Leadership Over Fear

Terrible, terrible news. I think we have all seen what happened, last night, in Las Vegas. Hopefully you have been able to contact anyone you may know in the area. Being that the news is so fresh, I do not have any editorial comments to add. I simply feel sick to my stomach. Yesterday, I had planned to post a certain article, for today's blog post. Based on the title, alone, I think it is still appropriate to post that article.

The article is titled, "Leadership Over Fear." And, it was written by John Edwin Mroz. Here is the article, in its entirety:

President Franklin Roosevelt’s response to the national despair of the Great Depression was simple and direct: “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” Today, much of the world lives in fear. Many tens of millions of young people around the world fear they will never secure a job. Increasing numbers of people, including many in the middle class, fear the destruction of their way of life due to global warming, or the powerful and unwelcome influences of globalization. Others fear that the so-called “clash of civilizations” between the Muslim and non-Muslim worlds will become an inevitability. Ever-increasing terrorism around the globe, the spread of weapons of mass destruction, and a renewed fear of global pandemics have added new uncertainties about our safety. Fear breeds a search for simple truths, which in turn contributes to intolerance, alienation, and extremism. This problem is a global phenomenon. A world increasingly devoid of hope and trust is an increasingly dangerous and unpredictable one.

Peter Drucker reminded us a decade ago that the world had entered a prolonged period of profound change every bit as dramatic and turbulent as that ushering in the Industrial Revolution. Since 9/11, we have had to deal with an additional layer of unexpected complexity and uncertainty. Our world is an extremely unpredictable place in which asymmetric threats make it difficult for governments to guarantee the safety of their citizens and the well-being of their economies.

Franklin Roosevelt boldly attacked the hopelessness of his nation in his first inaugural address, when he declared “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself—nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.” FDR convinced the despairing victims of the Great Depression that the only way to gain control of their lives was to overcome fear. He challenged the American people to move beyond their fears and inspired them to take those seemingly impossible first steps forward, thus rekindling the spirit and strength of the nation. In short, he led.

While tens of millions of Americans crowded around their radios, the new president, in one mighty stroke, empowered the populace to take risks and believe again that their lives could and would get better. Millions of self-appointed citizen-leaders rose to FDR’s challenge. As that first wave of risk-takers stepped forward, the nation pulled itself out of its deepest abyss since its Civil War some seventy years before. The willingness of one leader to stare down fear worked because he was able to challenge countless would-be leaders across the nation to join him. And those leaders joined their president not only in overcoming the Great Depression but also in fighting and winning the world war that followed.

In today’s globalized world, top-down leadership by politicians and governments is simply not sufficient to cope with the challenges of keeping the global ship afloat in such turbulent waters. The public sector must partner with businesses and the social sector in meeting these challenges. A key task is to identify, mobilize, and challenge naturally embedded leaders in our societies to stand up and lead in a world that is increasingly seen by its citizens as being adrift. There are four things we must do: first, natural leaders in a world of fear and change must step up and lead themselves. Second, such women and men must imagine the possibility of change. Third, they must seek out other natural leaders who, like themselves, have had enough of watching and are willing to assert themselves. Fourth, they must set a pace that fits the context.

I am heartened to know that this same pattern of empowering naturally embedded leaders to step forward and take the risks of leadership is alive and well around the world—even in places where fear is the norm and hope a fleeting dream. For example, six years ago in the war-ravaged former Yugoslavia, the EastWest Institute, an independent and privately supported international “think and action tank,” recruited a dozen and a half women and men to try to do something that governments and experts said could not be done. Following years of bloody killing based on religious and ethnic lines, families living in these border areas faced their own great depression with no possible hope of life getting better. Moreover, their hatred for families just a town away was intense. They could not forget memories of the wanton killing and destruction inflicted upon one another just a decade previously. Our team of women and men had a single common mission: to mobilize citizens in these war-ravaged regions to work together across borders to build trust and help local communities begin the painful journey of exiting their world of poverty and hopelessness. To accomplish this goal would require our leaders to help build bridges over many years’ growth of deep-rooted fears, and to inspire people to themselves become leaders within their communities. What they accomplished during the past six years is well-known to the local populations and to governments all over Europe. It’s a story of enormous hope and testimony.

As extraordinary as I think each one of my colleagues is as a human being and a leader, they are “ordinary” women and men. One had no university education; another was a young mother of two small children living in a town where some of the heaviest fighting took place. The first was a Christian, the second a Muslim. Others came from other tough parts of the Balkans, with a few from European countries or the United States. All were driven by a personal commitment to do something larger than themselves. Most of these leaders took on serious personal risks, from the real possibility of becoming alienated from their own communities to endangering their personal safety—all as they worked to build bridges of trust between the two sides. Leaving their war-torn communities was unthinkable. They were men and women who had had enough and were ready to fight fear by taking the risks of going where others feared to go.

I sat with twelve of these brave leaders recently in a remote village hall that billed itself as a restaurant. As the evening progressed, I asked each to explain exactly how they had succeeded in bringing together communities devoid of hope and trust. I told them I thought the key must have been their ability to find others like themselves who shared a common vision for a future of peace. They respectfully begged to differ. They reminded me that for the longest time, no one in any of their communities would speak of peace or a common vision. Everyone believed that more violence was imminent.

Their initial success came in finding individual men and women within their communities who, like themselves, had come to the conclusion that the only way out of the quagmire of poverty and isolation was to try to find somebody—anybody—who also was tired of this hopelessness and wanted change. A tough initial hurdle was persuading communities to trust that the sponsors of this cross-border work were truly committed to impartiality and had no hidden agendas. Would we not take sides when the chips were down? Our leaders in the field and the EastWest Institute itself were tested once again.

The story of how our leaders were able to inspire everyday people to face down their own very real fears and to take leadership roles within their communities is instructive no matter what kind of organization you lead. The smallest incremental steps taken by the local populace became their building blocks to larger initiatives. Because they listened and continued to talk about and probe their most basic common interests, barriers continued to fall. When one previously hostile man proposed that he might let his son play in a sporting event for younger children with boys of a neighboring village of a different religious belief, our team on both sides of that border decided to try to organize a soccer match for younger children. Many months later it happened, although most families escorted their children to the playing field with weapons at their side. Several games later, they came without arms. Eventually they would bring food from home and share a community table after the match.

The initial risks people were willing to take were ones based on plain old self-interest. Could we together find the source of a polluted stream that was tainting drinking water for families on both sides of the border? Could children be given a normal experience of playing sports with other children? Success came by having our staff locally based and of the community; by not rushing; and by being fiercely independent as a sponsoring institution, remaining outside of the politics and focusing solely on the bottom line— improvement of the human condition. In the end, our teams were able to accomplish things no one dreamed possible in three difficult areas of the former Yugoslavia. Their inner drive and sense of purpose at first was tolerated, then came to be respected and even embraced by a growing number in the communities they served.

As I listened to their passionate discourse that evening, I thought about how diverse these leaders and their backgrounds were. In most cases, their success was due not to their particular educational backgrounds or special training, nor to their nationality, religion, family status and upbringing, age, or gender. It seems the only thing that really mattered was that these leaders shared innate leadership strengths springing from a fierce inner drive to face down fear and be part of a force for change that was larger than themselves. This resonated in others who stepped forward, every bit as much leaders as the initiators.

I asked our team of leaders whether their experience had taught them lessons that could be applied elsewhere—perhaps to how we in the West could do better in bridging the growing divide between Muslims and non-Muslims globally. Their enthusiasm then went to an even higher level, and the ideas started spilling forth. At the core was a baseline of shared values, especially a desire for fairness and integrity in others. I wondered what would have happened if we in the Institute had not decided to face our own fears and undertake the seemingly impossible task of cross-border work in the Balkans. In what kind of world would these women and men have found themselves? I thought of how comfortable President Roosevelt would have been at the table that evening some seventy years after he spoke his words that inspired so many.

Leaders willing to take risks to overcome fear are all around us. Therein lies our hope for dealing with the seemingly overwhelming challenges on our planet in this twenty-first century. A key leadership challenge today is how to mobilize sufficient numbers of these naturally embedded leaders across the divides that breed fear and extremism and threaten our future and that of our children. It all starts with our willingness to face up to our own fears, stare them down, and find the emerging natural leader within each of us.

Not Invented Here

People tend to have a bias against ideas they did not come up with. It commonly referred to as the not-invented-here bias. This bias causes problems for both individuals and for businesses.

Referring to the not-invented-here bias, Drucker said it is, "the arrogance that leads a company, or an industry, to believe that something new cannot be any good unless they themselves thought of it. And so the new invention is spurned, as was the transistor by the American electronics manufacturers."

This is a really important idea, which I hope to demonstrate by giving you a countervailing example. One person who seems to not have suffered from this bias was Steve Jobs. For example, upon seeing the device, Jobs immediately adopted the mouse from the Xerox research center.

This idea, of people resisting ideas they did not come up with, occurred to me last week as I was writing that little note about facing our demons. 

As I am sure you already know, this world is vast and complex. And, I am of the mind we cannot figure it all out on our own. This is where the not-invented-here bias can become a very big problem. Trying to figure out our challenges, by ourselves, can lead to some very real problems.

When we do not reach out, for help, it can feel like we are all alone. It can feel like we are the only ones dealing with any given difficulty. And, that feeling can compound the problem by making us feel broken or defective.

I really like reading books and researching various topics. And, one thing that always amazes (and humbles) me is how few things have not already been considered by other people. Meaning, off the top of my head, I cannot think of one problem which nobody is yet working on.

I believe, in a lot of ways, creative people are struggling against this very bias. Coming up with an original idea can be very enjoyable. It can also be extremely frustrating. I am certainly not against creation. What I am saying is, when you are facing difficulties, know that you are not alone.

I like bringing in the example of Steve Jobs. Because, we all know who he is, and we all know how successful his company has been. I can only imagine Apple's future had they suffered from this insidious bias.

If you not familiar with that story, about the computer mouse, click here and watch a short clip on YouTube. Admittedly, there is a fine line between borrowing and stealing. Do NOT steal. But, do borrow your ass off! It matters.

Face Your Demons

Most of use spend our lives running from ourselves. If you do, I believe, you will one day discover, there is no place to run.

This is a big part of why I love sales and entrepreneurship. Because, to succeed, you really have to face those demons!

What are the demons? Stay tuned. We talk about them all the time.

What are you running from?

Digital Minimalism

I tend to be a fan of Cal Newport. Professor Newport teaches computer science at Georgetown University. Among others, he has written an important book, titled So Good They Can't Ignore You, that I think you should read.

Newport is a big proponent of what he calls "Digital Minimalism." A main component of this idea is the fact that humans are easily seduced by technology. We participate is various new technologies because they are neat or cool.

We seldom scrutinize whether, or not, these technologies are necessary. Meaning, we do not consider whether the new technologies contribute anything important to our lives.

Cal recommends we stay aware of this natural tendency so that we may keep from overloading our lives with banality. Here is a great article Newport wrote titled "On Digital Minimalism":

The Curmudgeonly Optimist

People are sometimes confused about my personal relationship with digital communication technologies.

On the one hand, I’m a computer scientist who studies and improves these tools. As you might therefore expect, I’m incredibly optimistic about the role of computing and networks in our future.

On the other hand, as a writer I’m often pointing out my dissatisfaction with certain developments of the Internet Era. I’m critical, for example, of our culture’s increasingly Orwellian allegiance to social media and am indifferent to my smartphone.

Recently, I’ve been trying to clarify the underlying philosophy that informs how I think about the role of these technologies in our personal lives (their role in the world of work is a distinct issue that I've already written quite a bit about). My thinking in this direction is still early, but I decided it might be a useful exercise to share some tentative thoughts, many of which seem to be orbiting a concept that I’ve taken to calling digital minimalism.

The Minimalism Movement

To understand what I mean by digital minimalism it’s important to first understand the existing community from which it takes its name.

The modern minimalism movement is led by a loose collection of bloggers, podcasters, and writers who advocate a simpler life in which you focus on a small number of things that return the most meaning and value — often at the expense of many activities and items we’re told we’re supposed to crave.

Minimalists tend to spend much less money and own many fewer things than their peers. They also tend to be much more intentional and often quite radical in shaping their lives around things that matter to them.

Here's how my friends Joshua and Ryan (aka, The Minimalists) describe the movement:

Minimalism is a lifestyle that helps people question what things add value to their lives. By clearing the clutter from life’s path, we can all make room for the most important aspects of life: health, relationships, passion, growth, and contribution.

These ideas, of course, are not new. The minimalism movement can be directly connected to similar ideals in many other periods, from the voluntary simplicity trend of the 1970s to Thoreau. But what is new is their embrace of tools like blogs that help them reach vast audiences.

I first encountered this movement through Leo Babuta’s Zen Habits blog about a decade ago. This was the early days of Study Hacks and these sources soon played a major role in transforming my writing and speaking during this period. Most notably, they shifted my attention away from the technical aspects of studying and toward the philosophical aspects of creating a meaningful student experience (the Zen Valedictorian, for example, owes an obvious debt to Zen Habits).

It occurred to me recently, when I was pondering my philosophy on technology, that my thinking continues to be influenced by minimalism. I am, I realized, perhaps usefully described as an advocate for a new but urgently relevant branch of this philosophy — a branch focused on the proper role of digital communication technologies in our increasingly noisy lives.

Digital Minimalism

Adapting some of the above language from Joshua and Ryan, I loosely define digital minimalism as follows:

Digital minimalism is a philosophy that helps you question what digital communication tools (and behaviors surrounding these tools) add the most value to your life. It is motivated by the belief that intentionally and aggressively clearing away low-value digital noise, and optimizing your use of the tools that really matter, can significantly improve your life.

To be a digital minimalist, in other words, means you accept the idea that new communication technologies have the potential to massively improve your life, but also recognize that realizing this potential is hard work.

Here's a preliminary list of some core principles of digital minimalism...

Missing out is not negative. Many digital maximalists, who spend their days immersed in a dreary slog of apps and clicks, justify their behavior by listing all of the potential benefits they would miss if they began culling services from their life. I don’t buy this argument. There’s an infinite selection of activities in the world that might bring some value. If you insist on labeling every activity avoided as value lost, then no matter how frantically you fill your time, it’s unavoidable that the final tally of your daily experience will be infinitely negative. It’s more sensical to instead measure the value gained by the activities you do embrace and then attempt to maximize this positive value.

Less can be more. A natural consequence of the preceding principle is that you should avoid wasting your limited time and attention on low-value online activities, and instead focus on the much smaller number of activities that return the most value for your life. This is a basic 80/20 analysis: doing less, but focusing on higher quality, can generate more total value.

Start from first principles. Digital maximalists tend to accept any online activity that conceivably offers some value. As most such activities can offer you something (few people would write an app or launch a web site with no obvious purpose) this filter is essentially meaningless. A more productive approach is to start by identifying the principles that you as a human find most important—the foundation on which you hope to build a good life. Once identified, you can use these principles as a more effective filter by asking the following question of a given activity: will this add significant value to something I find to be significantly important to my life?

The best is different than the rest. Assume a given online activity generates a positive response to the question from the preceding principle. This is not enough. You should then follow up by asking: is this activity “the best” way to add value to this area of my life? For a given core principle, there may be many activities that can offer some relevant value, but you should focus on finding the small number of activities that offer the most such value. The difference between the “best” and “good enough” in this context can be significant. For example, someone recently told me that she uses Twitter because she values being exposed to diverse news sources (she cited, in particular, how major newspapers were ignoring aspects of the Dakota pipeline protests). I don’t doubt that Twitter can help support this important principle of being informed, but is a Twitter feed really the best use of all the Internet has to offer to achieve this goal?

Digital clutter is stressful. The traditional minimalists correctly noted that living among lots of physical clutter is stressful. The same is true of your online life. Incessant clicking and scrolling generates a background hum of anxiety. Drastically reducing the number of thing you do in your digital life can by itself have a significant calming impact. This value should not be underestimated.

Attention is scarce and fragile. You have a finite amount of attention to expend each day. If aimed carefully, your attention can bring you great meaning and satisfaction. At the same time, however, hundreds of billions of dollars have been invested into companies whose sole purpose is to hijack as much of your attention as possible and push it toward targets optimized to create value for a small number of people in Northern California. This is scary and demands diligence on your part. As I’ve written before, this is my main concern with large attention economy conglomerates like Twitter and Facebook: it’s not that they’re worthless, but instead it’s the fact that they’re engineered to be as addictive as possible.

Many of the best uses of the online world support better living offline. We’re not evolved for digital life, which is why binges of online activities often leave us in a confused state of strung out exhaustion. This explains why many of the highest return online activities are those that take advantage of the Internet to improve important aspects of your offline life. Digital networks, for example, can help you find or form a community that resonates with you, but the real value often comes when you put down your phone and go out and engage with this new community IRL.

Be wary of tools that solve a problem that didn’t exist before the tool. GPS helped solve a problem that existed for a long time before it came along (how do I get where I want to go?), so did Google (how do I find this piece of information I need?). Snapchat, by contrast, did not. Be wary of tools in this latter category as they tend to exist mainly to create addictive new behaviors that support ad sales.

Activity trumps passivity. Humans, deep down, are craftsmen. We find great satisfaction in creating something valuable that didn’t exist before. Some of the most fulfilling online activities, therefore, are those that involve you creating things, as oppose to simply consuming. I’m yet to meet someone who feels exhilarated after an evening of trawling clickbait, yet I know many who do feel that way after committing a key module to an open source repository.

The above list, and much of the thinking behind it, is still tentative. I should also emphasize again that it applies almost exclusively to the role of digital technology in your personal life, and is largely distinct from my thinking about how to integrate technologies productively in the professional sphere.

But there’s something coherent lurking in the background here that I will continue to work through.

Digital minimalism, for example, has helped me better understand some of the decisions I’ve made in my own online life (such as my embrace of blogging and rejection of major social media platforms), while at the same time challenging me with areas where I could be leveraging new technologies to even better support some of my core principles. In other words, like any productive philosophy, it gives me both clarity and homework.

The bottom line of this general thinking is that a simple, carefully curated, minimalist digital life is not a rejection of technology or a reactionary act of skepticism; it is, by contrast, an embrace of the immense value these new tools can offer…if we’re willing to do the hard work of figuring out how to best leverage them on behalf of the things we truly care about.

The Genius of Being a Baby

Last week I wrote a post about Shoshin or Beginner's Mind. The idea is to maintain a child-like openness, and humility, towards ideas and knowledge.

This week I wanted to remind myself about the importance of baby steps. Because, let's be honest, the main reason I write this blog is to cement ideas in my own brain.

Like I said, last week, us adults have a tendency to turn our back on all things childish. We tend to prefer affecting an air of maturity and sophistication.

Of course, the paradoxical truth is that, often, the most sophisticated thing we can do is to avoid sophistication. 

This led me to reflect on the genius of being a baby. In particular, I was thinking about the critical importance of baby steps. And, closely connected to baby steps is the concept of small wins.

I think a big part of the problem is television/internet. When we see expert performance, on TV or online, it is understandable to assume the person has some natural ability. We do not see the countless baby steps they took.

Now, not all of us are interested in expert performance. Which is certainty fine. However, all of us, at some point in our lives, will experience real challenges and problems.

From marital problems, to addiction, to injustice, and beyond, the world is full of very real and very thorny problems. When dealing with hard problems we really need to remember the genius of baby steps and small wins.

Karl Weick is a professor at the University of Michigan. And, many years ago, he wrote an article titled "Small Wins." As Weick explains, one of the main reason to focus on small wins is to keep from becoming overwhelmed.

Weick said, "When the magnitude of problems is scaled upward in the interest of mobilizing action, the quality of thought and action declines, because processes such as frustration, arousal, and helplessness are activated."

What a pisser! What a conundrum!

What the professor is saying is there exists a tug-of-war between motivation and deflation. On the one hand, we might use the size of a problem to rally our energies. However, that same energy can easily grow too big and become overwhelming.

Enter the genius of small wins and baby steps. Colloquially, we have cliches like the idea that the journey of a thousand miles beginning with a single step. Or, eating an elephant one bite at a time. Or the saying, "Inch by inch is a cinch. Yard by yard is hard."

There are many ways to remember the importance of baby steps. For me, instead of running from our child-like qualities, I think it is wise to embrace them. How about you? How do you view small wins?

Shoshin

This week will be the third, and final, mention of the greatness that is Jon Kabat-Zinn. Over the last two weeks I have discussed a couple ideas from his book Full Catastrophe Living. If you missed them, they can be found here and here.

I find people endlessly fascinating. We humans are such a curious bunch, for we have have a tendency to get in our own way. It is like that Mark Twain quote that said, "I have been through some terrible things in my life. Some of which actually happened."

For this week's post, here is how getting in your own way relates to Kabat-Zinn. As adults, we often think we need to behave like "grown-ups." Fair enough. But, unfortunately, behaving like a grown-up often means we need to have it all figured out.

The idea that adults need to have the answers sounds reasonable. However, it is an idea that runs counter to a strong, and true, paradox. The paradox is one we have all heard before. "The more I know, the more I know I do not know." So true!

Having it all figured out is a sure sign that you have stopped learning. Because, as the paradox suggests, the more you learn, the more you realize how limited your knowledge really is. A truly humbling experience.

In Zen Buddhism they have a concept called "Shoshin" or "Beginner's Mind." Wiki says, "It refers to having an attitude of openness, eagerness, and lack of preconceptions when studying a subject, even when studying at an advanced level, just as a beginner in that subject would."

And, this comes back to Kabat-Zinn. When it comes to mindfulness, and meditation, Kabat-Zinn says it is wise to maintain a beginner's mind. Because, the truth is, life is amazingly complex. And, we can never hope to figure it all out.

I pass this along because, though I do not know about you, unique words (like shoshin) do a great job of implanting in my own mind. Meaning, unique words tend to be more memorable. Shoshin reminds me to also question my assumptions, and know that I might not know.

We only have moments to live

We live in the age of information. And, in the information age, knowledge is a vital resource. What's more, as we all know, knowledge resides in the mind. So, it is not surprising that Peter Drucker once said the most important of the modern technologies is cognitive science.

Last week I mentioned Jon Kabat-Zinn and his book Full Catastrophe Living. As I had mentioned, the book is about mindfulness. You see, if the mind is critically important, it only makes sense that we be mindful.

In fact, this indeed is the current state of the cognitive sciences. These days many psychologists incorporate mindfulness into their practices.

Controlling the mind is largely a function of the ability to focus and pay attention. This is where meditation becomes very important. Through the practice of mediation, and mindful awareness, we can increase our ability to focus and pay attention.

One of the main problems is the mind's tendency to wander. We often live in the past or the future. It can be quite hard to exist in the present. But, paying attention to our experience, in the present moment, is the key to focus.

It is virtually impossible to be mindful if we cannot focus on the present moment. And, this is where I wanted to pass along a saying from Kabat-Zinn's book. Kabat-Zinn says, "We only have moments to live."

The past is gone and the future is yet to arrive. All we have is this moment. Some people like to say the past is history and the future is a mystery.

We can become overly fixated on the past or the future. And, thus, we miss this moment. So, I want you to remember, we only have moments to live. One way to improve your ability to be present is through the practice of mindful meditation. Which is why I recommend Kabat-Zinn's book.

Living the Full Catastrophe

Lately I have been reading an excellent, old book titled Full Catastrophe Living. The book was written by Jon Kabat-Zinn. And it is all about mindfulness and meditation.

As I was reading, I was struck by how similar mindfulness is to leadership. A concept which certainly applies to our discussion here on this blog. If you are an entrepreneur, you need to be a leader. Even if the only person you are leading is yourself!

As I have said before, I think leadership is largely about effective living. Which is why Full Catastrophe Living has struck such a chord. Mindfulness and meditation are also, very much, about effective living. So, I figured I would send along a passage from the book.

Kabat-Zinn writes, "To cultivate meditative awareness requires an entirely new way of looking at the process of learning. Since thinking that we know what we need and where we want to get are so ingrained in our minds, we can easily get caught up in trying to control things to make them turn out "our way," the way we want them to. But this attitude is antithetical to the work of awareness and healing.

The author continues, "Awareness requires only that we pay attention and see things as they are. It doesn't require that we change anything. And healing requires receptivity and acceptance, a tuning to connectedness and wholeness."

And, here is the particular passage I would like to point to, "Non of this can be forced, just as you cannot force yourself to go to sleep. You have to create the right conditions for falling asleep and then you have to let go. The same is true for relaxation. It cannot be achieved through force of will. That kind of effort will only produce tension and frustration."

What most caught my eye was creating the right conditions, and not being able to force things. I have found this to be very important when it comes you entrepreneurship. We cannot force things. But, we can always be paying attention, to ensure we create the right conditions.

Stay tuned because, over the next couple weeks, I will be discussing a couple of other gems from this legendary book.

Anchoring Leadership

I recently read an interesting article by a gentleman named Ronald Heifetz. If you are not familiar, Heifetz is a professor at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. Whenever you can, I recommend reading his book Leadership Without Easy Answers. In the interim, the article I speak of is titled "Anchoring Leadership in the Work of Adaptive Progress." Here is the article in its entirety:

Our language fails us in many aspects of our lives, entrapping us in a set of cultural assumptions like cattle herded by fences into a corral. Gender pronouns, for example, corral us into teaching children that God is a he, distancing girls and women every day from the experience of the divine in themselves, and distancing men from the traditionally feminine virtues in themselves.

Our language fails us, too, when we discuss, analyze, and practice leadership. We commonly talk about “leaders” in organizations or politics when we actually mean people in positions of managerial or political authority. Although we have confounded leadership with authority in nearly every journalistic and scholarly article written on “leadership” during the past one hundred years, we know intuitively that these two phenomena are distinct when we complain frequently in politics and business that “the leadership isn’t exercising any leadership.” This is a contradiction in terms, resolved by distinguishing leadership from authority and realizing that we actually mean to say, “People in authority aren’t exercising any leadership.” Whether people with formal, charismatic, or otherwise informal authority actually practice leadership on any given issue at any moment in time ought to remain a separate question answered with wholly different criteria than those used to define merely that relationship of formal powers or informal influence. As we know, all too many people are skilled at gaining formal and informal kinds of authority, and thus a following, but do not then lead.

Moreover, we assume a logical connection between the words leader and follower, as if this dyad were an absolute and inherently logical structure. It is not. The most interesting leadership operates without anyone experiencing anything remotely similar to the experience of “following.” Indeed, most leadership mobilizes those who are opposed or who sit on the fence, in addition to allies and friends. Allies and friends come relatively cheap; it’s the people in opposition who have the most to lose in any significant process of change. When mobilized, allies and friends become not followers but activated participants—employees or citizens who themselves often lead in turn by taking responsibility for tackling tough challenges within their reach, often beyond expectations and often beyond their authority. They become partners. And when mobilized, the opposition and fence-sitters become engaged with the issues, provoked to work through the problems of loss, loyalty, and competence embedded in the change they are challenged to make. Indeed, they may continue to fight, providing an ongoing source of diverse views necessary for the adaptive success of the business or community. Far from becoming “aligned” and far from any experience of “following,” they are mobilized by leadership to wrestle with new complexities that demand tough trade-offs in their ways of working or living. Such is the work of progress. Of course, in time they may begin to trust, admire, and appreciate the person or group that is leading, and thereby confer informal authority on them, but they would not generally experience the emergence of that appreciation or trust by the phrase “I’ve become a follower.” I doubt Alabama’s Governor George Wallace would have seen himself after his conversion on civil rights as a “follower” of the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. It is far more likely, and appropriate, for Wallace to have seen himself as a political adversary and colleague of King’s in the struggles of American populist politics. And even among King’s more natural allies, I doubt that Bernard Lafayette saw himself as King’s follower when he went wandering with a bloody shirt through the streets of early 1965 Selma to mobilize middle-class black people to risk their hard-earned security by joining in the demonstrations for the right to vote. I imagine he knew himself as another leader and collaborator in the movement.

If leadership is different from the capacity to gain formal or informal authority, and therefore more than the ability to gain a “following”—attracting influence and accruing power—what can anchor our understanding of it?

Leadership takes place in the context of problems and challenges. Indeed, it makes little sense to describe leadership when everything and everyone in an organization is humming along fine, even when processes of influence and authority will be ubiquitous in coordinating routine activity. Moreover, it’s not just any kind of problem for which leadership becomes needed and relevant as a practice. Leadership becomes necessary to businesses and communities when people have tough challenges to tackle, when they have to change their ways in order to thrive or survive, when continuing to operate according to current structures, procedures, and processes no longer will suffice. We call these adaptive challenges. Beyond technical problems, for which authoritative and managerial expertise will suffice, adaptive challenges demand leadership that engages people in facing challenging realities and then changing those priorities, attitudes, and behaviors necessary to thrive in a changing world.

Mobilizing people to meet adaptive challenges, then, is at the heart of leadership practice. In the short term, leadership is an activity that mobilizes people to meet an immediate challenge. In the medium and long term, leadership generates new cultural norms that enable people to meet an ongoing stream of adaptive challenges, realities, and pressures likely to come. Thus, with a longer view, leadership develops an organization or community’s adaptive capacity, or adaptability.

The subject of cultural adaptability and the practice of leadership that generates it is a big frontier. In this short article, I suggest eight properties of adaptive work. Leadership anchored in the adaptive growth and development of an organization or community begins with an understanding of these properties.

1. An adaptive challenge is a gap between aspirations and reality that demands a response outside the current repertoire. Whereas technical problems are largely amenable to current expertise, adaptive challenges significantly are not. Of course, every problem can be understood as a gap between aspirations and reality. What distinguishes technical problems from adaptive challenges is whether that gap can be closed through applying existing know-how. For example, a patient comes to his doctor with an infection, and the doctor uses her knowledge to diagnose the illness and prescribe a cure; that’s a technical problem.

In contrast, an adaptive challenge is created by a gap between a desired state and reality that cannot be closed using existing approaches alone. Progress in the situation requires more than the application of current expertise, authoritative decision making, standard operating procedures, or culturally informed behaviors. For example, a patient with heart disease may need to change his way of life: diet, exercise, smoking, and the imbalances that cause unhealthy stress. To make those changes, the patient will have to take responsibility for his health and learn his way to a new set of priorities and habits. Philip Selznick described this distinction between “routine” and “critical” challenges in his seminal 1957 monograph, Leadership in Administration.

This distinction is summarized as follows:

2. Adaptive challenges demand learning. An adaptive challenge exists when progress requires a retooling, in a sense, of people’s own ways of thinking and operating. The gap between aspirations and reality closes when they learn new ways. Thus, a consulting firm may offer a brilliant diagnostic analysis and set of recommendations, but nothing will be solved until that analysis and those recommendations are lived in the new way that people operate. Until then, the consultant has no solutions, only proposals.

3. With adaptive challenges, the people with the problem are the problem, and they are the solution. Adaptive challenges require a shift in responsibility from the shoulders of the authority figures and the authority structure to the stakeholders themselves. In contrast to expert problem solving, adaptive work requires a different form of deliberation and a different kind of responsibility-taking. When adaptive work is being done, responsibility needs to be felt in a widespread fashion. At best, an organization would have its members know that there are many technical problems for which looking to authority for answers is appropriate and efficient, but that for the adaptive set of challenges, looking to authority for answers becomes self-defeating. When people make the classic error of treating adaptive challenges as if they were technical, they wait for the person in authority to know what to do. He or she then makes a best guess—probably just a guess—while the many sit back and wait to see whether the guess pans out. And frequently enough, when it does not, people get rid of that executive and go find another one, all the while operating under the illusion that “if only we had the right ‘leader,’ our problems would be solved.” Progress is impeded by inappropriate dependency; therefore, a major task of leadership is the development of responsibility-taking by the people with a stake in the problem.

4. An adaptive challenge requires people to distinguish what’s precious and essential from what’s expendable within their culture. In cultural adaptation, the job is threefold: to take the best from history, to leave behind that which is no longer serviceable, and through innovation to learn ways to thrive in the new environment.

Therefore, adaptive leadership is inherently conservative as well as progressive. The point of innovation is to conserve what is best from history as the community moves into the future. As in biology, a successful adaptation takes the best from its past set of competencies and discards the “DNA” that is no longer useful. Thus, unlike many current conceptions of culturally “transforming” processes, many of which are ahistorical—as if one begins all anew—adaptive work, profound as it may be in terms of change, honors ancestry and history at the same time that it challenges them. Apparently, neither God nor evolution do zero-based budgeting.

Adaptive work generates resistance in people because adaptation requires us to let go of certain elements of our past ways of working or living, which means to experience loss—loss of competence, loss of reporting relationships, loss of jobs, loss of traditions, or loss of loyalty to the people who taught us the lessons of our heritage. An adaptive challenge generates a situation that forces us to make tough trade-offs. The source of resistance that people have to change isn’t resistance to change per se; it is resistance to loss. People love change when they know it’s beneficial. Nobody gives the lottery ticket back when they win. Leadership must contend, then, with the various forms of feared and real losses that accompany adaptive work.

Anchored to the tasks of mobilizing people to thrive in new and challenging contexts, leadership is not simply about change; more profoundly, leadership is about identifying that which is worth conserving. It is the conserving of the precious dimensions of our past that make the pains of change worth sustaining.

5. Adaptive work demands experimentation. In biology, the adaptability of a species depends on the multiplicity of experiments that are being run constantly within its gene pool, increasing the odds that in that distributed intelligence some diverse member of the species will have the means to succeed in a new context. Similarly, in cultural adaptation, an organization or community needs to be running multiple experiments, and learning fast from these experiments in order to see “which horses to ride into the future.”

Technical problem solving appropriately and efficiently depends on authoritative experts for knowledge and decisive action. In contrast, dealing with adaptive challenges requires a comfort with not knowing where to go or how to move next. In mobilizing adaptive work from an authority position, leadership takes the form of protecting elements of deviance and creativity in the organization in spite of the inefficiencies associated with those elements. If creative or outspoken people generate conflict, then so be it. Conflict becomes an engine of innovation, rather than solely a source of dangerous inefficiency. Managing the dynamic tension between creativity and efficiency becomes an ongoing part of leadership practice for which there exists no equilibrium point at which this tension disappears. Leadership becomes an improvisation, however frustrating it may be not to know the answers.

6. The time frame for adaptive work is markedly different from that for technical work. It takes time for people to learn new ways—to sift through what’s precious from what’s expendable and to innovate in ways that enable them to carry forward into the future that which they continue to hold precious from the past. Moses took forty years to bring the children of Israel to the Promised Land, not because it was such a long walk from Egypt, but because it took that much time for the people to leave behind the dependent mentality of slavery and generate the capacity for self-government guided by faith in something ineffable. Figure 6.2 helps depict this difference in time frame.

7. Adaptive challenges generate avoidance. Because it is so difficult for people to sustain prolonged periods of disturbance and uncertainty, human beings naturally engage in a variety of efforts to restore equilibrium as quickly as possible, even if it means avoiding adaptive work by begging off the tough issues. Most forms of failure when addressing adaptive challenges are a product of our difficulty in containing prolonged periods of experimentation, and the difficult, conflictive conversations that accompany them.

Work avoidance is simply the natural effort to restore a more familiar order, to restore social, political, or psychological equilibrium. Although many different forms of work avoidance operate across cultures and peoples, it appears that there are two common types: the displacement of responsibility and the diversion of attention. Both methods function terribly well in the short term for avoiding adaptive work, even if they leave people more exposed and vulnerable in the medium and long term. Some common forms of displacing responsibility include scapegoating, blaming the persistence of problems on authority, externalizing the enemy, or killing the messenger. Diverting attention can take the form of fake remedies, like the Golden Calf; an effort to define problems to fit one’s competence; repeated structural adjustments; the faulty use of consultants, committees, and task forces; sterile conflicts and proxy fights (“Let’s watch the gladiator fight!”); or outright denial.

8. I suggest that adaptive work is a normative concept. The concept of adaptation arises from scientific efforts to understand biological evolution. Applied to the change of cultures and societies, the concept becomes a useful, if inexact, metaphor. For example, species evolve whereas cultures learn. Evolution is generally understood by scientists as a matter of chance, whereas societies will often consciously deliberate, plan, and intentionally experiment. Close to our normative concern, biological evolution conforms to laws of survival. Societies, however, generate purposes beyond survival. The concept of adaptation applied to culture raises the questions, Adapt to what, for what purpose? What does it mean to “thrive”? What should we mean by progress, as a business or community?

In biology, the “objective function” of adaptive work is straightforward: to thrive in new environments. Survival of the self and one’s gene-carrying kin defines the direction in which animals adapt. A situation becomes an adaptive challenge because it threatens the capacity of a species to pass on its genetic heritage. Thus, when a species is fruitful by multiplying and protecting its own kind and succeeds in passing on its genes, it is said to be “thriving” in its environment.

Thriving is more than coping. There is nothing trivial in biology about adaptation. Some adaptive leaps transform the capacity of a species by sparking an ongoing and profound process of adaptive developments that lead to a vastly expanded range of living. Still, thriving in biological systems is defined by progeny.

In human societies, “thriving” takes on a host of values not restricted to survival of one’s own kind. Human beings will even sacrifice their own lives for values such as liberty, justice, and faith. Thus, adaptive work in cultures involves both the clarification of values and the assessment of realities that challenge the realization of those values.

Because most organizations and communities honor a mix of values, the competition within this mix largely explains why adaptive work so often involves conflict. People with competing values engage one another as they confront a shared situation from their own points of view. At its extreme, and in the absence of better methods of social change, the conflict over values can be violent. The Civil War changed the meaning of union and individual freedom. In 1857, ensuring domestic tranquility meant returning escaped slaves to their owners; in 1957, it meant using federal troops to integrate Central High School in Little Rock.

Some realities threaten not only a set of values beyond survival but also the very existence of a society if these realities are not discovered and met early on by the value-clarifying and reality-testing functions of that society. In the view of many environmentalists, for example, our focus on the production of wealth rather than coexistence with nature has led us to neglect fragile factors in our ecosystem. These factors may become relevant to us when finally they begin to challenge our central values of health and survival, but by then, we may have paid a high price in damage already done, and the costs of and odds against adaptive adjustment may have increased enormously.

Adaptive work, then, requires us to deliberate on the values by which we seek to thrive, and demands diagnostic inquiry into the realities we face that threaten the realization of those values. Beyond legitimizing a convenient set of assumptions about reality, beyond denying or avoiding the internal contradictions in some of the values we hold precious, and beyond coping, the work of adaptive progress involves proactively seeking to clarify aspirations or develop new ones, and then involves the very hard work of innovation, experimentation, and cultural development to realize a closer approximation of those aspirations by which we would define “thriving.”

In other words, the normative tests of adaptive work involve an appraisal both of the processes by which orienting values are clarified in an organization or community and of the quality of reality testing by which a more accurate rather than convenient diagnosis is achieved. By these tests, for example, serving up fake remedies for our collective troubles by scapegoating and externalizing the enemy, as was done in extreme form in Nazi Germany, might generate throngs of misled supporters who readily grant to charlatans extraordinary authority in the short run, but this would not constitute adaptive work. Nor would political efforts to gain influence and authority by pandering to people’s longing for easy answers constitute leadership. Indeed, misleading people over time may likely produce adaptive failure. 

Work Matters

Last week I made mention of my three, main business gurus. To my way of thinking, an entrepreneur would be well advised to listen to all three of those gentlemen.

One person I did not mention, but whom I am quite fond of, is Tom Peters. Peters wrote one of the most seminal business books titled In Search of Excellence. As such, my fondness for Tom is not limited to the fact that we happen to share the same birthday.

Peters has been around for a long time and is known for many things. I once heard somebody say Tom is passionate about passion. A good example would be the comic strip Dilbert.

If you are not aware, Dilbert is a comic strip, created by Scott Adams, which pokes fun at work life. Dilbert is generally pretty innocent, but Peters feels the comic illustrates a cynicism towards work.

Let's face it, work makes up a major part of our life. Statistically, it bids for the top spot on any time-audit. To quote a famous Peters refrain, "Work matters."

I am onboard with Peters. Rather than mock our work, we should aspire towards optimism and engagement. But, I am probably preaching to the choir. A big part of the reason to become an entrepreneur is to avoid the cynicism of organizational life.

So, let me tell you something else Peters said. He said, "I have learned only three things in forty years. One, he or she who has the best relationships takes home the prize. Two, all effective leaders are full-time salespeople. And, three, he-she who tries the most stuff wins; action beats talk ten time out of ten."

This quote is probably more important than work matters. In accord with Peters's third point, entrepreneurship is about a life of action. As I have said before, experimentation is critically important.

Another important point is the centrality of selling. A business exists for one reason. And, there are two main functions: innovation and sales.

While you are taking action, experimenting, and iterating like crazy, do not forget to build and nurture relationships. Because we cannot do it alone.

My three main business gurus

A real challenge of modern life is the paradox of choice. With so many gurus out there, it is easy to get lost.

Unfortunately, I do not necessarily have any shortcuts for you. Perhaps you have been paying attention to me for a while. If you like the way I think, I recommend sticking with me.

The way I resolved the paradox of choice was by reading everything I could get my hands on. Over time, I have been able to identify who keeps it real, and who is full of hot air.

This leads me to my first guru: Peter Drucker

If you make any real effort to study business, you will discover that all roads eventually lead to Mr. Drucker. And, if you are familiar with my blog, you know I talk a ton about Drucker.

Let me give you a little example. James O'Toole is a professor at the University of Denver Daniel's College of Business. And he once said, "It is frustratingly difficult to cite a significant modern management concept that was not first articulated, if not invented, by Drucker."

Not that the order matters, but, my second guru is Warren Buffett

Last week I talked about the original definition of the word entrepreneur. And, according to that definition, Buffett is the greatest entrepreneur of all time.

Think about it. To remind you, JB Say originally said, "The entrepreneur shifts economic resources out of an area of lower and into an area of higher productivity and yield."

On May 1, 1956 Warren started Buffett Associates, a limited partnership of seven people, who collectively invested just over $100,000. Buffett himself only invested $100.

From that rather humble beginning, Buffett would become the richest person in the world. And, he did it all by shifting economic resources out of areas of lower and into areas of higher productivity and yield.

I listen to everything the man has to say.

Last and possibly least: Neil Rackham

As Drucker would say, a business exists for one reason: to create a customer. Thus, the two main functions of business are innovation and marketing.

Business can be boiled down to simple basics. Business is, very simply, an exchange of value. Innovation is the value part. And marketing creates the exchange. Without getting into too deep of a discussion, I am going to say sales instead of marketing.

Back in the 1980's, Rackham permanently changed the sales landscape. He did a ton of research with the intent of finding out what made the best salespeople so good.

Ultimately, what Rackham did was he took sales and turned the focus onto the buyer and the buyer's decision-making journey. This might seem obvious. But, trust me when I say it is not.

Most salespeople (and all entrepreneurs are salespeople) have no idea how to increase their effectiveness. Their actions prove that they really do not know how buyers make decisions.

Rackham is best known for his book SPIN Selling. If you have yet to read it, you really need to. And, if you want to truly understand the genius of Rackham, read his book Rethinking the Sales Force.

Entrepreneur

Last week I spoke about entrepreneurship being about education. And, it is a true statement. A large part of entrepreneurship is the education which facilitates an exchange of value. Aka selling stuff.

Admittedly, this is a newer conception of the word entrepreneur. The term "entrepreneur" was originally coined, around 1800, by French economist Jean-Bastiste Say.

JB Say originally gave the following definition, “The entrepreneur shifts economic resources out of an area of lower and into an area of higher productivity and greater yield.”

Nowadays the word entrepreneur has morphed into numerous meanings. Many of which I support. However, I feel it wise to always remember the original meaning of the word.

Entrepreneurship is the essence of economic activity. Indeed, it is the essence of life. Because life and business are critically dependent on the allocation of scarce resources.

I know that sounds pretty dry, but it is important. It is so common for people to keep adding servings to their plate. Meaning, we keep taking on more and more stuff, to do or to think about.

The trouble we run into is the fact that mental energy is a limited resource. And, if you understand the nature of humans, and resource allocation, you understand that deciding what to ignore, deciding what not to do, is usually the hard part.

Additionally, we need to know what our resources are. Meaning, we need to know our strengths. Click here to go to an old post which contains an excellent strengths test.

Back in the 19th Century, like most economists, JB Say was talking about resources. Today we live in the information age, where knowledge is one of the key resources. 

Today, our main resources reside between our two ears. These resources are: attention, knowledge, style, and strengths.

If we wish to allocate our resources, we had better know what they are!

Entrepreneurship is Education

Entrepreneurs innovate. It is one of the main things we do.

This truth has many implications.

One of implications is that we are breaking from the status quo.

This can be difficult, because people resist change.

Another implication is that your customers need to be educated.

Any true innovation is a break with the past. A break with the old way of doing things.

This requires that your customers be educated about the new possibilities.

The readers of this blog will have various and sundry products.

So, I cannot tailor everyone's education process.

Some innovations can make sense from the instructions on the product's packaging.

Other innovations might benefit from the educational platform known as an "infomercial."

While some innovations require a sales force to go out and educate the customer.  Eyeball to eyeball or ear bud to ear bud.

As an entrepreneur, it is your job to figure out the best way to educate your prospective customers.

This is one of the main hurdles to Commercializing Creativity.

Make it happen!

Artificial Intelligence

There is a lot of talk these days about artificial intelligence. It certainly is interesting.

A few weeks ago I predicted that China will not overtake America any time soon (click here) Allow me to make another predication. Artificial intelligence will not replace humans any time soon.

Sure, AI will replace some human activities. But, a big advantage of the human mind is its ability to perceive the world around it.

Computers are great at logic. Humans are great at perception.

And, when it comes to business, and entrepreneurship, perception is much more important than logic.

Sometimes it sure would be nice if a computer could do the hard thinking for us. It cannot. And, I am pretty comfortable saying computers will never be able to replace our job of perceiving the outside world. At least not in our lifetimes.

P.S. I am well aware of the commercials IBM is running about "Watson." I am also aware that Watson won at Jeopardy.

But, think about it. Jeopardy is about the past and business is about the future. And, when it comes to dealing with the future, humans are still way better than bots.

P.P.S. I know artificial intelligence has a lot of futuristic appeal. Sorry to rain to sexy parade...but, I roll with humans.