I believe that if you are true to your values then you will achieve your vision. If you abandon those values while on the journey then your vision can become corrupted and lose its appeal before even you get there.
Action Item:
Own the leadership role by demonstrating the values of the organisation every day. Get others to buy into those values by showing how walking the talk leads to better results for them.

Spirit Doctor – Motivation – Why are we going there? – Inspiration
My Rating: 3 out of 5
We are going there because that’s where we want to go! I am untested in this area because the only motivation I have used with followers has been the lure of financial reward. This is a common motivation for self employed contractors in the Information Technology business. I think that if I have a compelling vision and the right TPV to get it across I could build a band of followers however I haven’t had the chance to challenge myself in this.
Action Item:
The Leadership Challenge will be the ultimate test of how good I am at inspiring others to be followers and eventually leaders themselves.

Servant – Self Awareness – Why am I going there? – Introspection
My Rating: 4 out of 5
This is a hard one. Some days my motivation for power is the most important to me. Other days my motivation for achievement or affiliation is the omnipotent one. The challenge for me is to really dig deep and find the things that fascinate and inspire me, putting aside the baggage of the past, society and even my nearest and dearest. I have come to the realisation that if you are not true to yourself and doing something that satisfies you in your work life, then you are probably not going to be satisfied in any other area of your life. Doing things for the money just isn’t enough. You need to be doing them for the love of it.
Action Item:
Develop my motivational and transferable skills model and find something that meets most of my needs most of the time.

Creative Leadership: The Gift of my Childhood

Introduction
From my childhood a number of things stand out as being of significance.

Bullying – both victim and offender, power, attention seeking, control
Reading – fantasy, imagination, vision and on the odd occasion studious
Technical – mechanical, electrical, physical, ability to draw, read and understand technical sketches and music notation
Recklessness – loved some sports and hated others, sailing, skiing, hiking, kendo were all good sports and brought out a my determination and sometimes my reckless side, not a huge fan of team based competitive sports
Individualism – rejection of norms, troublemaker, non-conformist, manifests itself in my choice of sports and my determination not to let bullies get the better of me

After I read through my personal obituary I realised that there were a lot of matches, something I commented on in my journal before I started writing this essay. In this essay I will take a little time to focus on each one of these areas. In conclusion I will draw a quick analogy of an activity where I feel I have addressed each of these issues and try to discover any emergent behaviours or motivators.

Reading
This was one of my favourite activities, along with planning and thinking. Not that these plans turned into action all that often, but I was very good at visualising what I was going to do after I had achieved success at an activity. The weakness of this approach was that sometimes the visualisation of how I was going to get to that success end point was ignored in favour of the end result. I guess you could call this the “give it to me now without the hard work in between” or “I know what I will do when I get it, but I can’t get off my arse to get there”. On balance I think that this is an edge because visualisation is an important part of the design process for any new innovation or improvement to the existing product or service. Being able to imagine what you could do with something is the first step in changing that thing in such a way that you can achieve that goal. Another weakness to consider with vision is that it can encourage impatience as I get so keen to see the end result I can rush through some of the steps and end up having to touch up the end product later.

Technical
This is an ability I’ve always practiced and its best described as the way I come to understand how a process works or the way I build something based on a plan or set of instructions. It also covers how I go about using various tools and techniques to create a thing and involves a fair amount of visualisation when I’m in the planning phase of the build. I see this as a strength because it traqnsforms the process of realising visions into a set of concrete steps, plans or processes that need to be executed. It also acts as a safe harbour for me when things are going wrong because a bad situation can often be broken down into small problems and systematically fixed.

Bullying
This is a harder one to define because there are elements or power and attention seeking in Bullying. This implies a need for both power and affiliation which could be mutually exclusive in a leader where power is usually paired with achievement. How this manifests itself in my adult life is in the game playing that I indulge in at work, which usually consists of using governance processes for my personal advantage. Bullying I received in childhood stills haunts my memories to this day. I have drawn strength from this by driving my career forward in a determined sort of way, usually with the end goal of making more money that anyone who pissed me off in high school. The negative side of this is that it has made me remote and hard to get to know. I tend to react defensively, almost to the point of being slightly paranoid whenever I am approached by colleagues that I believe could be about to give me more work to do. It’s like the feeling where you think you see the light at the end of the tunnel, but it turns out to be someone with a torch bringing you more work.

Recklessness
I do not mean stupidity by this. I think it is more a case of feeling confident about something and just doing it, trusting in myself or my equipment to save the day. I do not mean bravery by this. That would involve having the courage to do something regardless of how confident I felt about achieving the goal, even in the face of hopeless odds. In my world this manifests itself in a love of sailing, skiing, mountain climbing, hunting, kayaking, cycling, Kendo, motorbikes and other things that most people think are implicitly dangerous. To me they are not dangerous because all you need to do is learn the skills involved and you can do them. For example, I never worry about going over the edge of a cliff when I have a climbing harness, shoes, helmet and ropes rigged up properly. It doesn’t matter how high the cliff is as long as I have enough rope to get to the bottom!

Individualism
You might have noticed that all of the sports I like doing are individualistic. If I fail it is down to my mistake or to an equipment failure. They are not team sports and do not depend on other people to pull me through challenges. Even in Kendo where competition is in a team format, it is still a one on one challenge between two humans, their equipment, their skill, stamina, balance and knowledge of their opponents fighting style. When you fight in Kendo the world ceases to exist as you go one on one with your opponent, bring mind and body together in a fight to the metaphorical death. I guess part of this stems from the bullying that seems to be a curse of team sports, in particular rugby. It’s hard to get good at something if you are the small kid who is always sitting on the bench. As a child I remember be fiercely individualistic, rejecting the social norms of my high school because I couldn’t be part of that anyway. At the time this cost me socially, but I bounced back at University where I met a lot more people who thought like me and I rarely bumped into anyone I went to school with ever again.

Conclusion
In this essay I have touched on each of the feelings or behaviours I most remember my early life and which I think are still shaping my life at present. I could summarize the whole set with a simple analogy that comes from one sport, wall climbing:

Vision – I know what the goal is, to reach the top!
Technical – I have the right equipment, I have the right skills and understand the process, the unexpected doesn’t frighten me as I have backup
Recklessness – It’s a dangerous and pointless sport with lots of injuries and pain
Individual – Me V The Wall, no need to rely on others unless I’m climbing in a pair
Bullying – I have complete control of the situation

What I have discovered through this analogy is that for me the emergent motivation is that requirement for control or power. I can conclude by saying that when I have all these factors in balance I feel that I have control over the situation and myself. When I feel that these things are being incrementally stripped away from me I can respond with anger or hopelessness. The implication of this is that I feel I am an emergent visionary leader, looking for the right situation to unleash the energy I have inside and motivated by power and achievement.

Leading Change: Handbook Entry, Week 2

“The Iron Law of Failure extends from the world of biology into human activities, into social and economic organisations. The precise mathematical relationship which describes the link between the frequency and size of the extinction of companies, for example, is virtually identical to that which describes the extinction of biological species in the fossil record. Only the time scales differ.” Omerod, P. (2005)

Now that is a profound little quote. It ties in nicely with something my economics lecturer said which was that if there is a market and your product or service is good enough, then the “right owners” who think they can make a buck out of it will invest. If there are no “right owners” then your idea should probably be left alone to die, or you could try to get the government to prop it up if there is some sort of social benefit that is too hard to price in the market. Adaptability is also an important factor in why things survive or not. Being able to get arbitrage out of your surroundings is something that requires constant monitoring of your environment, plus the resources and skills to invest in the projects as they pop up. Forward thinking vision seems to be a factor as well. If you can see an arbitrage opportunity coming up then you can make the investment decision required to take advantage of it. The lesson I have learned from all of this is that failure is a normal part of the business process and that ideas have a limited time and place in which to work. If an idea doesn’t work then the time and place may be yet to come and it’s time to move on to another idea.

“Management is based on process, in that it focuses on maintaining systems to provide goods and services more efficiently. Leadership is prospective: it defines what the future should look like, aligns the organisation with a common vision, and provides inspiration to achieve transformational goals.” Ahn, M., J., Adamson, J., S., A., Dornbusch, D. (2004)

I often feel like a leader without a following. My capabilities are so focussed on forward thinking that the present sometimes gets left to deal with itself. My argument for this is that if you don’t plan and design with the future in mind, then you end up with a sub-optimal future. This is a little bit of a problem for me as I also need up the ante with the management side. Establishing equilibrium between these roles and adjusting that equilibrium to respond to the context you find yourself in has been shown by Farkas and Wetlaufer (1996) to be more successful than sticking to any one leadership or management approach. Going forward I will be more aware of this balance and the need to change it to adapt to whatever I am doing at the time.

Ahn, M., et al discuss how successful leaders tend to be those to change the corporate culture to match strategic needs. Overcoming resistance to this change can be aided by focussing on 3 key principles:

Focus on short term wins
Develop a coalition in favour of change
Engage employees emotionally behind the common vision

This ties in nicely with my own personal beliefs and style. I don’t think that having a strong vision is something I need to work on in particular, but the way I engage the stakeholders who are going to be delivering part of my vision is. The lesson I take from this idea is that a change isn’t going to happen if you can’t get a team together to drive it and a bunch of followers to believe in it. My vision has to be a short, compelling story that is easy to sell and people can understand very quickly. Then all they need to do is decide if they want to invest in the idea or not.

Kotter, J. P. (2005) reinforces some of the ideas and adds a couple of extra ones as well. He repeats the ideas regarding building a coalition, creating a vision, working on short term wins and overcoming resistance and other obstacles. In addition to this he also talks about:

Creating urgency
Communicating the vision
Declaring victory too soon
Anchoring change in the organisational culture

Creating urgency that helps to define vision and drive change is something that can be hard to do if people think everything is successful and change is not required. This implies that people are not looking forward and seeing the changes in the environment and sometimes a spurious action is required to create a sense of urgency. Kotter cites and example of how a CEO cooked the books of a successful company to make things look worse than they really were (2005). The lesson I take from this is that in order to create a sense of urgency I need to create a need within an organisation, and that creating a spurious need is not necessarily a bad thing as long as the actions that come out of it are congruent with the vision.

Communicating the vision has always been a weak point of mine. I can see the benefits of change but others cannot, or they are not willing to invest their time or put themselves in the firing line in the event that it doesn’t work according to plan. The lesson I take from this is that I need to work on selling the vision to the audience, getting people on side as my short term wins and then using my coalition to drive the need for change home, get the money spent the and change implemented. One point that Kotter makes is that walking the talk of your vision is very important. You won’t be selling your vision if your actions are not consistent with that vision (2005).

Declaring victory too soon is a thing I hadn’t really considered before. The idea is that the momentum of a program of change can be lost if victory is declared before the whole thing is implemented. Perhaps the best way of describing this is with the idea that a project isn’t complete until it’s operational. When the project team is split up the coalition for change can be dissolved and the inertia for change can evaporate before the benefits a realised. The lesson I take from this is that you cannot stop the process of change, that there should always be a non-stop program of change occurring and the people making that change happen shoul be working for leaders who can overcome the obstacles to that change.

This ties in nicely with Kotter’s last point, that the need for change must be anchored in the organisations way of doing things (2005). If people want to be maintenance workers then they are not the right kind of follower for me and they can go work somewhere else. If they want to be agents of change who are fulfilling the shared vision then they can join in. The lesson that I take from this is that change needs to be the mantra of the organisation, not something that has an end point.

The last quote from Kotter (2005) that I want to finish this entry with is:

“Change is messy and full of surprises”

This ties in nicely with a story I read about how the US military Special Forces search for emergent leadership. When an exercise is planned, the examiners change almost everything about the exercise so that when the troops and commanders are on the field they need to manage change on the fly to get the core objectives achieved. This involves bold, aggressive leadership and that kind of leader emerges during the crisis times. The lesson I take from this is that change can be unpredictable and that I need to be an adaptable leader if I want to make it happen.

Creative Leadership: Personal Obituary

Samuel, born December 27th XXXX, died May 17th 2124 in a motorcycle accident, aged XXX. Beloved husband of Shari, and loving father of triplet daughters Lakshmi, Saraswati and Parvati and sons Attilla and Tamerlane.

Sam was vaporised in a ball of flame when his classic Ducati 916 exploded at 235km/pr during a race at Monza, Italy. Authorities are investigating claims that the new biopetrol replacement for the now banned oil based product may have had a part to play in this tragedy as the motorcycle had been recently converted to run on biopetrol. Whatever the cause, Sam died doing what he loved, riding hard on a fast motorcycle, to quote him “seeing the road 6 inches away from your face at 200km’s really lets you know you’re alive”.

His was a life lead in full, experiencing some of most momentous changes in human history. From the fall of Communism to the commercialization of Clinical Immortality, for which he acted as the Intellectual Property Lawyer, and the colonisation of Alpha Centuri which he visited on a number of occasions. Always a leader of change, Sam was quoted in an interview by Harvard Business Review as saying “when you are faced with a situation where everything is going wrong, leadership will emerge and it will be bold and aggressive. That’s the kind of leader I am.”

This leadership style was typified by his no nonsense approach to the legal profession he loved. Leading the charge on bringing Intellectual Property Law into the post digital world, he chaired the United Nations commission for Property Rights and was responsible for the ratification of the 2031 Zurich Convention on Intellectual Property Law by 195 countries. He also acted as the chief justice on the Hague tribunal for Intellectual Property Law enforcement from 2030 to 2074.

A keen advocate of innovation and science, Sam acted as a board member for a number of biomedical and engineering start ups, including GodLife Sciences, developers of the Clinical Immortality Pill that made everyone 29 years old again, and ChillySleep, the innovators in Suspended Animation techniques which were to make space travel possible. Sam was always mechanical tinkerer and spent a lot of his spare time tuning his ancient Ducati and trying to find a little more power. His love of engineering and things that go fast or make lots of noise lead to him being a guest presenter on the Discovery Channels Myth Busters 127th series.

After the tragic death of his wife in 2033 from lung cancer as a result of smoking, he pursued tobacco firms with irrational vengeance until commercial tobacco production was banned under the United Nations Nicosia Convention of 2035. He later published her children’s books and established an educational trust for the proceeds. Shari’s books have now sold 1.7 billion copies and are published in 120 languages and 5 dialects of post modern English.

Leaving the legal profession in 2072 to pursue a life as a philanthropist adventurer, he travelled extensively in the third world, devoting all his energy to championing the causes of the poor and raising their standards of living by providing facilities for clean water, organic farming techniques and sustainable living. Sam also brought about a Luddite revolution in hunting techniques where people killed wild animals for food, techniques that had not been used since 2100 when farming of animals was replaced by clone factories. He also turned from his views on Intellectual Property and advanced the cause of the Creative Commons, arguing successfully for the amendment to the Zurich Convention that allowed “life critical” technological innovations to be royalty free for poorer countries. Sam received a Knighthood in 2107 and was admitted to the order of the Garter in 2114 for services to humanity. Sam was also ennobled in 2120, gaining the title Earl of Cornwall.

During his life Sam always had a thirst for knowledge, and value that he instilled in his children through example and encouragement. Tamerlane graduated from MIT and went to work at GodLife Sciences, becoming the CEO in 2046. Attilla joined the military and is now leading the United Nations peace keeping force in the former United States of Africa. Lakshmi is now a fashion designer and political agitator for the New York Lesbian Couples with Clone Children Action Group, taking a leaf from her father who was a former anarchist. Saraswati went to university to meet a rich husband, and has since been married four times. She is currently the Royal Family Gossip reporter for a British Tabloid newspaper. Parvati is a geek like her father and joined Tamerlane at MIT and GodLife, before retuning to the families home country of New Zealand where she followed her father into the Legal profession and is now the Member of Parliament for Hawke’s Bay and Minister of Environmental Affairs.

A memorial service is to be held at St Luke’s Church in Havelock North, New Zealand on May 21st, before his monument is unveiled at the nearby Cemetery. A minutes Silence will also be held at the United Nations General Assembly, and at the Hague on May 24th. No flowers please, however Sam would love it if you would send a donation to “The Bobbitty Bob Bob Children’s Education charity”.

Creative Leadership: What does leadership mean to you (personally)?

Is leadership and following an instinctive behaviour? I my mind there is an element of instinctive behaviour in how leaders emerge and how followers choose to follow them. In my working career I have known, without really being able to explain it, who the managers are that I would want to work with again. Managers that display what I define as leadership skills are the people whom I most respected and enjoyed working with. When I worked with managers that did not display those skills I left to work elsewhere. So what I would like to discuss is what behaviours I consider to be good leadership behaviours and how do these affect my own values.

Firstly, I respected managers who trust their staff to do research and make the best possible choice regarding an issue and who then supported those findings when reporting to others. I had a case where I got left to my own devices to design a solution to the problem. After I had been given a set of requirements, I engaged the resources I needed to do some research in areas I was not familiar with and then I presented the findings and recommendation to my boss when we had come up with the best idea. Unfortunately the boss reacted in anger because they felt that they hadn’t been kept in the communications loop and that the design had changed from what was originally proposed. I got angry and left the organisation. The conclusion I draw from this is that I like to work with managers with high emotional intelligence. The outcome of this is that I place “developing high emotional intelligence” at the top of my personal leadership action list and in the future I will walk the talk when it comes to displaying trust.

Secondly, I respect managers who help their staff work with the values and processes of an organisation even if those values and processes do not fit well with their own personal philosophy. I think that a person needs to ensure that they are working for an organisation whose values agree with their own or who is prepared to internalise the organisations values regardless of their own beliefs and display behaviours that are congruent to those values. For example, I got stung badly by the performance management system at one employer’s site because of some issues between my manager and the organisation that were broadly related to his personal philosophies. The performance management system allowed one to set personal objectives and the benchmarks against which achievement were to be judged, alongside peer review of those achievements. The process expected that the manager review those objectives for alignment to strategic aims and values of the organisation. Because the manager didn’t really agree with the process and had a lot of turmoil in their personal life, those objectives were never reviewed nor were any milestones used to ascertain progress towards those goals. The outcome was an extremely poor performance review. At the post review meeting I discussed this problem and even received a raise but I resigned and moved on to another organisation shortly after. The outcome of this is that I now make a conscious effort to understand the values of an organisation before I start working for them, mostly through research conducted through employees of that organisation. I also make very sure that what I want to do is congruent with what they want me to do. I never want to be the kind of manager that doesn’t look after their staff or who doesn’t know when their personal life is getting in the way of their professional life and seek the appropriate help.

Thirdly, I respect leaders and managers that I trust. From my perspective trust can take a lot forms. One side of this ~would be where a manager sticks around in the face of adversity or when problems start becoming complex and challenging. For example, I had a manager that instigated some activities and took a leadership role in them while it was still fun to do so but who disappeared when those activities were called into question by more senior people. Suddenly it was our problem and by being absent the repercussions of those activities bypassed him entirely. I guess that I have to know that a manager is going to stand in my corner when an issue starts getting complex rather than bailing. The outcome of this is that I place a high value on ownership and responsibility and want to follow these values as a leader.

Fourthly, I respect the managers that communicate with their followers and check to see if there are any issues that need to be addressed. In the case of my best leader this did not take the form of a daily team meeting, but was implicit in their dealings with all of the staff. They were so good at getting people to deliver what was supposed to be delivered that they eventually replaced the real boss of the team! For example, when a IT project was not delivering, the sponsor tried to pin the road block on our team and arranged for the vendor to turn up at the end of the working day, with the intention that we all stay onsite until the sponsor was happy that something was being done. My team leader immediately stepped in and said that this was unreasonable and that I would only have to stay late if I felt like it. I stayed late and the job got done, for which I was rewarded with a round at the pub. The outcome for me from this scenario is that I will place a high value on supporting my staff in the face of process abuse by other teams, and inspire them towards extra effort by setting the example myself and rewarding that effort to show that it’s appreciated.

Lastly, I respect those managers who take the time to teach and answer questions. This is a leadership trait that I try to practice myself and I really enjoy teaching others. Where I could improve upon this is in the answering of questions which I tend to answer with “I don’t know”. In the United Kingdom it was considered a good thing and earned you respect when you said “I don’t know” to questions that you didn’t know the answer too. In New Zealand this is seen as trying to avoid work. The outcome of this is that I need to make sure that my behaviour matches the values of the society I happen to be working in, or move to a society where specialisation is more readily accepted.

In summary to the question “what does leadership mean to me?” I have discussed a range of experiences where I felt leadership qualities were displayed (or not!) and I discussed how those values are important to me. I intend to internalise and then preach those values to my own followers when the time comes for me to step up and lead. Specifically those values are:
Trust
Be true to yourself
Loyalty
Learning
From my perspective these are the leadership values that I believe in and will follow in my future working life.

Leading Change: Handbook Entry, Week 1

It’s a new course, a new semester and the beginning of the end of my MBA. It’s at this time I start to contemplate in earnest what I need to change about my life and career that will lead to happiness, fulfilment and ultimately using the skills that I enjoy using and take away from this qualification. What journey shall I take next? Should I worry about it now or wait until the last assignment is handed in and my grades are cast to the whims of the powers that be?

Anywho, enough setting of the scene and to the matter at hand! As required, I will now discuss what 2-3 issues raise in class and how these may help me be more effective in future work situations. I’ll take this as meaning 2-3 issues that interest me and I can immediately relate to something that’s happened to me in the past or I’ve seen happening to someone else.

In his presentation Professor Meeks raised a point that immediately resonated with me because it seemed to be mentioned only briefly and then was largely ignored for the rest of the discussion. The point was this, the discussion introduced the generational differences between “baby boomer’s”, “generation x” and “millennials” which is a useful frame to provide insight on how people behave and how to motivate them. I felt the gap that was left unfilled was how one motivates and manages generation x. Please don’t think that the rant that follows is motivated by the fact that I am a member of generation x . I am concerned by the idea that our generation may become some sort of historical footnote in between the social enlightenment that accompanied the baby boomers and the over pampered the millennials. Maybe generation x are so few in number that we have not had any real impact of Western culture, relegating us to being a bridging generation between periods of social upheaval. It’s not a comforting thought! I remember being a young adult watching the Berlin wall, the horrors of Yugoslavia, the rediscovery of Eastern Europe, dancing to techno music in the Berlin love Parade and the rise of the anti-globalisation movement where “No Logo” was our bible and we protested in front of the British houses of parliament in May 1999. We were united and we were a movement, then 9/11 changed the world and we thought we could make happen in the new millennium was laid bare by the winds of fear, anger and hate. All that being said I took away from the discussion that the motivation and behaviour of the millennial generation needs to be understood if I am to be an effective manager in the future. This ties in nicely with Meeks summary of his talk, “think forward and have empathy” which I agree are essential elements of leading the millennial generation. I’ll finish with another perl of wisdom that was passed down to me by a baby boomer, he said that there is a golden time in your life when you are on of the young, cool people and the future is a ocean of possibilities with an unknowable horizon. Then without warning you suddenly realise that the cool people are all younger than you and your life is a good sized sea. The one satisfaction that can be gleaned from this is that you realise that those young cool people are all going to be in the same predicament eventually. If Meek’s is right in saying that millennials are by and large pampered children who demand respect without thinking they need to earn it, I can only hope that they develop the mental faculties to deal with that day when they realise that they are not the young cool people anymore because it comes sooner than they think.

A few things leapt out at me immediately when I read Eli Cohen & Noel Tichy paper.

Firstly, there is a great quote from a middle manager at Intel:

When I see a chain of email messages, I know people aren’t confronting. When I see an e-mail with a big long tail floating across my screen, I tell people, ‘I’ll stay for the whole time in the meeting you need to have but we’ve got to confront this.’

In my previous life as a computer geek I saw this precise behaviour several times each day. Maybe that was an indication of the organisational culture I was in. Every time a problem arose that required some leadership from someone an endless email would float around the group waiting form someone to make a decision. The reasons for this were twofold, people didn’t really know why they were doing a particular thing and no one would step up to fill the role of defining the problem and the process to fix it. Going forward in my future roles I would like to be the kind of person that steps up and takes ownership of the problem through to resolution or I would like to be the person who brings it to the attention of the person whose role it is to step up to the task. If the person is happy to teach me how to step up to the role and deal with it myself then I’m happy to learn from that kind of leader.

The second thing I found interesting in the article was the story about leaders under fire in the Special Operations Forces where a simulation exercise is designed to go wrong at every point. The kind of situations that lead to the endless emails referred too above could often occur when things were going badly. The point of the simulation exercise is to develop leaders who have a bold, aggressive leadership style. I think the same kind of leadership style can be applied to solving complex problems in the IT industry a person can step into the role of the problem manager and lead the resources through to the resolution of the issue. I would like to adjust my management style so that I can fulfil this leadership role, providing the sanity when things are going wrong.

The third thing that interested me was the quote from E. Cohen et al:

“The most powerful experience is when leaders teach their own points of view. You can’t just hand them a deck of slides and tell them to go forth”

I’m trying to think of a time in the corporate life I have lead to date where I have listened to the company song and read the company values every day when I started work. There has not been one occasion for it. Usually the orientation is the only opportunity to read the values statement after which they are thrown in the bin as the pragmatic activities of day to day operations trundle along. I’ve never seen a real attempt to sell the values of a company to the IT workers. In the future I want to be the kind of leader that can integrate the values of the company into practical day to day activities, not just use the company logo and slogan as a graphic for the signature in my emails.

The forth thing that I thought was a great idea from E. Cohen et al was the format of leadership stories.

• A case for change
• An idea of where the organisation is headed
• How it will get there

I have always enjoyed developing and designing plans and then watching as they unfold and start to deliver on their goals. I haven’t really used leadership stories in the way they are shown in the examples however I see how they could be a powerful tool. I like the example of when the Shell Oil executives had to write their resignation letters because I think it’s a really effective way of getting a story out of people as to what they think is wrong with the organisation the role that fulfil within it. Resignation or obituary exercises also reveal what motivates people and get’s they to think about what they would like to try and change within an organisation. I think that’s a powerful tool for brain storming ideas of where to take an organisation, regardless of how well it is doing.

I guess I could summarise all this stuff by the simple statement:

I want to be a leader, telling stories that make people want to follow on the journey of organisational life.

If I can master that then I have a skill that will make any organisation I touch be a better one.