It is not making better people of others that management is about. It’s about making a better person of self. Income, power, and titles have nothing to do with that.
I think any genuine leader today has to learn leadership the hard way—by doing it. That means embracing turbulence and crisis, not avoiding it. It means “flying through the thunderstorm.” That’s not to say that there are no basic principles to orient you to the challenge. Indeed, I describe some in the book. But there are no simple recipes. Until you have lived it, you don’t really know how to do it. That’s what I mean by “leadership the hard way.”
Much like a pilot flying through a thunderstorm, in today’s economy leaders confront a situation of non-stop turbulence. Technology is constantly changing and innovation is continuous. Globalization is throwing up new competitors who seem to come out of nowhere. And, God knows, since 9/11, business people everywhere are far more aware of the impact of geopolitical turbulence in the form of terrorism, war, or big issues like climate change.
It is precisely these forces of increased turbulence that have fueled the growing preoccupation with leadership. In such an environment, leadership isn’t a luxury. It’s a matter of survival! Yet the very forces that make leadership more critical also make teaching it virtually impossible. What it takes to lead an organization through that turbulence isn’t simple or straightforward. There is just too much uncertainty. And it takes personal courage. You don’t really know what you will do at the moment of truth. No matter how much training you have (or how many leadership books you have read), nothing quite prepares you for that moment when you enter the eye of the storm!
Nearly every major decision of my business career was, to some degree, the result of daydreaming. ... To be sure, in every case I had to collect a lot of data, do detailed analysis, and make a data-based argument to convince superiors, colleagues and business partners. But that all came later. In the beginning, there was the daydream. By daydreaming, I mean loose, unstructured thinking with no particular goal in mind. ... In fact, I think daydreaming is a distinctive mode of cognition especially well suited to the complex, 'fuzzy' problems that characterize a more turbulent business environment. ... Daydreaming is an effective way of coping with complexity. When a problem has a high degree of complexity, the level of detail can be overwhelming. The more one focuses on the details, the more one risks being lost in them. ... Every child knows how to daydream. But many, perhaps most, lose the capacity as they grow up.
Wrong location? Move it. Wrong people? Replace 'em. Wrong industry? I don't believe it. I've got a company in the machine tools industry, and we're doing great. I'd happily go into the coal business. It's how you look at something and how it's managed that make the difference.
Human nature always defeats a big idea about how to change human nature... In the battle between company policy and human nature, human nature always wins.
How could any entrepreneur, confronted by such amazing opportunities to help transform the world and to do so with such extraordinary colleagues, be tempted to lose focus? Especially since the work involves such breadth that the boredom of routine or specialization does not exist.
The worst mistake I have made was to compromise on these core principles. For example, toward the end of our first period of very rapid growth (45 percent a year for five years), we hired several wonderful, spirited managers. However, they were not entrepreneurs; and they never could, partly in consequence, intuitively "get" our vision, our core stakeholders, or our culture. They set to work managing, which ended in failure, uncomprehending frustration, and culture division. Good entrepreneurs can manage, but no one but an entrepreneur can entrepreneur, let alone help build and lead the world's community of leading social entrepreneurs and their top business entrepreneur allies.
Epilogue – Ecological Literacy – excerpt from page 297
Reconnecting with the web of life means building and nurturing sustainable communities in which we can satisfy our needs and aspirations without diminishing the chances of further generations. For this task we can learn valuable lessons from the study of ecosystems, which are sustainable communities of plants, animals and microorganisms. To understand these lessons, we need to learn the basic principles of ecology. We need to become, as it were, ecologically literate. Being ecologically literate, or “ecoliterate,” means understanding the principles of organization of ecological communities (ecosystems) and using those principles creating sustainable human communities. We need to revitalize our communities – including our educational communities, business communities, and political communities – so that the principles of ecology become manifest in them as principles of education, management, and politics.
If you are crunching numbers, you are probably gathering information from existing customers. This will give you insight into their buying habits, usability behaviors, and other patterns. But most likely you are only gathering data on YOUR customers. This represents the middle of the bell curve or the norm. This information may be useful in “incremental” improvement, but it will rarely lead to significant innovations.
When I was trying to popularize the concept of the Internet -- ten or 15 years ago -- I came up with this concept of "the 5 Cs." Services needed to have content, context, community, commerce, and connectivity. After that, when I was trying to think of what the key management principles were to build into the culture, I started talking about the Ps. The P's were things like passion, perseverance, perspective and people. I think the people aspect is really the most important one.
Can you imagine how many hot dogs you would have to sell to make a $50K?
This highlights one of the mistakes that organizations make when thinking about innovation.
Although top executives typically keep their eyes on the end game (usually some variation of short- and long-term stock price), as you move down through the organization this changes. The focus shifts to measuring and managing tasks and products (such as selling hot dogs). The reality is, these are only a means to an end.
The solution? Stop micro-managing activities and make sure that every employee understands – and keeps their eyes on - business fundamentals and what matters most. This will enhance both creativity and overall business performance.
Leaders have to set the team's vision and make it come alive. How do you achieve that? First of all, no jargon. Targets cannot be so blurry they can't be hit. You have to talk about vision constantly to everyone. A common problem is that leaders communicate the vision to close colleagues and it never filters down to people in frontline positions.
If you want people to live and breathe the vision, "show them the money" when they do, be it with salary, bonus, or significant recognition. To quote a friend of mine, Chuck Ames, the former chairman and CEO of Reliance Electric, "Show me a company's various compensation plans, and I'll show you how its people behave."
Too often, managers think that people development occurs once a year in performance reviews. That's not even close. It should be a daily event, integrated into every aspect of your regular goings-on. Customer visits are a chance to evaluate your sales force. Plant tours are an opportunity to meet promising new line managers. A coffee break at a meeting is an opening to coach a team member about to give his first major presentation. Think of yourself as a gardener, with a watering can in one hand and a can of fertilizer in the other. Occasionally you have to pull some weeds, but most of the time, you just nurture and tend. Then watch everything bloom.
Business, like art and science, has been revealed and conceived through the intellect and imagination of people, and it develops or declines because of the intellect and imagination of people.
In fact, there is no business; there are only people. Business exists only *among* people and *for* people.
You know what comes next, of course. You know I'm writing this at my desk, on a Thursday, and day after tomorrow I'll put on bib overalls, the neighbors thinking what an affectation, and pull weeds for the composter, and dig a place for a late row of greens, most of them going to seed instead of in the pot, and tell myself what the hell, I just want to dig the dirt and watch the stuff grow, an educated fool at last.
*excerpt from Educated Fool
A few weeks ago, one of the senior managers in my group told me about a very difficult critique session he'd had with one of his women employees. He had hired her, with great expectations of an outstanding performance. Instead, she had not adjusted well to her new job, and her performance was lackluster. An appraisal and perhpas a "caring conftontation" were in order.
When he told her she was not doing the job well enough, she began to cry. She knew, she said, she was letting him down, and her own disappointment in herself embarrassed her. Thus she cried. "What did you do?" I asked. "What could I do? I felt terrible. I cried too," he said, and I couldn't help thinking about the big-time management consultant and his box of Kleenex. In my view, that manager demonstrated two things: He cared enough about the work that he was willing to confront someone he had a special interest in, and he cared enough about her to be hurt that she was upset. But let me make something clear: *I'm not talking about management for and by the wimps.* In fact, I am talking about the most difficult management there is, a management without emotional hiding places. You just can no longer be the tough guy, and you also can't come on as the impassive, icewater-in-the-veins "cool head." On the other hand, the kindly parent who listens-and-understands-but-does-nothing approach also won't work. No, in every situation, you must lead with your real self, because if you're going to be on the leading edge of management, you sometimes must be on the emotional edge as well.
In every situation, you must lead with your real self, because if you're going to be on the leading edge of management, you sometimes must be on the emotional edge as well.
People are not "things" to be manipulated, labeled, boxed, bought, and sold. Above all else, they are not "human resources." They are entire human beings, containing the whole of the evolving universe, limitless until we start limiting them. We must examine the concept of leading and following with new eyes. We must examine the concept of superior and subordinate with increasing skepticism. We must examine the concept of management and labor with new beliefs. And we must examine the nature of organizations that demand such distinctions with an entirely different consciousness.
Implementers don’t care about the origins of ideas or the creative process; they are too busy with their own concerns, while idea people don’t often value the necessary financial and business management skills necessary for execution.
Home and work life can blend successfully if you set boundaries and treat the temporal and attention-management balancing act with proper respect.
Entrepreneurs and management often spend years huddled in their chilly isolated caves, creating market competition drawings on white marker boards hung on the damp rocky walls.
If thou dost love life, then do not squander time... for that is the stuff life is made of.
Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things.
...in the words of Max DePree: "Management has a lot to do with answers. But leadership is a function of questions. And the first question for a leader always is: 'Who do we intend to be?' Not 'What are we going to do?' but 'Who do we intend to be?'"
Concentration is the secret of strength in politics, in war, in trade, in short in all management of human affairs.
Management works in the system; Leadership works on the system.
Management is efficiency in climbing the ladder of success; leadership determines whether the ladder is leaning against the right wall.
In addition to self-awareness, imagination and conscience, it is the fourth human endowment-independent will-that really makes effective self-management possible. It is the ability to make decisions and choices and to act in accordance with them. It is the ability to act rather than to be acted upon, to proactively carry out the program we have developed through the other three endowments. Empowerment comes from learning how to use this great endowment in the decisions we make every day.
Success is good management in action.
