Here is to the wonderfully courageous, highly human and therefore imperfect leaders who courageously take the risk of exposing themselves, by getting closer to their people, aiming at co-creating clarity, purpose and wide ownership around their company’s Strategic Intent. Most of the times, their people respond in a truly mature way (“adult-adult” as the Transactional Analysis aficionados call it) and some other times, the courageous move is met, temporarily at least, by a “blame the circumstances attitude” (the “rebellious” child-parent relation).

We had lunch yesterday with two wonderful friends of our son Betinho. One of them was enthusiastically talking about the rugby tournament his Business School had taken part to. “If it weren’t for the referee, we could have finished in 8^th position on 25 teams”… Blaming circumstances again… I jumped and quoted the movie that a leader in Bank Julius Bär had shown me just the day before:

I love the quote left by G. B. Shaw: “People are always blaming their circumstances for what they are. I don’t believe in circumstances. The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and, if they can’t find them, make them!”

It is urgent that we, leaders, step down from our pedestal, reduce the “Power Distance” and truly engage with our people. If we believe in the “Intelligent Organization”, if we are serious about “People being our main asset”, there is no other way.

But some of our people, after so many years of obedience have grown into the behaviour that “it’s easier to be a slave” and blame the boss (look around, there are countries where this has become a national sport…) We need to be prepared for it and help them regain the assurance that they can make a difference and that they can and should influence the organization they chose to be a part of…

After two weeks non-stop in Brazil and Switzerland, on my way to Lyon, Paris and Zürich again. Have a great week all!

Didier

I had an illuminating week in Brazil, first with a wonderfully courageous leadership team nearby Porto Alegre whose intuition was that they absolutely needed to “reduce the distance” between them in order to create the conditions for “Leadership as a process” to emerge.

Second, I was invited to the yearly event to which the Fundação Dom Cabral (now promoted amongst the Financial Times world’s top ten institutions for Executive Development) gathers the country’s C.E.O.s for three days to explore, reflect and generously share ideas together.

While I was showing a short clip of Brazil’s last goal in the 1970 World Cup’s final (rated as the goal of the century by many sources) in an attempt to illustrate “Leadership as a process”, a participant drew our attention on the almost invisible although fundamental role of a player nicknamed Tostão.

Tostão was one of the two forward centers of the team. However, as his captain explains (00.35’’), “he came back to help”, meaning that Tostão took a personal risk, rushing back in defense to support his partners. This was not “his job”. He could have chosen to stay in the front awaiting for the guys in the back (office?) to sort out their (Italian) problem. But as a true embodiment of generous and altruist leadership, he chose to “mind their business” and went in support of his partners. That made him the player at the very origin of the goal of the century.

Then (visible at the start of the clip 00.05’’), he is the one who waves to Pelé, warning him that a player is coming in his back and better positioned than him to score. Here again, Tostão could have taken a neutral stand (“I am well positioned, I have done my job. Now it is up to Pelé to do his best”) but he chooses to take a personal stand, going out of his way to help colleagues creating value for the team.

Nobody, until this last Friday, had ever drawn our attention on the discreet but critical role played by this humble although vital player for his team.

This is just football… But once again, it produces a powerful metaphor for us all: a true leader must disappear behind his team’s Purpose. The famous book “From Good to Great[1]”, suggests that leaders who manage to keep their organization on a sustainable performance path have in common a strong resilience (Fierce Resolve) and a profound humility. Most of them do not appear on the front page of Fortune Magazine, nor have someone writing, under their name, flashy articles for the Harvard Business Review. They consider their organization’s Purpose more important than their own glory and by so doing, build credibility, respect and trust.

I thought worthwhile sharing this last “footballistic” bit of good sense with you all…

In Zurich for what I expect to be another fascinating week of learning with a highly respectable banking institution. Have a great week all

Didier

This week, we will cover the second feature of “Intelligent/Organic enterprises”, after last week’s “Strong and shared sense of Purpose”.

A permanent feedback loop: Staying with the human body metaphor: the only way to compensate for the lack of a centralized governing body (is it the heart, brain, nervous system???) is for all the components, aligned on the shared Purpose, to receive permanent feedback, indicating whether or not they are deviating from the line. Ginger Graham explains[1] how she installed simple and effective feedback processes when she became CEO at Guidant, by “assigning non executive coaches to senior managers to drum up grassroots feedback”.

In the clip below, also borrowed from Ernst & Young’s “Embracing Complexity”, we see Kevin Kelly (one of the “gurus” of the now old “New Economy”) inviting a room of 500 people to pilot a plane on a simulator. 250 persons command through their individual joystick the lateral movement of the plane (all joysticks are linked to a computer, which will “average” the orders given by the pilots) and the other 250 control the vertical movements. They are supposed to fly through four targets… fasten your seatbelts (with renewed apologies for poor picture)…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2KR9G0FSaUU

So what can we notice?

There is a clear and shared Purpose: Fly this plane trough four targets.

The feedback is permanent (they see themselves fly and the immediate results of their collective actions) and directly related to the purpose (going through the targets). The feedback is meaningful, as people know how to interpretate it and immediately act on it (they do not need further instructions nor permission from Kevin in order to take corrective action)

Finally, you may have noticed the style and tone of intervention of Kevin Kelly: he controls his own anxiety rather than transmit it to the audience. With light touches of humour, a relaxed and sometimes firm tone, he directs his 500 pilots team towards success. My partners and I have sometimes used a comparable simulator in various organizations. We were almost always capable of guessing whether or not the flight would be successful, based on the capacity to let go of control needs of the leader in charge of the maneuver. Each time a “control freak” was I charge, the flight was rather bumpy, as he was seeking to control the feedback mechanism, showing little trust and respect to his troops (we suspect in some cases, some of the pilots to voluntarily play the kamikaze as this was probably their way of giving feedback to their anxious and autocratic leader…). Each time, we discretely had to jump in support of the exhausted leader and bring the plane and crew safely home On the contrary, when the leaders had taken some time to build a compelling and engaging reason for succeeding in the exercise (rather than order the people to fly through four targets), had ensured the pilots understood the feedback loop and how they could act on its results and used a “Kelly like” style and language, the mission was accomplished.

In more general terms, designing a permanent feedback loop process that will enable the organism to become intelligent and self-adaptive means:

• Identifying a few Purpose related indicators and ensure they are widely and regularly understood/updated/communicated

• Developing our people so that they understand what could impact positively and negatively the organism and its purpose. If our people understand this, they will live, breathe and “be” the Purpose of the firm. They will act and behave as early warning systems and propose new ways, ideas and initiatives that support the company’s Purpose

• The language of the leaders should reflect the Purpose and indicators in a way to permanently reinforce its existence and message.

Very grateful for the discussions I had in São-Paulo with fourteen forward looking CEO’s and bankers at Banco Santander Brasil already amazingly preparing themselves for the “Open Economy”. On my way to Zürich and Germany for reflecting on engaging leadership…

Have a great week all Didier

For those of us, old enough to remember the 70’s, Alvin Toffler was then sharing his  views that a “third wave[1]” (following the ones of agriculture and industry) was about to submerge humanity. This wave was not to be (as many mistakenly remember) an era of services but the advent of the knowledge and information economy. Toffler is still around (now aged 82), continues to write books and, strangely enough, his website[2] is a surprising vestige of the past economy (all dedicated to the guru’s cult, when he will appear, his books, his quotes, his interviews but little generosity, nothing free…)

For years, many of us struggled with what we knew to be a sharp insight from the famous futurologist but unsure of its impact and how it would affect us. Would the third wave be merely just another tide or the real Tsunami its inventor promised? The jury is still out but I strongly believe that the phenomenon we call “Open Source”, “Open Collaboration”, “Open Network”, “Open You-name-it” Economy is the concrete manifestation of Mr. Toffler’s prediction.

Both with a highly geared group of fifteen Brazilian CEO’s (at the invitation of Brazil’s Fundação Dom Cabral[3]) and with an informal community of researchers, geeks, artists, musicians, academics and business people, (gathered with the help of Gerd Leonhard[4]) we have started to try and structure our reflections on how to prepare for that maelstrom and understand its likely impact on business, and more specifically, on the way we prepare our organizations for that future, how we need to transform them and which of our assumptions about leadership will have to radically evolve.

The starting point is as follows: the “Open Source” phenomenon which started with the software industry, greatly enabled by the internet and the web, has already largely moved into totally different areas (science with open innovation, medicine with the open researches on new threatening viruses, consumer goods, with P&G or LEGO as well as in NGO’s[5].) We believe that it will fundamentally transform the economy, particularly fragile these days as well as business ethics, badly damaged by the crisis and the rather shocking behaviours from those who seem to have a very short memory…

The image which I found best helping define the state of this transition comes from a recent post[6], (Umair Haque him again!): Think of an M. “On one side is the old high ground of the industrial era capitalism; on the other, the new high(er) ground of next-generation capitalism.” So who would we find on the left side? Companies whose belief system is still about “go it alone”, competition and dominance, “what’s yours is mine and what’s mine remains mine”, economies of scale, short term shareholder value etc. I bet many names come to mind, including in the supposedly advanced “high tech” business world. In the middle are companies whose intuition tells them that the economy is changing. LEGO would be one, Google probably another with some great intuitions (make no evil and many of its truly open source initiatives) and set backs (bowing down to Chinese censorship for so long or the utter user disrespect demonstrated through the catastrophic launch of Nexus). On the right may sit organizations such as Wikipedia and we believe that there is a business model to be invented (new capitalism) that will see many traditional firms migrate towards that new “Open Economy”.

The next posts of this blog will be dedicated to sharing with you our thinking and progress on that “Open Network Economy” in terms of its values, logic, as well as strategy, organizational and leadership impact (I liked the term once coined by a Nokia executive “Open Source Leadership”).

I would like to invite you to join our reflection, share examples and sources of knowledge you have. Let us make this an “Open Exercise”. It is less about preparing an individual competitive advantage than exploring ways to make the pie bigger. One of the key features of the “Open Economy” is Interdependency. One of its key values is Generosity! Let us explore and learn together. It is less about guessing an ever more complex future than preparing ourselves and our organizations for it.

On my way to a fascinating meeting in Brazil, generously hosted by Cisco, where we will work with Roland Kupers from London (a Shell executive and specialist of the translation of Complex Adaptive Systems theory to leadership) then to Ludwigshaven in Germany precisely to talk about change with executives from around the world.

Have a great week

Didier

[2] http://www.alvintoffler.net/

[3] www.fdc.org.br

[4] www.mediafuturist.com

[5] See for example Cameron Sinclair on www.TED.com 2006

[6] http://blogs.hbr.org/haque/2010/01/google_china_and_the_new_high.html

The beginning of a new adventure, Didier gets blogging…

Each of my pieces of work provides me with rich learning (see our April 2009 book “Engaging Leadership”) and I was always a bit frustrated not to be able to share some of the post work reflections. This blog is here for that.

As my friend, Media Futurist and provocative thinker, Gerd Leonhard would say: “Tomorrow, content will come for free”. M.I.T. has already understood this a few years ago and put all its course material (content) freely on the web. In my job, it is not the content which makes a difference but the process, the way we deliver and design engagement around a new strategy, organization, culture or post-merger integration.

So this blog also intends to be a place of… GENEROSITY where I hope to share with you (and encourage you to do so as well) thoughts, ideas, explorations etc…

Thank you for joining, best regards

Didier Marlier