As a second installment in the “Overlooked Aspects of Leadership” series, I turn once again to the Berlin School Executive MBA theses. Lucia Tarbajovska, Vice President of Marketing Communications at T-Mobile, researched and wrote about fear. Like Craig Markus’ work, this study was a truly original piece of research and writing; indeed, this thesis was awarded the Michael Conrad Award for Best Thesis in the Graduating Class.
Just like with Markus’ work on rage and grace, Tarbajovska’s work on fear delves into the psyche of leadership. Fear is an emotion we are all familiar with, but spend far too little time acknowledging and talking about. Fear of failure; fear of the unknown; fear of disappointing; for some, even fear of succeeding. We all know these experiences, and they shape the way we approach problems, work, relationships, life in fundamental ways. In Tarbajovska’s empirical survey on the topic, she found that nearly 90% of the creative leaders that participated in her survey acknowledged that fear is a critical factor influencing the ways they make decisions and ultimately influencing creativity.
And, for leaders of organizations, the stakes are high. Inasmuch as these experiences and emotions live deep inside of us, they also live deep inside of organizations, and ignored or left unaddressed, they will ultimately drive an organization or a brand toward mediocrity.
Tarbajovska plainly stakes her claim on the relationship between leadership and fear, saying: “Leadership is all about confronting fears and overcoming them. Furthermore, it is not only about overcoming their own fears but fears of people around them, all stakeholders - people they lead directly and the entire employee base, partners, suppliers, shareholders, public etc. And not only that, it is about overcoming the systems that we live in – the structures, the norms, the templates, the processes, the hierarchies, the rules, the guides etc… Most leaders are under a constant pressure of fear of failure that ultimately locks them in a routine and pushes them to comfort zones, to consensus, to mediocre decisions… [Yet] a business environment like [the current economic crisis] requires managers to be courageous. I suggest taking it a step further by adopting courage as a key value of your organization and injecting it into your organizational culture. The courage to listen, act, make mistakes, admit failure – or rather promote it as learning, and most importantly stay the courage is essential to survival in times like these – the times of economic crisis and separates successful businesses from the rest in more stable times.”
In my reading of Tarbajovska’s thesis, there are three key points that come out of the discussion. First, she argues that, with respect to organizations and brands, it is not just general fear that drives us. It is actually the fear to differentiate. If you were to boil down strategy guru Michael Porter’s views on what lies at the core of effective strategy, differentiation would be a central theme. But, according to Tarbajovska, we fear this more than anything else: We are much more comfortable staying within the norms of society and the norms of the competition because there are signals all around us that this is a right and appropriate thing to do. Differentiation is the most important thing, but it is also the thing we fear the most.
Second, for leaders, the challenge is not just overcoming their own fear, it is about creating a culture of courage in the organizations they lead; it is about leading a team or an organization in which all members of that system live the values of fighting fear.
Third, creating an anti-fear culture is as much about organizational design as it is about simply being a fearless leader yourself. Great leaders must think hard about how to design an organizational system that produces and nurtures such a culture. Now Tarbajovska has her own views on how to structure an organization like this—low hierarchy, few rules, forcing people to stretch and rewarding mistakes. But the main insight here is the creative leaders need to think hard about how to structure their organizations to produce a culture of fearlessness.
Creative leaders that can accomplish that are truly great leaders.
Look for the final installment of "Overlooked Aspects of Leadership (Part III): Being Wrong"... Coming soon.
Thursday, August 20, 2009
Monday, August 17, 2009
Overlooked Aspects of Leadership (Part I): Rage and Grace
In one of my roles I have the pleasure of serving as the Academic Director of the Berlin School of Creative Leadership (http://www.berlin-school.com/ ), a business school for executives in the creative industries. It is a wonderful experience spending time teaching business skills and discussing leadership with senior creative directors in the advertising, publishing, media, and other creative industries.
One of the requirements of the program is a capstone project of a Master’s thesis. The school’s second graduating class completed the program in July, ending with the presentations of their theses, and they did not disappoint. There were many fabulous pieces of research presented there, and many new ideas floating around, some of which are truly original in the field of leadership.
Craig Markus, Executive Creative Director and Executive Vice President at McCann Erickson, gave a fabulous presentation on the relationship between rage and grace in leadership. Rage and grace: the perfect partners; both necessary; both central to creative energy.
Markus argued that all great leaders have a little rage. They need the emotional impetus that drives them to do something remarkable; they need to feel unsatisfied with the status quo and furious enough to do something about it; they need to have the emotional constitution that pushes them to strive for something more. Complacency is the enemy of greatness, and leaders that have some rage are never complacent.
But rage can be a dangerous thing. It cannot be an excuse for treating people badly or acting like an ego-maniacal buffoon. Indeed, rage must be balanced by an appropriate dose of grace. Rage, according to Markus is the reaction to an event or circumstance, driving the leader to strive aggressively for change; grace is his or her ability to moderate that rage, to channel it in appropriate directions, to treat people and the world around him/her in a civil and caring fashion.
Markus analyzes a number of figures through this prism--the exegesis on Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X is particularly insightful, but let's stick to examples from the business world. Take, for example, the leader at the top of everyone’s list of great creative leaders: Steve Jobs. When Steve Jobs was young… wow. Now there’s some serious rage (think about the rage conveyed in the iconographic “1984” commercial (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BxShzoUjiAQ ), which debuted during the Superbowl that year). And it led him to create great things. But most people who name Jobs as one of the great creative leaders of our time often forget his destructive behavior at Apple in 1984-85. His legendary battle with Scully; his insistence on occupying two distinctly different levels in the organization (Chairman of the Board and GM of Mac—in effect, being the boss of his boss), which created great organizational confusion and significant cultural dysfunction in the organization; his resignation from the board. A lot of rage; not much grace. But when Jobs returned Apple in 1996, he had enough creative drive (and enough rage) to revive and save Apple (witness: the iPod), but he also had grown into considerably more grace. His grace would balance his rage, and he would be a considerably better leader for it. (Though still not without his detractors... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TUl1DFBKdv8 )
Markus’ insights on leadership are fresh and provocative. His ideas take us much deeper into vague concept of passion in leadership. It is really an analysis of what drives us and how we balance the emotions of those drivers. For someone who spends most of his time thinking about the analytical and design aspects of leadership, I found Markus’ ideas about the psyche of creative leaders to be truly insightful.
One of the requirements of the program is a capstone project of a Master’s thesis. The school’s second graduating class completed the program in July, ending with the presentations of their theses, and they did not disappoint. There were many fabulous pieces of research presented there, and many new ideas floating around, some of which are truly original in the field of leadership.
Craig Markus, Executive Creative Director and Executive Vice President at McCann Erickson, gave a fabulous presentation on the relationship between rage and grace in leadership. Rage and grace: the perfect partners; both necessary; both central to creative energy.
Markus argued that all great leaders have a little rage. They need the emotional impetus that drives them to do something remarkable; they need to feel unsatisfied with the status quo and furious enough to do something about it; they need to have the emotional constitution that pushes them to strive for something more. Complacency is the enemy of greatness, and leaders that have some rage are never complacent.
But rage can be a dangerous thing. It cannot be an excuse for treating people badly or acting like an ego-maniacal buffoon. Indeed, rage must be balanced by an appropriate dose of grace. Rage, according to Markus is the reaction to an event or circumstance, driving the leader to strive aggressively for change; grace is his or her ability to moderate that rage, to channel it in appropriate directions, to treat people and the world around him/her in a civil and caring fashion.
Markus analyzes a number of figures through this prism--the exegesis on Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X is particularly insightful, but let's stick to examples from the business world. Take, for example, the leader at the top of everyone’s list of great creative leaders: Steve Jobs. When Steve Jobs was young… wow. Now there’s some serious rage (think about the rage conveyed in the iconographic “1984” commercial (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BxShzoUjiAQ ), which debuted during the Superbowl that year). And it led him to create great things. But most people who name Jobs as one of the great creative leaders of our time often forget his destructive behavior at Apple in 1984-85. His legendary battle with Scully; his insistence on occupying two distinctly different levels in the organization (Chairman of the Board and GM of Mac—in effect, being the boss of his boss), which created great organizational confusion and significant cultural dysfunction in the organization; his resignation from the board. A lot of rage; not much grace. But when Jobs returned Apple in 1996, he had enough creative drive (and enough rage) to revive and save Apple (witness: the iPod), but he also had grown into considerably more grace. His grace would balance his rage, and he would be a considerably better leader for it. (Though still not without his detractors... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TUl1DFBKdv8 )
Markus’ insights on leadership are fresh and provocative. His ideas take us much deeper into vague concept of passion in leadership. It is really an analysis of what drives us and how we balance the emotions of those drivers. For someone who spends most of his time thinking about the analytical and design aspects of leadership, I found Markus’ ideas about the psyche of creative leaders to be truly insightful.
Friday, August 14, 2009
Putting the WTO Ruling Against China in Perspective
Wednesday’s World Trade Organization ruling against China’s restrictions on the distribution of media by American companies (actually the ruling will apply to all WTO nations) in China has implications for the creative industries specifically and US-China trade relations more generally. But it also has deeper implications for China’s role in the global economy, many of which are positive.
First, a little background: for the first 22 years of China’s opening to the world (1979 until 2001, the year of its accession to the WTO), the Chinese government directed foreign investment with a heavy hand. Foreign investors across industries were almost always required to set up joint ventures (JVs) with state-owned organizations if they wanted to have any chance at success in penetrating China’s markets.
That changed dramatically with China’s accession to the WTO. Today, across many industries, companies are much more likely to set up Wholly-Owned Foreign Enterprises (WOFEs) than they are to set up JVs as their position in the market. There are still a few controlled industries, those that the Chinese government sees as critical in one way or another: automobiles (because of its role as a “backbone” industry), energy/oil and gas (because of the strategic implications of this industry for national development, tobacco (a longstanding, lucrative monopoly with key economic implications for several provinces), telecommunications, and entertainment/media. The final two are actually very interesting to ponder because of their implications for democratization.
The decision is indeed good news for the creative industries. It is absolutely the case that this ruling will have an impact on how Chinese markets will eventually open up. It will not be a watershed moment, because, China will still drag its feet as any bureaucratic nation can do with approval processes and behind-the-scenes “guiding” of ventures. However, the good news, which China is often not given credit for, is that it is taking global processes seriously. The country moved steadily in the direction of a rational-legal system under Zhu Rongji and Jiang Zemin in the 1990s and it is continuing in that direction under Hu Jintao.
Some have argued that this ruling will have implications for the trade deficit. However, it is important to keep the trade deficit issue in perspective.
Despite claims that markets in China are closed to foreign producers—an allegation that is often raised in the face of the growing trade deficit with the United States and the rest of the world—there are several complexities and nuances to this claim.
First, one simple fact that is often lost in this debate is the shift in 1991 from measuring national economic growth as GNP to GDP. GNP measures the total value of goods and services produced by a given nation in a given year; GDP measures the total value of goods and services produced within a nation’s borders in a given year.
This is an important point because, of the top forty exporters from China, ten are U.S. companies. Multinational corporations like Dell, Motorola, and Wal-Mart benefit tremendously from producing in China and exporting to the rest of the world—benefits that include healthy profits, which boost stock prices and, thus, market capitalization. These exports, however, count on China’s side of the export ledger, because the goods are produced in China. Thus, although Wal-Mart is one of the largest importers to the United States from China, those imports count as Chinese exports in the balance of trade. The bottom line is that, while the trade deficit is clearly a problem for many U.S. policy makers, it is a complicated development that encapsulates many more commodity-chain relationships than the statistic itself reveals.
Second, as U.S. trade with China has grown, its trade with other East Asian economies has shrunk. This is not surprising, given that countries such as South Korea and Taiwan have moved production sites to China to take advantage of cheaper labor there. Under these circumstances, exports from China grow; however, this commodity-chain cooperation amounts to a reorganization of export flows across the region rather than a simple net growth of exports from China. In other words, in order to really think accurately about the trade imbalance with China, we need to also account for the fact that as production in Taiwan has declined, many of the Taiwanese businesses have moved their factories over the China’s eastern seaboard.
It is important to keep all of these issues in perspective, as the issues are often distorted in significant ways by the media and by anti-China (and anti-globalization) interest groups.
Finally, on the issue of democratization, if you care about democratization in the world’s largest nation, this ruling comes as a welcome sign. The flow of information (both cultural and news) is a cornerstone of democracy. China has been moving slowly (and quietly) on this front, but it HAS been moving and in significant way, and it often does not receive enough credit for how open the society has become. This ruling will not change much in the short run, but it will in the long run. As media companies have freer rein to operate in China’s markets with fewer and fewer restrictions, the information available to people in Chinese society will be greater and greater, a fact that follows the trends already in play over the course of the last 30 years.
First, a little background: for the first 22 years of China’s opening to the world (1979 until 2001, the year of its accession to the WTO), the Chinese government directed foreign investment with a heavy hand. Foreign investors across industries were almost always required to set up joint ventures (JVs) with state-owned organizations if they wanted to have any chance at success in penetrating China’s markets.
That changed dramatically with China’s accession to the WTO. Today, across many industries, companies are much more likely to set up Wholly-Owned Foreign Enterprises (WOFEs) than they are to set up JVs as their position in the market. There are still a few controlled industries, those that the Chinese government sees as critical in one way or another: automobiles (because of its role as a “backbone” industry), energy/oil and gas (because of the strategic implications of this industry for national development, tobacco (a longstanding, lucrative monopoly with key economic implications for several provinces), telecommunications, and entertainment/media. The final two are actually very interesting to ponder because of their implications for democratization.
The decision is indeed good news for the creative industries. It is absolutely the case that this ruling will have an impact on how Chinese markets will eventually open up. It will not be a watershed moment, because, China will still drag its feet as any bureaucratic nation can do with approval processes and behind-the-scenes “guiding” of ventures. However, the good news, which China is often not given credit for, is that it is taking global processes seriously. The country moved steadily in the direction of a rational-legal system under Zhu Rongji and Jiang Zemin in the 1990s and it is continuing in that direction under Hu Jintao.
Some have argued that this ruling will have implications for the trade deficit. However, it is important to keep the trade deficit issue in perspective.
Despite claims that markets in China are closed to foreign producers—an allegation that is often raised in the face of the growing trade deficit with the United States and the rest of the world—there are several complexities and nuances to this claim.
First, one simple fact that is often lost in this debate is the shift in 1991 from measuring national economic growth as GNP to GDP. GNP measures the total value of goods and services produced by a given nation in a given year; GDP measures the total value of goods and services produced within a nation’s borders in a given year.
This is an important point because, of the top forty exporters from China, ten are U.S. companies. Multinational corporations like Dell, Motorola, and Wal-Mart benefit tremendously from producing in China and exporting to the rest of the world—benefits that include healthy profits, which boost stock prices and, thus, market capitalization. These exports, however, count on China’s side of the export ledger, because the goods are produced in China. Thus, although Wal-Mart is one of the largest importers to the United States from China, those imports count as Chinese exports in the balance of trade. The bottom line is that, while the trade deficit is clearly a problem for many U.S. policy makers, it is a complicated development that encapsulates many more commodity-chain relationships than the statistic itself reveals.
Second, as U.S. trade with China has grown, its trade with other East Asian economies has shrunk. This is not surprising, given that countries such as South Korea and Taiwan have moved production sites to China to take advantage of cheaper labor there. Under these circumstances, exports from China grow; however, this commodity-chain cooperation amounts to a reorganization of export flows across the region rather than a simple net growth of exports from China. In other words, in order to really think accurately about the trade imbalance with China, we need to also account for the fact that as production in Taiwan has declined, many of the Taiwanese businesses have moved their factories over the China’s eastern seaboard.
It is important to keep all of these issues in perspective, as the issues are often distorted in significant ways by the media and by anti-China (and anti-globalization) interest groups.
Finally, on the issue of democratization, if you care about democratization in the world’s largest nation, this ruling comes as a welcome sign. The flow of information (both cultural and news) is a cornerstone of democracy. China has been moving slowly (and quietly) on this front, but it HAS been moving and in significant way, and it often does not receive enough credit for how open the society has become. This ruling will not change much in the short run, but it will in the long run. As media companies have freer rein to operate in China’s markets with fewer and fewer restrictions, the information available to people in Chinese society will be greater and greater, a fact that follows the trends already in play over the course of the last 30 years.
Wednesday, August 12, 2009
Shifts in Approaches to Leadership
In the August 17, 2009, edition of BusinessWeek, Jack and Suzy Welch’s long-running backpage commentary had been replaced by the sage words of Henry Mintzberg, a management professor at McGill and author of numerous excellent books on the topics of management and leadership. The move brought forth wonderful ideas but also signaled some important changes that are afoot in the study and understanding of leadership in the business world.
In contrast to Jack and Suzy Welch, Henry Mintzberg is a very different kind of authority on leadership. He has always been a scholar and educator that promoted deep thinking about the hard work of organizational structure, process, the right (limited) role for strategic planning, and how to create the right kinds of culture. In addition, he has always struck me as being among the most humble of gurus. One time, several years ago, I had the honor of sharing the stage with him at some event in China; I was there to give a talk about some aspect of economic development in China and he was there to get some quite significant honor. We spent some of the next day together and I found him to be an engaged, intellectually curious, and unassuming figure, especially given his international prominence.
As for substance, Mintzberg’s views voiced in the BusinessWeek commentary, which not surprisingly reflect his larger body of work, are a breath of fresh air. The article, entitled “We’re Overled and Undermanaged: Too many ‘leaders’ fancy themselves above the messy, but crucial, work of managing,” is an excellent treatment of how we need to shift our thinking in how we teach, nurture, train and what we emphasize for leaders. Too often, educators, consultants, corporate boards, and CEOs themselves emphasize the issues of charisma, courage, and vision at the expense of the difficult day-to-day work of mentoring, designing organizational processes, analyzing the structure of the organization, and working toward building the right organizational culture. As Minzberg notes “CEOs [today]… don’t manage so much as deem – pronouncing performance targets… that are supposed to be met by whomever is doing the real managing.” Minzberg goes on to remind us that “American enterprise, so admired around the globe, was not built by the currently fashionable ‘heroic’ leadership but with leaders tangibly engaged in managing – and without today’s bonuses.” There are many ways to think about leadership, but following Minzberg, in my own approach to teaching executives and MBA students, I place much more emphasis on analysis, organizational design and the creation of a culture of innovation. Building a lasting culture of creativity, innovation, and passion that transcends a given leader is the ultimate expression of excellent leadership. But how is this achieved? How do leaders construct truly innovative organizations? I focus below on 3; they are surely many more. But the main thing to notice here is that these are qualities that are as much about rolling up your sleeves and doing the hard work of analyzing environments (and ourselves) and building appropriate organizational processes that align with them.
Understanding Complexity--It is a little too easy to take pot-shots at the fields of strategy and economics right now, but it is relevant for our discussion here, so I must. For three decades, economists have been content to analyze the world through theoretical mathematical models, which are impressively complex in terms of math but horribly simplistic in their assumptions about the real world. Such approaches contributed greatly to the accounting scandals of 2000-01 and the economic meltdown of 2008. However, truly creative leaders recognize that complexity is something to be cherished, examined, analyzed for opportunities; it is not something to be assumed away for the elegance of a theoretical mathematical model. Complexity exists on two levels: (1) the macro-level complexity of the environment in which the organization is embedded; and (2) the micro-level complexity of the human dynamics on which the organization is built. Let's face it: organizations are messy; they are human, organic, political, rife with power struggles and inequalities; and the leaders that face and embrace this fact perform better than those who want to simplify the world and pretend those power struggles or politics don't exist in their organizations. Similarly, those that believe you can simplify the world, that global complexity can be captured in abstract theoretical modeling, are simply missing what is happening in the global economy today.
Analysis and Alignment--In 1977, Harvard Business School Professor, Abraham Zaleznik, set a new course for the field of leadership when he penned the essay “Managers and Leaders: Are They Different?” From that point forward, the field of leadership has been defined around individual personality traits, as visionary, intuitive, inspiring individuals who understand work and interpersonal relationships differently than other people do. What was lost in the personal and individualistic turn in leadership was the importance analysis. In our approach to creative leadership, we shift the discussion away from individualistic traits like charisma, personality, and style. Instead, we emphasize an analytical approach to organizational design focusing on alignment—creating harmony among all of the organization’s component parts. Truly creative leaders do not lead by intuition or charisma but instead by having the patience to take a step back and think analytically about how the complex parts of their organizations fit together. They think deeply and carefully about how to put the structures in place that will produce a culture of innovation and change.
Introspection--Ultimately, the most difficult, yet also the most important, thing for leaders is knowing themselves: knowing their strengths; knowing their weaknesses; knowing their style; knowing the things that tend to set them off or respond in certain (unproductive ways); and being honest about these qualities. The best leaders surround themselves with people who can help to compensate for and balance their qualities.
***
The fact that BusinessWeek replaced Jack and Suzy Welch with Professor Minzberg should probably not be taken as some fundamental shift in business reporting. Who knows, perhaps it is just a one-week guest appearance. Nor is this a dramatically new approach to these issues: scholars like Mintzberg, Mike Tushman, Richie Freedman, and many others have been making this case for years, but in recent years, it seems that the charismatic and heroic leader approach has been winning at least in the popular media and with corporate boards (witness the many ridiculous appointments of CEOs to Fortune 500 companies in the last 10 years). That is why we need to think more about what it takes to be a good leader in today's global economy, and Minzberg's voice is a welcome addition to this conversation (especially in venues like BusinessWeek). It is easy to imagine all the great individual qualities that might help leaders to be effective (courage, charisma, vision). And it is all too often the case that prescriptions for leadership focus on changing individual personalities. But the real key to effective leadership is a deep analytical understanding of the organizations these individuals run; having the courage to embrace the complexity of the world in which the organization is embedded; having the courage understand who you are as a leader and surround yourself with individuals who will complement and compensate for your weaknesses; and having the wisdom to listen to those people. Leadership is hard work and it is much less about powerful speeches than it is about rolling up your sleeves and getting your hands dirty in the details of the organization you are leading.
In contrast to Jack and Suzy Welch, Henry Mintzberg is a very different kind of authority on leadership. He has always been a scholar and educator that promoted deep thinking about the hard work of organizational structure, process, the right (limited) role for strategic planning, and how to create the right kinds of culture. In addition, he has always struck me as being among the most humble of gurus. One time, several years ago, I had the honor of sharing the stage with him at some event in China; I was there to give a talk about some aspect of economic development in China and he was there to get some quite significant honor. We spent some of the next day together and I found him to be an engaged, intellectually curious, and unassuming figure, especially given his international prominence.
As for substance, Mintzberg’s views voiced in the BusinessWeek commentary, which not surprisingly reflect his larger body of work, are a breath of fresh air. The article, entitled “We’re Overled and Undermanaged: Too many ‘leaders’ fancy themselves above the messy, but crucial, work of managing,” is an excellent treatment of how we need to shift our thinking in how we teach, nurture, train and what we emphasize for leaders. Too often, educators, consultants, corporate boards, and CEOs themselves emphasize the issues of charisma, courage, and vision at the expense of the difficult day-to-day work of mentoring, designing organizational processes, analyzing the structure of the organization, and working toward building the right organizational culture. As Minzberg notes “CEOs [today]… don’t manage so much as deem – pronouncing performance targets… that are supposed to be met by whomever is doing the real managing.” Minzberg goes on to remind us that “American enterprise, so admired around the globe, was not built by the currently fashionable ‘heroic’ leadership but with leaders tangibly engaged in managing – and without today’s bonuses.” There are many ways to think about leadership, but following Minzberg, in my own approach to teaching executives and MBA students, I place much more emphasis on analysis, organizational design and the creation of a culture of innovation. Building a lasting culture of creativity, innovation, and passion that transcends a given leader is the ultimate expression of excellent leadership. But how is this achieved? How do leaders construct truly innovative organizations? I focus below on 3; they are surely many more. But the main thing to notice here is that these are qualities that are as much about rolling up your sleeves and doing the hard work of analyzing environments (and ourselves) and building appropriate organizational processes that align with them.
Understanding Complexity--It is a little too easy to take pot-shots at the fields of strategy and economics right now, but it is relevant for our discussion here, so I must. For three decades, economists have been content to analyze the world through theoretical mathematical models, which are impressively complex in terms of math but horribly simplistic in their assumptions about the real world. Such approaches contributed greatly to the accounting scandals of 2000-01 and the economic meltdown of 2008. However, truly creative leaders recognize that complexity is something to be cherished, examined, analyzed for opportunities; it is not something to be assumed away for the elegance of a theoretical mathematical model. Complexity exists on two levels: (1) the macro-level complexity of the environment in which the organization is embedded; and (2) the micro-level complexity of the human dynamics on which the organization is built. Let's face it: organizations are messy; they are human, organic, political, rife with power struggles and inequalities; and the leaders that face and embrace this fact perform better than those who want to simplify the world and pretend those power struggles or politics don't exist in their organizations. Similarly, those that believe you can simplify the world, that global complexity can be captured in abstract theoretical modeling, are simply missing what is happening in the global economy today.
Analysis and Alignment--In 1977, Harvard Business School Professor, Abraham Zaleznik, set a new course for the field of leadership when he penned the essay “Managers and Leaders: Are They Different?” From that point forward, the field of leadership has been defined around individual personality traits, as visionary, intuitive, inspiring individuals who understand work and interpersonal relationships differently than other people do. What was lost in the personal and individualistic turn in leadership was the importance analysis. In our approach to creative leadership, we shift the discussion away from individualistic traits like charisma, personality, and style. Instead, we emphasize an analytical approach to organizational design focusing on alignment—creating harmony among all of the organization’s component parts. Truly creative leaders do not lead by intuition or charisma but instead by having the patience to take a step back and think analytically about how the complex parts of their organizations fit together. They think deeply and carefully about how to put the structures in place that will produce a culture of innovation and change.
Introspection--Ultimately, the most difficult, yet also the most important, thing for leaders is knowing themselves: knowing their strengths; knowing their weaknesses; knowing their style; knowing the things that tend to set them off or respond in certain (unproductive ways); and being honest about these qualities. The best leaders surround themselves with people who can help to compensate for and balance their qualities.
***
The fact that BusinessWeek replaced Jack and Suzy Welch with Professor Minzberg should probably not be taken as some fundamental shift in business reporting. Who knows, perhaps it is just a one-week guest appearance. Nor is this a dramatically new approach to these issues: scholars like Mintzberg, Mike Tushman, Richie Freedman, and many others have been making this case for years, but in recent years, it seems that the charismatic and heroic leader approach has been winning at least in the popular media and with corporate boards (witness the many ridiculous appointments of CEOs to Fortune 500 companies in the last 10 years). That is why we need to think more about what it takes to be a good leader in today's global economy, and Minzberg's voice is a welcome addition to this conversation (especially in venues like BusinessWeek). It is easy to imagine all the great individual qualities that might help leaders to be effective (courage, charisma, vision). And it is all too often the case that prescriptions for leadership focus on changing individual personalities. But the real key to effective leadership is a deep analytical understanding of the organizations these individuals run; having the courage to embrace the complexity of the world in which the organization is embedded; having the courage understand who you are as a leader and surround yourself with individuals who will complement and compensate for your weaknesses; and having the wisdom to listen to those people. Leadership is hard work and it is much less about powerful speeches than it is about rolling up your sleeves and getting your hands dirty in the details of the organization you are leading.
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