Good Morning Thinkers!

7 Types of Leadership Stories

"Through a story, life invites us to come inside as a participant." -- Steve Denning, author of the Springboard: How Storytelling Ignited Action in Knowledge-Era Organizations and Squirrel, Inc.: A Fable of Leadership and Storytelling

In his new book, "Squirrel, Inc.," Convergence 2004 keynote speaker, Steve Denning, describes seven types of stories:

Sparking Action. Leadership is, above all, about getting people to change. To achieve this goal, you need to communicate the sometimes complex nature of the changes required and inspire an
often skeptical organization to enthusiastically carry them out. This is the place for what I call "springboard story," one that enables listeners to visualize the large-scale transformation needed in their circumstances and then to act on that realization.

Such a story is based on an actual event, preferably recent enough to seem relevant. It has a single protagonist with whom members of the target audience can identify. And there is an authentically happy ending, in which a change has at least in part been successfully implemented. (There is also an implicit alternate ending, an unhappy one that would have resulted had the change not occurred.)

The story has enough detail to be intelligible and credible but not so much that listeners are but -- and this is key -- not so much texture that audience becomes completely wrapped up in it. If that happens, people won't have the mental space to create an analogous scenario for change in their own organization. For example, if you want to get an organization to embrace a new technology, you might tell stories about individuals elsewhere who have successfully implemented it, without dwelling on the specifics of implementation.

The Human Face of Outsourcing

Kudos to Fast Company (issue: April, 2004) for putting a human face on the complex and controversial issue of outsourcing.

And, jeers to Michael Mullarkey, CEO of Workstream, Inc., a Canadian-based tech company, for saying "I'm paying $65,000 Canadian for developers that were making $147,000 [in California], and they're smiling ear to ear. People are a dime a dozen." (Quoted in the same Fast Company article)

I highly doubt that anyone working for a CEO who views people as a commodity is truly "smiling ear to ear." Workstream's website bills it as a "full talent management solution" and "the business of people" and "targets the major stakeholders in building employment relationships." Hmmmm ... someone's not walking the talk.

Compare this leadership Neaderthal to Costco's CEO Jim Sinegal who refuses to ship his call center offshore because he doesn't think it would create the right image in the minds of his customers and employees.

As some economists have noted, offshoring stops making sense when everyone is doing it. Not only does the cost advantage go away, but so also do the customers who no longer have salaries and money to buy the products and services made by all the cheap labor.

In freshman economics, I learned the principle of ceteris paribus (defined as "With all other factors or things remaining the same.") However, the most important part of this principle is that it doesn't happen. All other things are never ever the same. You can't change one thing and hope that nothing else changes. All actions have reactions. And most of us are having the same corporate reaction these days: they (big corporations) just don't care about us as employees or as customers. Even Delta Airlines, once a paragon of service, is now rated #14!

The Fast Company article states that 1,000,000 Americans have had their jobs sent offshore. Think about the math. That probably turns into 5,000,000 close family members, 25,000,000 friends and relatives, and 100,000,000 friends, relatives, neighbors and working associates still sitting at their desks wondering when it's their turn. One contagious strategic decision is spreading a virus that affects one third of our population.

Are more cheap goods really worth this?

Wellington: Film Center of the Universe

This piece comes from an article by Richard Florida. There is a political tone to the article but it is important to think about how our political environment impacts our ability to innovate. The following story about Peter Jackson's film studio in New Zealand is just one example of the shift happening in the world. Richard Florida is the Heinz professor of economic development at Carnegie Mellon University and the author of The Rise of the Creative Class.

From Richard Florida:

Last March, I had the opportunity to meet Peter Jackson, director of The Lord of the Rings trilogy, at his film complex in lush, green, otherworldly-looking Wellington, New Zealand. Jackson has done something unlikely in Wellington, an exciting, cosmopolitan city of 900,000, but not one previously considered a world cultural capital. He has built a permanent facility there, perhaps the world's most sophisticated filmmaking complex. He did it in New Zealand concertedly and by design. Jackson, a Wellington native, realized what many American cities discovered during the '90s: Paradigm-busting creative industries could single-handedly change the ways cities flourish and drive dynamic, widespread economic change. It took Jackson and his partners a while to raise the resources, but they purchased an abandoned paint factory that, in a singular example of adaptive reuse, emerged as the studio responsible for the most breathtaking trilogy of films ever made. He realized, he told me, that with the allure of the Rings trilogy, he could attract a diversely creative array of talent from all over the world to New Zealand; the best cinematographers, costume designers, sound technicians, computer graphic artists, model builders, editors, and animators.

For a great insight about why Peter Jackson has succeeded, keep reading.

Learning is the Master Skill

(We're delighted to have this guest article from a couple of leading thinkers.)

by Jim Kouzes and Barry Posner

When discussing innovation and risk-taking in our leadership development programs we regularly ask participants, ”How many of you have ever learned a new game or a new sport?” Invariably every hand in the room goes up. We then ask, “And how many of you got it perfect the first day you played it?” People chuckle. No hands go up. Who ever gets it right the first time?

There was this one time, however, when Urban E. Hilger, Jr. raised his hand and said that on the very first day he went skiing he got it perfect. Naturally we were curious and asked Urban to tell us about the experience. Here’s what he said.

It was the first day of skiing classes. I skied all day long, and I didn’t fall down once. I was so elated; I felt so good. So I skied up to the instructor, and I told him of my great day. You know what the ski instructor said? He told me, “Personally, Urban, I think you had a lousy day.” I was stunned. “What do you mean lousy day? I thought the objective was to stand up on these boards, not fall down.” The ski instructor looked me straight in the eyes and replied, “Urban, if you’re not falling, you’re not learning.”

Urban’s ski instructor understood that if you can stand up on your skis all day long the first time out, you’re only doing what you already know how to do, not pushing yourself to try anything new and difficult. By definition learning is about something you don’t know. Those who do what they already know how to do never learn anything new. Promoting learning requires building in a tolerance for error and a framework for forgiveness. Learning and innovation go hand in hand. You can’t have one without the other. We’ve also discovered that the same thing is true for leadership.

In a series of research studies we conducted — along with Lillas Brown of the University of Saskatchewan — we found that leaders can be differentiated by the range and depth of the learning tactics they employ when facing a new or unfamiliar experience. We measured managers on four different approaches to learning — taking action, feeling, thinking, and accessing others — and we discovered that managers who were more engaged rather than less engaged in each of these learning tactics were also more effective at leading. The more they engaged in learning the better they did at leading. We discovered, in other words, that we could predict that someone would be a more effective leader based on the extent to which they engaged in learning!

This shouldn’t be surprising to anyone. It just makes sense that those people who push themselves to learn will do better than those who only dabble in it. Attending one three-day workshop, reading one best-selling book, reflecting only on one incident, or participating in one simulation doesn’t produce great leaders. It doesn’t produce great innovators either. What was somewhat surprising to us, however, was that no one style of learning was more effective than any other at being a more effective leader. Learning to lead seems to be independent of any particular learning style. It doesn’t matter how you learn. What matters is that you do more of whatever learning tactic works best for you. Becoming a better leader is clearly linked to becoming a better learner.

These findings also raise an extremely interesting and mostly unexplored question: Which comes first, learning or leading? Whenever we pursue this question with our clients their hunches are the same as ours. Learning comes first, they say. When people are predisposed to be curious and want to learn something new, they are much more likely to get better at it than those who don’t become fully engaged. When it comes to getting great at leading, or anything for that matter, the axiom is not simply “Just do it.” It’s “Just do more of it!”

Learning is the master skill. When we fully engage in learning — when we throw ourselves whole-heartedly into experimenting, reflecting, reading, or getting coaching – we’re going to experience the thrill of improvement and the taste of success. Less is not more when it comes to learning. More is more. And a word of caution to executives with the red pencils. In these challenging times when we’re faced with the need to innovate, don’t cut the training budget!

Question of the Week: Let's take this great question about learning and leading and see what your experience is. How do you see your leaders learning? What brief example of outstanding learning leading to great leadership? Please respond in the comments section below.

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