Leadershift - Reinventing Leadership For The Age of Mass Collaboration PDF
Leadershift - Reinventing Leadership For The Age of Mass Collaboration PDF
Emmanuel Gobillot
First published in Great Britain and the United States in 2009 by Kogan Page
Limited
Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism
or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this
publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any
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The right of Emmanuel Gobillot to be identified as the author of this work has been
asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library.
Gobillot, Emmanuel.
Leadershift : reinventing leadership for the age of mass collaboration / Emmanuel
Gobillot.
p. cm.
Includes index.
ISBN 978-0-7494-5531-6
1. Leadership. I. Title.
HM1261.G632 2009
303.3’4--dc22
2009008502
Acknowledgements ix
Introduction 1
Why am I asking for your time?
6 Pay or play? 53
Who matters most?
7 Leadershift 69
Are you worth following? Are you easy to follow?
Index 181
Acknowledgements
From the day I got my first cassette tape as a child (Kate Bush’s The
Kick Inside if you must know) I discovered the fascinating world of
acknowledgements. Here was a way of getting closer to the artist. Here
I could not only enjoy the work itself but understand more about its
creation and the person behind it. Later, as I became an avid reader as
well as a music fan, my love for acknowledgements never disappeared.
Until, that is, I realized how hard it was to write my own. There is
something really difficult about naming everyone who contributed to
your work when you have been influenced by so many people without,
at times, even realizing it. So I want to start by apologizing to anyone I
might have omitted from this. I did not do so willingly or knowingly.
I also want to thank Evan Wittenberg and his team at Google Uni-
versity (in particular Rachel Kay and Alana Weiss from the School
of Leadership Development) for trusting me enough to let me roam
the corridors of Googleplex and meet some of the most talented and
inquisitive people I have ever met.
I would also like to thank Katherine Thomas for her support. Katherine
not only improved the early drafts of this book, but, because of her
role as Group Director of Talent and Leadership Development at BT
plc, challenged me to make the ideas relevant to real executives with
real jobs in the real economy rather than the conceptual executives
and organizations that inhabit my consultant’s and academic’s head.
Acknowledgements xi
The craft of writing can be a long and lonely existence. I want to thank
my publisher Helen Kogan and her team at Kogan Page. Special thanks
go to Hannah Berry, whose project this was, for patiently listening to
my poor excuses and adjusting her deadlines accordingly as well as for
putting up with my strange ideas for generating titles, designing covers
and my undying love of fonts (bordering, I admit, on psychosis).
You would not be holding this book if it wasn’t for all the people who
bought (thereby encouraging my publisher to have faith in me), read
(thereby encouraging me to have faith in myself) and commented on
(thereby encouraging me to challenge my own and my publisher’s
faith) The Connected Leader. It is because of you that I have been
lucky enough to be given the chance to write another book. To the
thousands of people who have listened and challenged my ideas as
I travelled the world presenting The Connected Leader keynote, your
words are somewhere in this new book and for that I thank you.
‘As for the future, your task is not to foresee it, but to enable
it.’
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (1900–44)
‘And if you throw enough snowballs you can even get banned.’ Those
were the words uttered, with just a bit too much enthusiasm for my
liking, by my then six-year-old son, George, which were to lead me on
the search that would eventually become this book. To be exact it was
the ensuing discussion rather than the above statement that would
do it.
include a new igloo, clothing, items to decorate their igloos and even
pets (called puffles) for which they will have to buy food.
The discussion George and I were having was about the rules of
the Club. ‘How do you know what is right and wrong?’ I had asked.
George’s explanation was that ‘you tell Club Penguin when you think
someone is doing something wrong and then they get banned’ (there
is no second chance according to George). ‘You can’t tell your real
name or where you live or stuff like that because that’s not right but
the thing I don’t get is why you can’t just say sorry and not get banned.’
This was what did it for me. Why, George was asking, is someone else
making decisions about what is right when the world is supposed to
belong to me?
As parents we get very few tips on how to raise our children. We may,
if we are that way inclined, buy a few books. In the main though, we
get our clues from the way we were raised. As children we developed
within a given environment. Our experiences shaped our lives. So
when the experiences of your children are fundamentally different
from the experiences you had as a child, you realize that looking to
your own childhood to guide effective upbringing may no longer be
the best source of insight. Had I been a child psychologist you could
well have been holding a book called How to bring up George. But I am
not a child psychologist. So the discussion with George took me to
another place and another question.
And it’s not just in the virtual or software world that things are changing.
Even in some of the most expert fields of human endeavour the rules
4 Leadershift
First, George is not the only one experiencing ‘the creation confusion’.
Mass collaboration in our current world is expressing itself through
the discomfort of its participants, who have been offered a role in the
narrative but are being kept away from creating the rules. To become
fully optimal (and arguably commercially viable), mass collabor-
ation requires a form of leadership that is prepared to let go of the
experience, expertise and control it holds precious.
Second, given that there are few, if any, clues from the past to inform
the way we can be successful in the future, we are unlikely to get in-
sights into becoming leaders in the next generation by looking back
at our experiences or our elders.
Having read over 100 books, from the more classic leadership titles
to the more adventurous anthropological searches of virtual worlds,
consulted over 1,000 blog entries, spoken to over 200 executives from
global corporations to local start-ups across Asia, Europe and the United
States, the answer to my question ‘If mass collaboration is a reality must
the way we lead change?’ met with a resounding yes. As our context is
changing, in a way we can no longer stop, it won’t change us, just make
us irrelevant, unless we know how to act in this new paradigm.
The two questions publishers always ask when considering a new book
proposal are ‘Who is the audience?’ and ‘Why should they buy/read
the book?’. My answer to these two questions is as follows.
Introduction 7
The way I have organized the book should help you navigate the
story. Ultimately I have tried to make it easy for you to write your own
narrative. When my first book, The Connected Leader, was published,
many reviews focused not so much on the content but rather on the
way the book was organized. As this formula seemed to work I have
tried to emulate it here. So, whilst the book is organized in chapters,
pretty much as you would expect, I have also included a couple of
devices that I hope will save you time.
One new device I have introduced here is the ‘Don’t take my word for
it’ section. The idea is that you may want to find out more about my
claims. You may feel that my word alone is not sufficient to convince
you (making you incredibly similar to my children if you don’t mind
me sayings). If that’s the case, at the end of the book, I have listed
titles which will help you explore the ideas contained in the book in
more depth. This isn’t a full bibliography but, hopefully, a helpful
source of interesting material.
So, yes you can read the book as a book. That’s how it was written. But
you can also use it as a toolkit if you wish.
Of course there will be no exam at the end of this book but the
likelihood is that your schedule is similar to the five minutes available
to anyone before going into an exam. So whilst I have included ‘The
Introduction 9
Below is what is effectively ‘The four minute recap’ (but I call it ‘The
cheat sheet’ just to induce a slight feeling of guilt). For those of you
standing in the bookshop and wondering why you should buy the
book given that you can just read the cheat sheet and get the idea, I
make you a promise – I have some amazing stories in here! For those
of you ready to read the book, come and check out the T-shirt in
Chapter 1.
Notes
1 To be fair George doesn’t know if the penguin is actually from India
or indeed if it is a boy or a girl, as this information was not exchanged
Introduction 11
(that’s purely his take on the situation). However, with 100 employees
monitoring the site for safety and software filtering data for security,
we can at least be pretty certain the little Indian penguin is actually
a child!
2 Whilst I do recognize that the terms mass participation and mass
collaboration convey different meaning (mass collaboration being a
two-way process rather than the one-way effort participation suggests),
to avoid repetition I will use them interchangeably throughout this
book to describe communal efforts.
3 Data courtesy of Phil White of mmogdata.voig.com. Please note that
the data change all the time as, much like our own, the online uni-
verse has been known to expand and contract but even with these
changes the vastness of space remains.
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12
1 The day of
reckoning
A cynical reader might well argue that all authors of business books
proclaim that the world is changing in radical ways and that only
the books they have written will help you deal with the forthcoming
paradigm shift (non-paradigm shifts seldom get written about). If
you want to push the cynicism further you might well highlight that
most predictions tend to be far enough away to ensure that should the
future not unfold as predicted, no one will remember the prediction.
On the other hand, they are typically close enough to warrant action
on the part of the reader (after all, who cares about what will happen
10 or 15 years hence when tenure in a role averages 5 years?). The
problem for me is that in this chapter I want to make the case that,
unless leaders fundamentally change, they will become irrelevant. So
picking a day of reckoning some four or five years away would imply
that I am playing right into the cynics’ hands. Therefore, rather than
somehow try to disprove the cynics’ claim, which I know to be true (I
too err on the side of cynicism when I read), let me just start by laying
down my cards.
The day Lehman Brothers fell might be the closest we will get to a day
of reckoning. This type of turbulence is real, shocking and disturbs
our leadership routines. It demands to be dealt with. For many it is
a call to rethink the way our system works. It is a time for followers
to hold leaders accountable and for leaders to question their modus
operandi. The strength of the turbulence might even force us to
question the effectiveness and nature of our tools (incentive schemes
spring to mind). There are some clear demands which are made of
leaders in these turbulent times.
When the CEOs of the big three motor companies take private jets to
go to Washington to ask for economic help it is not only poor taste,
but fundamentally reinforces the feeling that leaders are out of touch
and do not understand the needs of their followers. On the other
hand when one of the CEOs of the major banks says repeatedly ‘I
apologize for not having anticipated some of the issues we now face’,
he does more than show humility (or demand forgiveness in an effort
to keep his job as cynics might claim), he provides reassurance by
acknowledging what many feel.
In these testing times, many will question the very essence of what
they are called to do. Is it all over for capitalism? Doesn’t this prove
once and for all that our system is faulty? Isn’t the truth that our
organizations are built on greed and exploitation? However logical or
testing we think these questions might be, for followers to ask them is
legitimate. Our role as leaders is not to shy away from those questions
but to offer a forum for discussion. By forcing our organizations to
rethink their very essence they will become stronger. Of course it is
easier said (or written) than done. It requires courage on the part of
leaders.
In my first book I wrote about the pockets of energy that are latent in
all organizations. What I called ‘the real organization’, made up of the
social networks that provide most of the energy to support our efforts,
becomes even more critical in turbulent times. By understanding
these networks and connecting to them leaders will be able to build
the necessary bridge between these networks and the purpose the
organization seeks to fulfill.
The day of reckoning 17
Yet, whilst this ‘morning after the night before’ type of turbulence
questions the effectiveness of some leaders, it does not, in and of itself
question the need for leadership. My argument here is that if you think
we live in turbulent times you’re in for a shock. There is a deeper kind
of turbulence. There is a more pervasive kind of turbulence – one
that is not as obvious and, as a result, to which we often fail to pay
attention. This kind of turbulence does not express itself through a
day of reckoning.
Think about it this way. For all intents and purposes, when you look in
the mirror to compare yourself in the morning with how you looked
the previous evening, bar the possible distortions brought about by a
long day’s work or a short night’s sleep, your face looks broadly the
same. We may well wake up one morning to find a world dramatically
different from the one we left behind the evening before but it is still
our world. Each day looks, and will continue to look, pretty much like
the one before. The sun will come up and go down. But if we continue
with this analogy we have to address one critical question. Do you
look different today from how you did four or five years ago? Here,
unfortunately, the difference is a lot plainer to see.
Even more prescient is the issue of whether this means you actually
think that you look different. Many of us have attended school
reunions only to be surprised at how badly time has affected others
whilst leaving us unchanged. We are amazed at the way nature has
been so unkind to others’ hair and waistlines whilst it has been so
kind to ours. We don’t need quantum physics to know that change is
relative to our own perspective.
us meet the challenge of these trends are also the ones that will help
us get over the immediate challenges we face.
The communities I describe in this book are crying out for leaders.
Every challenge we face is met with a call for leadership. We have a
thirst for people who can meet the only test of leadership – make
us feel stronger and more capable. Our value and, ultimately, our
survival as leaders, resides in our ability to meet the challenges dictated
by four fundamental trends that make up mass collaboration. The
real difficulty will be our ability to shift our emphasis when some of
the things around us remain the same. The real challenge of mass
collaboration is that it is practised with tools that do not necessarily
facilitate it.
These shifts cannot be stopped. But they are not to be feared as they
offer leaders new, efficient and effective sources of value generation.
Let’s take each in turn.
Note
1 M Proust (1988) A la Recherche du Temps Perdu, tome 1: Du Côté de chez
Swann, Gallimard.
2 The demographic
trend
When two talented people had the idea of facilitating access to the
whole of human knowledge it is unlikely they realized they were
creating one of the world’s most amazing businesses. It wasn’t long
after they set out to develop their business that the simplified design
they adopted for their product (so different from the ones used by
their competitors), their ubiquitous presence (making knowledge
accessible quickly) and their relentless focus (doing one thing only
and doing it well) would encourage many to spread the word and
make theirs a product of choice for all. As their competitors struggled
to grow profitably, their business was backed from day one.
The year was 1935. The two talented people were Allen Lane and V K
Krishna Menon. This most amazing business was the British publisher,
Penguin Books. Lane’s idea was to democratize access to literature
by providing quality books at the same price and locations as a pack
of cigarettes. When many thought that the cheap selling price and
the paperback format (so far reserved for second-rate novels) would
lead anyone to bankruptcy, Lane and Menon knew that they could
22 Leadershift
succeed. They rightly banked that a focus on design (a very clean cover
to differentiate their offering from all other sub-standard works then
offered in paperback), location (achieving presence in the places most
likely to attract their target market) and seed funding gained from
the purchase of 63,000 books by Woolworths would make the project
worth it. They were right. Only 10 months after the company’s launch
on 30 July 1935, one million Penguin books had been printed.
The first element is the never-ending war for talent and, in particular,
a new front opening in that war – the battle for leaders. By 2015 the
working population of ‘advanced’ economies will have shrunk by 65
The demographic trend 23
When you start digging in the numbers you realize that for these
economies the picture is even more frightening when it comes to
driving tomorrow’s growth. Whilst it is unlikely that the demand
for leaders will decline, it is certain that a healthy supply pipeline is
necessary if you consider that 50 to 75 per cent of senior managers
will be eligible for retirement by 2010.5 Replacing them is critical. It
will require a fundamental rethink of leadership development on a
par with post-First and Second World War experiences. Fighting that
battle will be hard when you also factor in the changing nature of
both the job market and of the other people fighting the battle.
The fact is that whilst some are facing leadership supply issues, others
are not. If Pink Floyd are to be believed, ‘another brick in the wall’
doesn’t sound like a good thing. In demographics, like with many
other things, the BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India and China) are
building a wall of success that will keep many other economies out.
The working population of China is big enough to take every single
US job and still have spare capacity. If you think that labour surplus is
unqualified then think again. The number of those with upper quartile
IQs in China is equivalent to the total North American population. As
they come to realize the implications of the battle for leaders, policy
makers will open up their frontiers to outside talent. Some 1 in 10
people living in the ‘developed’ world are already immigrants and
that trend will more than likely continue. The implications are deep.
Think about it this way. What we learn shapes our experience, which in
turn informs the way we lead. Leaders are the products of their pasts.
24 Leadershift
are entitled to benefits without having to work for them? They are
more individualistic than any previous generations. They demand too
much and pay little respect to others and to hierarchies. Most of these
assertions are, however, more likely to be indications of us getting old
than a result of generational differences.
Take yourself back to your own youth. When you were in your early
20s didn’t you want more? Didn’t you always think there was a better
way to do something than by obeying an arbitrary hierarchy? Didn’t
you want a better life than the one you thought your parents had?
By comparing today’s younger and older employees we are as likely
to surface the nature of maturity as fundamental generational
differences.
The fact that I get tired more quickly than my children when I play
with them is more an indication of my age and deteriorating physical
abilities than it is a clue as to some new generational stamina. To
compare one generation with the next with any degree of certainty we
must find a way of studying each generation using the same methods
at the same time (ie inflict a test of some kind at the same age to
students in the 1950s, 60s, 70s, 80s etc). This poses serious issues for
today’s researchers as most of the questions we would like answered
today are to solve issues that no one paid much interest to in previous
decades. That is until Jean M Twenge came along.
differences rather than anything else). But, and perhaps more funda-
mentally, by using these established psychological tools she also had
access to a huge cross-generational database, making a longitudinal
study possible. In fact, Jean M Twenge had enough data to look at the
behaviours of students of the same age throughout the 1950s, 60s, 70s,
80s and 90s. Armed with enough data points to make a pointillist pale
with envy, Jean exposed the real differences between generations.
If the demographic trend got you thinking, the expertise trend should
get you worried.
Notes
1 New Zealand Department of Labour (2002).
2 Towers Perrin (2006) Talent management in the 21st Century, World
at Work Journal, Q1.
3 Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (2003).
4 HR Magazine (2003).
5 Forrester Research.
6 Workforce (2000) July.
7 Jean M Twenge, PhD (2006) Generation Me – Why Today’s Young
Americans Are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled and More Miserable Than
Ever Before, Free Press, New York.
8 In a survey of teens in USA Today (2 May, 1999), when asked how
much they should be earning at age 30, Gen Y’s median answer was
US $75,000, when in fact the actual median earnings they could expect
on current trends is US $27,000.
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3 The expertise trend
designers get to work on the cover. What look and feel do we need to
appeal to the right target audience? Does it work across geographies?
Little has changed in the method for some time. Technology has
brought in the need to ensure that the title contains key terms that
appeal to online searches but that’s about as far as things have got. In
some cases focus groups and market research have been employed to
test out titles and covers but given the margin on books these efforts
have been limited.
I mentioned that even focus groups are too expensive for the eco-
nomics of publishing so with this book I tried something different.
When I started this project I had three possible titles in mind. Which
one would work best? Spurred on by the findings of Ian Ayres in his
book Super Crunchers,1 I decided to run three GoogleAds that would
The expertise trend 31
prediction markets can now be created cheaply and easily. Where will
a terrorist strike next? Which of our ongoing projects are most likely
to succeed? When will the price of oil change and how high or low
will it go? These are all testing questions asked in our testing times
that prediction markets have helped to answer. With ever decreasing
technology costs, we can now routinely enlist customers (the best
experts in the field of their own buying preferences) and others in
our creation efforts.
When he published his book The Art of the Start in 2004, venture
capitalist, original MacIntosh pirate and all round marketing and entre-
preneurship guru Guy Kawasaki knew that his book would be judged
by its cover, so who better to design it than his potential readership?
In partnership with ‘istockphoto’ (more on them later) he decided
to run a competition that generated hundreds of entries. Eventually
the cover was settled on by Guy and his team (with 70 other covers
displayed on the reverse of the dust jacket of the first edition).
Barry Libert and Jon Spector took what has become known as
‘crowdsourcing’4 a step further when they decided that a book
would be even better if written by thousands rather than two experts.
Technology helped them connect with a vast community of people
who would eventually write a book. We are Smarter than Me was pub-
lished in 2008, counting over a thousand authors, all members of the
‘wearesmarterthanme’ online community.5 The task was not only an
interesting experiment – it produced one of the most insightful works
on mass collaboration and raised some fundamental questions about
the nature of leadership and transactions in ‘wikinomics’6 (how do
you for example share royalties with authors who might only have
contributed a few words versus others who have written an entire
chapter?).
Many authors have understood and harnessed the power and wisdom
of crowds. When writing his book Crowdsourcing,7 Jeff Howe posted
updates on his website and solicited comments. So did Charles
Leadbeater when he wrote We-Think,8 exploring the social nature
of our new user-generated economy. But let’s get back to this book.
I mentioned that I decided to test three titles for it. What I didn’t
The expertise trend 33
mention was that I didn’t come up with any of them in the first place.
For that, I too relied on a community.
Anyone can post the description for a new product or service (in
my case, a new leadership book). The tribe of volunteers gets to
work on naming the new venture. Each tribe member can vote for
the names they prefer by allocating them a number of votes (called
watts). Watts represent a member’s influence as they are earned
through participation. After a 48-hour period, Kluster’s engine does
‘some clever math’ (their description, not mine this time) and brings
up the three winning entries. In 48 hours I had over 150 names to
choose from for this book. Having investigated the services of expert
naming firms and looked at the economics of marketing departments
whose job it is to fulfil this function in large multinational companies,
the US $99 I paid for naming this book redefines what harnessing
knowledge to optimize transaction costs means for any business.
Take talent costs as an example. You can’t recruit all the best people
for a task so therefore you need to select the one you think is best at
the price you are prepared to pay. You must also consider managerial
costs as you need to have someone managing the interactions. On top
of that you now have structural costs. You have to create structures
that ensure the smooth flow of activities. As long as the total of all
these opportunity and hard costs comes to less than you save by
having an organization (ie savings on coordination costs), all is well.
However, the minute you can deliver more cheaply without incurring
these costs, why would anyone in their right mind want to put up with
structural, managerial and talent issues?
Let’s get back to this book and its cover. What should the cover look
like? Let’s say I want a picture of a businessman jumping – with
sufficient blue sky at the top to position my title.9 Typing ‘businessman’
and ‘jumping’ into the search facility on istockphoto, a website where
anyone can post pictures for others to search and purchase, I am now
offered 500 pictures of businesspeople in various positions, locations
and attires. That so many businesspeople adopt so many different
poses in so many different locations is surprising enough, but not as
surprising as the search options I can use to narrow my search down.
I can now ask for pictures with a portrait or landscape orientation
and even search for pictures with a precise area free of any elements
within which I will be able to position my text. Doing that leaves me
with sixteen choices.10 I can purchase the picture of my choice for a
few dollars depending on its size.
Not only is the price about a tenth of any other stock photo library
with a search process that took only a few minutes, but in addition I
have access to the photographic skills and imaginative capabilities of
an unrestricted number of contributors. No one was shut out of the
creation process by a need I had to maintain the price of talent at a
minimum by contracting with a restricted number of contributors.
Nor did I incur expensive managerial, structural or contractual costs
in the process.
Threadless, the company behind the T-shirt, relies on its users’ com-
munity to generate designs that other members vote on and eventually
purchase. Open source software was perhaps the best-known precursor
to the developing movement. As more companies reconfigure their
supply chain to rely on expertise beyond their organizational walls
36 Leadershift
Notes
1 I Ayres (2007) Super Crunchers: How anything can be predicted, John
Murray.
2 James Surowiecki (2004) The Wisdom of Crowds, Little, Brown.
3 The McKinsey Quarterly (2008) Number 2.
4 Jeff Howe (2008) Crowdsourcing: Why the Power of the Crowd Is Driving the
Future of Business, Crown Business.
The expertise trend 37
5 Barry Libert and Jon Spector (2007) We Are Smarter Than Me: How
to Unleash the Power of Crowds in Your Business, Wharton School
Publishing.
6 Wikinomics is the term coined by Don Tapscott and Anthony
Williams to describe the economy of online collaboration in their
book Wikinomics (published by Portfolio in 2006).
7 Jeff Howe (2008) Crowdsourcing: Why the Power of the Crowd Is Driving
the Future of Business, Crown Business.
8 Charles Leadbeater (2008) We-think: The Power of Mass Creativity,
Profile Books.
9 At the time of writing this line the cover for the book has not been
decided upon and I do hope no one at the design agency will be sad
enough to ever suggest having a businessman jumping as the right
image for the cover. But stick with me here, I am trying to make a
point.
10 If you’re interested my choice would have been a picture by Viorika
exclusive to istockphoto with the file number 6507087.
11 Jacques Bughin, Michael Chui and Brad Johnson (2008) The next
step in open innovation, The McKinsey Quarterly, online edition
number 2.
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4 The attention trend
The average e-mail user will receive 65,000 messages this year
alone.1 More than 300,000 books are published every year.2 The
average weekday edition of The New York Times contains more informa-
tion than someone would have come across in his or her lifetime in
17th-century England.3 Forty exabytes (4 × 1019) of unique information
is produced in a year – more than was produced in the previous 5,000
years. A typical supermarket stocks around 40,000 items.4 Pieces
of direct mail to hit letterboxes in the United States every year number
87.2 billion.5 You can access more than 2 billion web pages. Internet
traffic doubles every hundred days.6 It is estimated that the internet is
500 times larger7 than the 91 million daily Google searches8 can ever
show. So where do you focus? Where do you go for answers? Or is the
only answer to just switch off?
The answer to that last question is probably the most worrying for
leaders. With 48 million avatars (online representations of individuals)
currently roaming the web,9 10 per cent of whom do so for more than
10 hours a day, MMORPGs (massively multiplayer online role-playing
games) and associated virtual worlds might well be in the process of
designing a new reality. OK so that’s a pretty bold claim – which you
may now be looking to reject on analytical grounds alone. So let’s just
think about it for a second. Let’s get back to Current.
The other important point is that some people are better at creating
things that attract people than others. The key reason why so many
social networking and virtual technologies have become so appealing
is that they mimic our normal everyday social lives much better than
any of the organizations we have created.
The same is true of our world. We recognize the call of the tribe to
which we want to belong. For people this means restricting listening
to the voices we trust and can easily recognize. For organizations,
being better at creating things that attract people’s attention is not
a function of cleverness, but rather a function of focus. In a world
that is already crowded, if you try to be all things to all people your
message becomes so diluted that it loses the capability to stand out
above the noise. If you have a specific way of saying or doing things
you suddenly stand for something loud enough to attract the people
who matter. It may well mean that you attract fewer people, but these
people will be devoted people. Just as the baby penguin on the frozen
ice cap hears its parents’ voices amidst the cacophony of thousands of
other penguins’ cries, your potential audience (attuned to a specific
tone) will hear your voice and find you. Incidentally, what is true of
real penguins is also true of virtual ones – my children will always
recognize the call of Club Penguin!
42 Leadershift
The trouble is that the cries of organizations are becoming less and
less audible as they become less and less distinguishable. People are
growing deaf to your efforts to be heard. Indications that this trend has
already started are demonstrated by Current. People no longer rely
on traditional sources (in the case of news, that would be journalists)
to make sense of their world. They are prepared to belong to and
further the cause of communities that bring coherence to their world.
In so doing they construct a digital identity that they can control and
through which they can apply filters. Traditional organizations no
longer fit that model.
So yes, people may be turning up for work but they are no longer
investing all their efforts in your cause. Your efforts at attracting them
using the tools and levers you have always used (eg reward, recognition,
threats and rules) will no longer engage them to the extent that they
The attention trend 43
Faced with this trend some organizations are multiplying their com-
munication efforts. They try (sometimes successfully) to use new
channels to reach us. But what the attention trend demonstrates is
not so much that we need to be more intelligent and credible about
where we find people but much more importantly, it will shape what
we say to them once we have found a place where they might listen.
After three trends you might safely reason that things are not as bad
as they seem. After all, your leadership position still means that you
are in charge. Your desire to create value along with your power to do
so should see you win the day. This is where our fourth and final shift
comes in. When everything that has made you successful is crumbling,
there will be little hope in clinging to your leadership power to see you
through as the democratic shift is about to make that irrelevant too.
In many ways this is probably the easiest of the challenges to explain,
yet it is the one with the most profound consequences at it severs the
final cord that made the leader’s role relevant.
44 Leadershift
Notes
1 R S Wurman (2001) Information Anxiety 2, Que.
2 Thomas H Davenport (2002) The Attention Economy, Harvard Business
School Publishing.
3 R S Wurman (2001) Information Anxiety 2, Que.
4 Thomas H Davenport (2002) The Attention Economy, Harvard Business
School Publishing.
5 Thomas H Davenport (2002) The Attention Economy, Harvard Business
School Publishing.
6 Thomas H Davenport (2002) The Attention Economy, Harvard Business
School Publishing.
7 M Liedtke (2000) Study: Internet Bigger Than We Think, Associated
Press.
8 Data obtained on 18 July 2008 from searchenginewatch.com.
9 Data courtesy of Phil White of mmogdata.voig.com. Please note
that the data change all the time as, much like our own, the online
universe has been known to expand and contract but even with these
changes the vastness of space remains.
10 K Kelleher (2008) ‘MySpace and Friends Need to Make Money. And
Fast’, Wired magazine, March.
11 http://stanford.facebook.com/press/info.php?statistics (January 2009).
12 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_population.
13 Bruce Sterling Woodcock, An Analysis of MMOG Subscription Growth
[Online] MMOGCHART.COM.
The attention trend 45
You first need to fight the traffic to get there, only to begin the
somewhat schizophrenic experience of Ikea shopping; schizophrenic
because Ikea requires you to adopt as many different roles as there
are stages in the experience. You are the interior designer arranging
products together. You are the consumer savouring your meatballs.
You become the storeroom picker carrying your goods, prior to
acting as the transport manager loading stuff into the car. Ultimately,
as Ikea outsourced their factory to your living room floor, you will
48 Leadershift
We are facing the ‘Ikeazation’ of our world. Our economies are starting
to look like giant Ikea stores where people go from one role to another
depending on their skills, passions – and ultimately demand. In these
schizophrenic times, the idea that there are such things as employees
or customers no longer satisfactorily represents the complexity of the
economic activity. As organizations change shape, positional power (ie
the power leaders hold due to their positions) is being eroded to the
point of irrelevance. The democratic trend is the logical conclusion of
the other three. A new generation eager to serve with the tools of co-
creation at its disposal and the will to create communities of interest
was always likely to demand the right to participate.
That this trend has already started is beyond debate. The US department
of labour estimates that today’s students will have had 10 to 14 jobs
by the age of 38. Already today, one in four US employees is working
for an organization they have been at for less than a year. Half of all
employees in the United States have worked for their company for
less than five years.1 The transient nature of employment is making it
a lot harder for leaders to have an enforceable psychological contract
with their employees. With these conditions we can’t blame anyone
for wanting to look after number one. But the democratic trend
goes much further. The ‘Ikeazation’ of work is not just about the fast
change in the number of jobs people have over a period of time, but
also about the organization for which they work.
is that its narrow focus does not sit well with the demands of a dynamic
environment. The matrix, with its multiple lines, was supposed to
increase the number of areas one would care about. Uncomfortable
with the lack of control engendered by lack of singular focus, leaders
struggle to make things work. Now imagine a world where the lines
are not only blurred, but they have disappeared.
Already you might have experienced this world when dealing with
the growing world of what I call ‘peripheral’ staff (ie people not in
full-time employment contracts inside your organization – part-time
employees, temporary staff, contractors or consultants). With the
changing shape of the mature economies away from manufacturing
and into service, that world has grown. Between 1982 and 1992 the
number of temporary employees in the United States tripled.2 Since
1995 temporary employment has grown three times faster than
traditional employment in the United States.3
In that world contracts might buy you some effort but contracts alone
cannot give you the discretionary effort of people on whose attention
multiple demands are placed. You have had to rely on something
other than your position or contractual obligations if you wanted to
see them investing themselves in your task. Of course most leaders
would recognize that this is the case with any employee, but most
would also admit that the situation is somewhat easier with full-time
staff. As distributed co-creation grows, the need to rely on something
other than contracts and social power to fully engage others becomes
paramount. The logical conclusion of the ‘Ikeazation’ of the job
market is the birth of a powerful force in the economy – the free
agents.
You would have thought that given the importance placed on it by econo-
mists, policy makers and business in general, data on employment
trends would be easy to come by and analyse. You would probably be
wrong on both counts. There is a lot of data out there but analysing
it is somewhat difficult when you are looking at free agency.4 What
makes such analyses difficult is that it is in fact very hard to classify
occupation in any meaningful way when it comes to free agency. For
example actors who are currently filming are employed but become
50 Leadershift
If you still doubt that this trend exists just consider that, in the cradle
of most of today’s advances that is California, two out of three workers
currently hold non-traditional positions, hidden by employment
statistics.6 Is this a global trend? That’s harder to say as figures are
more difficult to come by and to compare globally, but the trend is
present to a lesser or larger extent in most developed economies.
The democratic trend 51
Taken together, these four trends form a coherent whole. They foretell
a world where relationships between followers and leaders will need
to be different from what they are today if they are to be productive.
Yet, for every worrying facet of change there are opportunities. Whilst
this work is making the way we lead today irrelevant, it is also a world
crying out for leadership.
Just as subjects living under the rules of monarchies proclaim ‘long live
the new monarch’ when one passes away, we need to understand that
the time for a new type of leadership is upon us. The demographic,
expertise, attention and democratic trends herald a day of reckoning
for a dying form of leadership, but they do not altogether make the
practice of leadership redundant. Our challenge is to understand the
communities that will form the new business landscape and the way
they are best engaged for the delivery of an economic objective. There
is little need to continue to get better at what we do when what we do
is no longer what is needed.
52 Leadershift
So, given these four trends, let’s try to understand what lies at the
root of engagement in the new landscape. Once we understand this,
we can turn to our role in making it happen. Penguins started us off
on our journey and it is a terrorist duck we need to turn to for the
answers that will enable us to progress along our path.
Notes
1 Employment data obtained from www.bls.gov releases.
2 Lonnie Golden (1996) The expansion of temporary help employment
in the US, 1982–1992: A test of alternative economic explanation,
Applied Economics, 28, pp 1127–91.
3 James Aley (1995) Where the Jobs Are, Fortune, 18 September.
4 Daniel H Pink (2001) Free Agent Nation, Warner Business Books,
Chapter 1.
5 Michelle Coulin (2000) And Now the Just-in-time Employee, Business
Week, 28 August.
6 Kenneth Howe (1999) Workforce Revolution in California; Only One
in Three Holds Traditional Job, Study Finds, San Francisco Chronicle, 6
September.
6 Pay or play?
In December 2005, proudly sporting a red Santa hat and blue shirt,
Philip Linden stood amongst his people. The crowd, gathered for an
early winter holiday party, was looking forward to a joyful celebration
of their ever growing community. Seeing Philip dance around the
roaring bonfire, they couldn’t have anticipated what he was about to
say. ‘This seems about as good a time as any to tell you that I am
turning over names to the FBI’1 was not the festive message anyone
had expected. Philip Linden is the name of Philip Rosedale’s avatar
(CEO of Linden Lab, the company behind Second Life). His words
were surprising but greeted with virtual cheers by virtual residents
toasting virtual marshmallows around the virtual fire. They were also
the logical conclusion to a series of unwelcome events. Second Life
(SL) was under attack and one view united the community – it was all
the Duck’s fault.
To be fair to the Duck no one knows for sure what his involvement
was and he denies any wrongdoing. To the community though, his
name had become shorthand for all that it hates. To SL residents, the
name Plastic Duck (or Gene Replacement, his other in-world name)
resonates in the same way as the names Al Capone or Lee Harvey
54 Leadershift
Oswald do in the real world. They are somehow ghastly but immensely
fascinating.
Like most teenagers, Patrick wanted to test the limits of his community.
Whilst anything is possible in the virtual world of SL (where you can
fly and walk under water), the world itself is amazingly similar to the
Pay or play? 55
real world. Far from being some strange planet, the majority of people
display very real-world-like behaviours. It is telling that in a world that
never gets cold and where it never rains, most people’s first activity is
to build themselves a house. Patrick’s mission was to disrupt the status
quo – to make what he saw as a boring place more fun. What led him
to trouble (fast amassing a double-digit rap sheet from Linden Lab)
was when he was accused of going beyond disrupting the minds of
inhabitants to disrupting the world itself.
In SL, inhabitants can build any object they want by just writing some
computer code. Plastic Duck is accused of scripting objects responsible
for crashing the world itself. These objects self-replicated at such a
rate that Linden Lab’s servers could not cope with the exponential
multiplication. Eventually, the grid (the platform on which the world
is built) crashed. That’s when Philip Linden decided that virtual
world terrorism was a real world crime. SL argued that crashing the
grid was like any denial-of-service attack on an internet web page
and therefore a real world crime. That moment was the first sign of
our trends crossing over to the real world. And this is why the Duck
matters to our story.
Human beings need three basic food groups to survive – protein, fats
and carbohydrates. Eat more or less of any one group than you should
and your health suffers. Organizations are no different. They too rely
on three basic food groups – control, structure and resources. In this
context, the Duck is death by chocolate. He is what happens when
organizations become indisposed. He is the bad bacteria that spoils
your organizational gut. He is the gastroenteritis of leadership. He is
the inevitable outcome of the DEAD trends. Let’s work on that one.
The demographic trend coupled with the attention shift are a direct
threat to control. You cannot control either what you do not under-
stand or what doesn’t want to be controlled. The combination of the
expertise trend and the democratic trend means that the legitimacy
of structures (which relies on either knowledge or willing adoption
of roles, and preferably both) is no longer present. The rejection of
current organizational forms forced by the demographic and attention
trends mixed with the loss of leaders’ positional power as a result of
the democratic and expertise trends threatens the order necessary for
success.
The Duck and his kind became an integral part of the organizational
narrative, intent on destroying it. On 1 April 2008 (a date, I am con-
vinced, chosen at random and without a hint of irony), when EdMarkey
Alter, better known in the real world as Congressman Ed Markey (D-
MA) chaired the first ever congressional hearing simultaneously held
in the US Congress and SL,2 Philip Rosendale confirmed that he had
indeed asked the FBI to investigate denial of service attacks. Yet he
also stated that he was confident that the community could police
itself. But how? This is important not just to the future of Second
Life and its inhabitants but to the future of leadership. If the trends
are breaking down control, how can order, necessary for success,
emerge from the chaos created by lost teenagers in need of kicks?
When control, hierarchies and resources disintegrate, how can we con-
sistently deliver the organization’s mission? How can we create self-
discipline within the organization? How can we achieve coordination
and control without structural hierarchies?
A pig and a chicken are walking down a road. The chicken looks
at the pig and says, ‘Hey, why don’t we open a restaurant?’ The pig
looks back at the chicken: ‘Good idea, what should we call it?’ The
chicken thinks about it for a minute and suggests, ‘How about “Ham
and Eggs”?’ ‘I don’t think so,’ says the pig, ‘because that would mean
that I am committed but you’d only be involved.’ This joke may not be
the funniest you ever heard but it tells us something about the nature
of roles in organizations and why the DEAD trends demand a new
perspective on the execution process.
The pigs are committed to the project. They have ‘their bacon on the
line’ so to speak. The chickens, on the other hand, are involved because
they are interested in its benefits. Both are important but already
we can see how their contributions, and therefore their desires and
accountabilities, might differ. The pigs are running the scrum. They
are the builders and doers. The chickens provide impetus through
their desires and needs but it is not in their interest to get in the way of
the process. The system self-regulates through the reciprocity it offers.
There are some interesting parallels to explore between scrum roles
and non-hierarchical communal roles.
There are three pig roles identified by Takeuchi and Nonaka. Product
owners are the ones who shape the product on the basis of what the
customer wants. Facilitators are the ones whose job it is to remove
anything that might stand in the way of the team fulfilling its objectives.
And finally there is the team itself. Team members are the people who
will complete the necessary tasks to bring the project to completion.
The product owner is the one I call master. Masters are the voice of
the community. They are dignitaries who define the direction. They
are the judges and often jury of communal behaviour. They are critical
to the organizational experience as they are custodians of its future.
They are the ones who, through first mover advantage, reputation or
sheer determination of contribution, have seen themselves elevated
to this position by the community.
Participants are the team of the community. They are the bees in the
communal hive fulfilling the maintenance tasks. They are the people
for whom the community is shaped and in turn they provide meaning
and raison d’être to the community through their actions.
Pay or play? 59
Now if these are the pigs then who are the chickens? Who are the
ones who are involved but not committed? Here again, Takeuchi and
Nonaka identify three roles. Users are the ones the project exists to
serve. They will ultimately use the software being built. The second role
is the one of stakeholder. Stakeholders are not necessarily the same
as users. They may be the customer buying the product for example.
Finally come the managers who, unlike facilitators, do not get involved
in managing the project, but rather set up the environment within
which the project can take place.
Pigs Chickens
(committed) (involved)
dependents
participants
shapers rebels
masters
platform
creators
There are three insights the chicken and the pig nomenclature can
offer us, see Figure 6.1 above.
since without the organization (the chicken) there are no reasons for
the project to exist. But what we must emphasize at this stage is that
the organization (the platform owner), per se, is not more important
than the other roles.
The final insight is one of numbers. Whilst pigs are critical, they are
less numerous than chickens. So who is most important? Who should
we pay attention to as we progress towards the new world of business?
Surely we should follow the money. Go for the ones who have the
most value. Allow me to poke you on to this next stage. Nothing like
a good poke to help us understand how value flows through mass
collaboration processes and what that means for organizations.
When many of us were small we were told that poking people was not
a good thing to do. The practice of prodding, even a friend, with your
finger to cause nuisance was generally frowned upon as being rude.
That all changed the day Facebook was launched. For those of you
still to discover the at once mesmerizing and infuriating community
that is Facebook, it is an online social network where you invite your
friends to connect with you and share pictures, news and the like.
In Facebook when you want to tell someone you have identified them
as a potential friend you can click a button to poke them. Poking
them means that they receive a note of your existence and can decide
62 Leadershift
The practice may be puerile but it becomes a whole lot more serious
when you realize that giant investment firms, Fidelity and T Rowe
Price, paid US $50 million for a 9.1 per cent stake in Slide, the San
Francisco-based company responsible for the SuperPoke widget.4
That, in one fell swoop, valued the company at more than half a billion
dollars (enough to rock anyone’s panties in my book). There are two
reasons why Slide is of interest here.
The first reason has to do with our attention trend. The growth of
social networks is such that online activity is an exponentially growing
potential source of revenue. Online search, the activity currently
accounting for a large share of online advertising revenue, only
accounts for about 6 per cent of online activities. So why such an
extraordinary valuation for Slide? After all, surely the actual social
network (ie Facebook) is the one on which the value rests? The
answer lies in the demographic trend. MySpace is replacing my place
as the meeting place for advertisers’ key demographics. And guess
what, Slide’s widgets are present on MySpace or any other open
social networking sites, enabling you to poke to your heart’s content.
Viewed in this context, Slide becomes a critical tool to connect to key
demographics across numerous platforms. But there is an even more
important reason why Slide is valued so highly and that reason gives
us a clue about how roles will interact in a post-DEAD trend world.
The 1 per cent rule tells a different story from the Pareto principle.
We need to make a distinction between what I call transactional
involvement (active economic participation – ie your 20 per cent)
and emotional engagement. What we identify through traditional
segmentation methods is transactional involvement. We know the
identity of the customers who pay us the most or the employees who
perform the best. What the 1 per cent rule forces us to do is recognize
that transactional involvement is only sustainable through social
engagement but, and here is the big news item, social engagement
operates completely independently of transactional involvement.
ently. Think about it this way. The reason I chose to live where I do is
because of the strong community. We have local newsletters that get
posted through my door. We have clubs of all sorts for all ages. We
have a festive dinner organized by some residents during the holiday
season for those community members who are alone or less fortunate.
We have a ‘help squad’ of volunteers looking out for the weaker
members of our community. The place is wonderful and without such
an active community I would not have transacted (ie moved in), given
the outrageous cost of London property!
Now how about the community itself? How about if I tell you that
most of the masters and shapers in my apartment block are in fact on
a special rental arrangement negotiated some time ago that generates
the least revenue and the greatest costs of any of the properties in the
block? Participants are a mix of low rent and high rent payers. What
do you do with them? Do you allocate them in your 20 and 80 per cent
buckets on the basis of their economic contribution or do you go
wider and somehow account for their social engagement (because
that’s what attracted me to pay)? As this chapter’s title suggests it is
hard to know who matters most – the people who play or the ones who
pay to watch the play.
66 Leadershift
The truth is that many chickens transact (ie your 20 per cent) because
of the social engagement of your participants (ie pigs). The partici-
pants (1 per cent) who give rise to the transactional involvement of
the dependents, on the other hand, will only socially engage on the
basis of the community’s total emotional footprint (irrespective of
their transactional level)! What it really means is that our traditional
models of engagement, built on historical transactional involvement
data, only tell half of the story. So let me try to recap in the hope of
achieving some clarity.
The mistake leaders are likely to make is to apply the logic of segmenta-
tion to the new landscape. They will actively try to dislodge rebels
and move everyone else up the community ladder (eg dependents to
participants etc). This is not only unnecessary but it will destroy the
balance of the community and lead to lower transactional involvement.
Chickens and pigs are as intertwined and inseparable as chickens
and eggs. To get to the heart of engagement we need to ensure we
understand the social engagement architecture of our community.
spent tending the gardens and renovating the houses to make the
place attractive for people who want to move in.
The second is that the very tools used to create the coordination of
activities and the engagement of resources have had their legitimacy
rooted in the institutional character of the organization. As these
institutions cannot survive we will need to find a new set of tools. The
trends are changing the way organizations create. The new units of
analysis are not organizations (in the sense of structurally organized),
but rather companies (as in groups of companions). Does that
mean that leadership will be irrelevant? Are we going towards some
anarchical, communal days where no one is in charge (with the associ-
ated chaos we have all been taught to fear anarchy leads to)? Well, the
way we have led might be irrelevant but this is not true of leadership
altogether. We are living beyond the days of leadership. See you in the
next chapter to talk about ‘leadershift’.
68 Leadershift
Notes
1 Dow Jonas (2005) Extra!!: Philip Calls the FBI. W-Hats Shit
Themselves, Second Life Herald, 14 December.
2 Rosedale discloses FBI griefing probe to Congress (2008) Second Life News
Center, 1 April.
3 Peter DeGrace and Leslie Hulet Stahl (1990) Wicked Problems,
Righteous Solutions: A catalogue of modern software engineering paradigms,
Prentice Hall.
4 Jessi Hempel and Michael V Copeland (2008) Are These Widgets
Worth Half a Billion?, Fortune, 25 March.
5 Jessi Hempel and Michael V Copeland (2008) ‘Are These Widgets
Worth Half a Billion?, Fortune, 25 March.
6 Ben McConnell, Jackie Huba (2007) Citizen Marketeers – When People
are the Message, Kaplan Publishing.
7 Leadershift
Our fear of abuse of common goods runs deep. When we think about
open, self-directed communities, we can’t help but muster an image
of farmers staring, wide-eyed, shaking their heads, at what used to
be their green common lying in ruin due to their own stupidity. We
can’t help but call for Hardin’s only two possible remedies – either
break up into small private enterprises or employ strong governance
through structured control. Our fear of our very own, seemingly
uncooperative, human nature is hard to shake off.2 We want leaders
to provide us with direction.
There are a number of issues with the idea of the tragedy when this is
applied more broadly. The first is that, unlike a common, creativity is
not a finite resource. The problem of the imbalance between limited
supply and ‘incentivized’ over-demand is not a concern that mass
collaboration efforts will suffer. Few organizations complain when
demand for their products or services increases. But that is only half
Leadershift 71
Free riders are people who abuse a communal system for their own
benefit. If you are an economist whose theories are based on the belief
that human beings are rational, it makes perfect sense to stipulate that
anyone faced with the possibility of getting something for nothing will
always try their luck. I remember my school economics teacher pointing
out that the fact that street lights were available to all had the unfair
consequence that people who evaded taxes would still benefit from
them. Endless discussions ensued about how it may be possible for the
local government to issue an electronic tag to tax payers that would
light up only their passage. I pictured a line of free riders following
tax payers around to benefit from their light. I conceived imaginative
new schemes tax payers could use to sell light to free riders in order to
recoup their tax payments. But as with the proverbial drunk looking
for his lost keys under the street lamp, not because he expects them to
be there but because that’s the only place with enough light for him
to see, we may be looking in the wrong place.
The problem is not one of competition but rather one of trust. We are
not as calculatingly rational as Hardin needs us to be for the tragedy to
occur. Community acceptance is important to us and exclusion from
the community punitive. Imagine what it would do to your reputation
if you were the one who started the whole downward spiral. Strong
links are psychologically hard to break. The situation we are in has
less to do with the ‘tragedy of the commons’, but rather with the
‘trustworthiness of the community’. It is community-derived rules,
rather than a governance structure directed by leaders, that provide
the incentive for responsible behaviour.
This analysis, however, does not sit well with the governing view of
leadership introduced at the start of this chapter, based as it is on the
need for control. Mass collaboration underpinned by active, motivated
agents and communal self-regulation requires a new modus operandi.
On that basis, whilst (to paraphrase Mark Twain’s famous quote) ‘the
report of leadership’s death was an exaggeration’,3 the need for its
reinvention remains a necessity.
Given the doomsday scenario painted by the tragedy and the fact that
our trends are directing us towards organizations where structures and
control are no longer possible, how can we possibly have examples of
effective organizational behaviour? Indeed, reading about the open
self-directed systems that have become the focus of so much business
writing, one is struck by the description of groups of individuals
Leadershift 73
How do you substantiate a claim that your blenders are the strongest
blenders in the world? Simple – you arrange to blend anything others
might consider impossible to blend – golf balls, lighters, garden rakes,
diamonds. In fact, if you can think of any more items you don’t believe
can be blended, get on YouTube or visit willitblend.com, suggest
your item and Tom Dickson might well try it, record it and post the
resulting film on the site for all to see.6 The films of the experiments
have proved so popular that Blentec started selling the DVD. The
74 Leadershift
Well, the thing about willitblend is that nobody forced anyone to watch
the clips. Its success rested on a band of loyal followers spreading the
message and going out of their way to get others to see it (sending links,
interrupting conversations to talk about that cool thing they’d seen
on the web). The reason they do so comes down to two key elements.
In the words of marketing supremo Seth Godin,7 for anything to go
viral it needs to be worth talking about and easy to talk about. By
blending ever more outrageous items, Tom Dickson made Blentec
worth talking about. By posting the films on YouTube and asking for
suggestions, he made it easy to spread. Now, back to leadership.
To align people towards the purpose you design plans. This is how
we’re going to change the world. You work hard to ensure the plan links
the nature of a role (ie sell food) to the purpose of the organization
(ie make the world a better place). And you create accountability by
76 Leadershift
defining roles. The role is the unit of analysis. ‘This is how what you
do fits and therefore if you mess up, we can’t change the world.’ That
certainly is more likely to create commitment than ‘If your shelf is not
stocked properly, we’ll miss some sales!’ You hope this will engineer
commitment but, if it doesn’t, you can always turn to the punitive or
encouraging nature of the economic incentive (ie money).
You may detect a slight sarcastic tone in the above analysis, but I don’t
mean to dismiss organizational efforts. Many of the leaders I know
embark on this road with honesty. They truly believe their effort
changes the world and in some cases it might well do. I have nothing
against supermarket companies and telcos. Some of my best friends
work in these sectors. What I mean to highlight is that these efforts are
doomed to failure unless the role we need people to play is vocational.
Few schoolchildren claim to want to be accountants or consultants
when they grow up and to try to convince adults who ended up in
these fields otherwise is something of a waste of time. The situation is
complicated further by the DEAD trends.
In a post-DEAD trends world the needs of the community and the focus
of its leaders are the same (engagement, alignment, accountability
and commitment) as in a pre-trends world. It is the modus operandi
of leadership that needs to change.
Leadershift 77
Travelling around New York, Milgram and his assistants identified 129
queues they would study. The idea was simple. Arriving at a line, they
would enter the queue between the third and fourth person, casually
apologize for needing to get in that spot and face forward as if nothing
had happened. They would only abandon the queue if challenged or
after one minute had elapsed. Now, here is the good news. To the
apparently weak out there, let me tell you that we are not alone. Most
of the time no one did anything to challenge the intruders. Only on
10 per cent of the occasions did anyone eject the queue-jumpers. In
fact, only on 50 per cent of the occasions did anyone do anything
resembling a challenge (cast a dirty look, exchange comments with
each other, or comment directly to the line-jumper).
First, Milgram suggests that the fact that we are in line makes social
order weak. It is easy to see how, facing each other’s backs, we have few
opportunities to build the social ties necessary to provide an effective
social coalition. There are of course elements of self-interest in our
keeping quiet. If we are to intervene, maybe driving the queue-jumper
out, we may lose our hard-fought place in the queue.
There is no need to regulate the queue. It will work as long as the social
ties that form it are strong enough. In a social structure, contrary to
our assumption when faced with the tragedy of the commons, it is not
regulation we need but rather social obligation. Milgram tells us that
as long as we can encourage social ties, we are much more likely to
have order.
This helps to remind me that whilst the goldfish, for good reasons, may
feel more comfortable and satisfied in its bigger bowl, it could have
82 Leadershift
ensured a brighter future by making the jump from the small bowl to
the ocean rather than just to a bigger bowl. The task at hand is not to
change or refine the style of leadership we use to be effective. Rather
it is about changing our focus to see and embrace the opportunities
offered by a new environment. This is the opportunity ‘leadershift’
offers.
This new focus is best illustrated by the kind of titles leaders in open
systems have been using to describe what they do. Few leaders in
organizations today, even if they wish they could, would ever openly
embrace the ‘Benevolent Dictator’ or ‘Benign Dictator’ title most of
Wikipedia gives to its founder Jimmy Wales, or the one of ‘the most
trusted party (TMTP)’ Linus Torvald of Linux has been given, or the
other examples such as ‘constitutional monarch’, ‘Eminence Grise’ or
‘Deus ex Machina’ that have been suggested in communities throughout
the world. These kinds of autocratic titles would be rejected by most
organizations as not representative of the visionary and democratic
behaviours they wish their leaders to display. Yet, if you are called to
facilitate the functioning of the community by shaping its culture, this
is exactly what you are called upon to do.
It is for these reasons that the following chapters look at the practices
that make a leader’s role worthwhile, in demand and sustainable.
By moving away from clarity, plans, roles and money and focusing
instead on simplicity, narratives, tasks and love (yes, I know, that may
not be to everybody’s taste, but trust me on this one), leaders can
help the community release its value and function at its best. Mass
collaboration wants ‘leadershift’ even if it doesn’t need leadership.
In fact, let’s start our exploration by hanging out with Jimmy Wales a
little while longer.
Leadershift 85
Notes
1 Garrett Hardin (1968) The tragedy of the commons, Science, 162, pp
1243–48.
2 For further discussions and insights on the economic impact of ‘The
tragedy of the commons’ you may want to turn to one of the first in-
depth studies of the open source movement. In his book The Cathedral
and the Bazaar (O’Reilly, 1999), Eric S Raymond takes a deeper look
at the economics of the tragedy as applied to open source than it is
possible or appropriate to cover here. Raymond is one of the founding
fathers of the open source movement and this book is acknowledged
by most as being ‘the shot that resonated around the world’ and
started a global movement.
3 There exist many versions of this quote using different words but all
conveying the same meaning. I have settled for what appears to be the
official version as written in a note from Mark Twain to the New York
Journal in May 1897.
4 OK so you did know the names, but you’re not your average person in
the street now are you? For a start you’re reading this book.
5 Maybe as a reminder that things are never as straightforward as they
seem in the world of creation, debates are always going on (with
threatened lawsuits to boot) about who the real founders are of many
86 Leadershift
web and non-web businesses. I have named Mark and Tom here as
they are the two people most often recognized as the founders of
Facebook and MySpace.
6 Just so you know, to date Chuck Norris is the only thing that has
proved too strong for the blender. Nobody can blend Chuck Norris.
Check it out at willitblend.com.
7 Seth Godin (2007) Meatball Sundae – How New Marketing is Trans-
forming the Business World, Piatkus.
8 There have been reviews of the claim since and other scientists have
questioned Milgram’s findings.
9 Stanley Milgram (1972) The familiar stranger: An aspect of urban
anonymity, Division 8 Newsletter.
10 Stanley Milgram, Hilary J Liberty, Raymond Toledo and Joyce
Wackenhut (1986) Response to intrusion into waiting lines, Journal
of Personality and Social Psychology, 51 (4), pp 683–89.
11 There is a lot of debate about the nature of the role Larry Sanger
played in creating Wikipedia, most of which is played out in Jimmy
and Larry’s respective entries on the site. My aim is not to fuel this
debate but to report concerns others have articulated.
12 Jimmy Wales (2005) Jimmy Wales: How a ragtag band created Wikipedia,
TED talk, Global TED Conference [Online] www.TED.com.
8 Shift 1 – from
clarity to simplicity
The first symptom of the unease created by the DEAD trends is com-
plexity. Nothing confirms the change we are facing more than our
recent awakening to the fact that organizations have become complex
to the point of distraction if not destruction. In the face of this
complexity, leaders renew their efforts at providing even more clarity.
But these efforts are largely wasted. Complexity is the symptom of a
deep condition for which clarity is not a cure. Let’s get back to Jimmy
Wales to gain some insights into what might be happening, why it
matters and what we can do about it.
88 Leadershift
Jimmy Donal ‘Jimbo’ Wales is hardly someone you would call the
poster child of the so-called ‘web 2.0’ revolution,1 that new wave of
internet ventures trumpeting creativity and collaboration as their
core offering. For a start, his birth in 1966 makes him older than the
16- to 20-year-olds most of us picture as the vanguards of the internet
revolution. And whilst he is not averse to publicity, controversy and
public appearances, his more philosophical musings on the status of
communal engagement, along with his self-description as ‘objectivist
to the core’, make him an unlikely contender for the coolest entre-
preneur award so many journalists are keen to bestow on much of
Silicon Valley’s population.2 But even if Jimbo doesn’t fully represent
our stereotype, it’s worth remembering that in 2006, as the co-
creator of the world’s largest encyclopaedia, he was named one of
‘the world’s most influential people’ by Time magazine. Whilst he may
not be the father of so-called ‘web 2.0’3 per se, being the founder of
Wikipedia makes him at the very least the man responsible for making
it popular.
Jimmy Wales was CEO of Bomis Inc, the company behind Nupedia, and
Larry Sanger its editor-in-chief. Taking his lead from Wales’s dream of
creating an encyclopaedia all could contribute to, Sanger suggested
they use the nascent wiki technology. Wikis are web pages designed
in such a way that anyone who can access them over the internet
can edit them. Sanger understood that this would open Nupedia up
to thousands if not millions of new contributors and editors. Wikis
would speed up Nupedia’s development whilst transforming it into
the true collaborative effort Wales dreamed of. As a result of this new
technology, Wikipedia was born in earnest on 15 January 2001.
Shift 1 – from clarity to simplicity 89
Much has been written about Wikipedia’s reliability and much of this is
underpinned by the cynicism one expects of a world that views expert-
ise as the preserve of the few. Whilst it is true that it can carry errors, the
difference between Wikipedia and Encyclopaedia Britannica is actually
fairly small.4 Critics also choose to conveniently forget that, unlike any
other encyclopaedia, Wikipedia is instantly editable and continuously
updated (the point was well made when, at a conference, a page was
updated and a mistake erased as the moderator was pointing it out to
Jimbo). Despite its exaggerated potential flaws, Wikipedia’s editorial
policy has had two major benefits.
Let’s start with the pigs.6 There are two types of people who contribute
to Wikipedia – registered and non-registered. Anyone can sign on but
not everybody does. Registered members are known to the community.
Together these contributors represent the pigs. In our topology
we looked at masters and shapers; in Wikipedia these registered
members split into three levels of editors. Editors are the caretakers
of the community. Their task is to edit articles that have an impact
community-wide (difficult disputed issues), as well as banning rebels
(yes, Wikipedia has a few Ducks too) from using vandalism editing
(making rude comments rather than adding facts for example).
Wikipedia uses two types of protection for certain articles. Some are
semi-protected, which means they can only be edited by registered
users who have logged in and been registered for more than four
days. They carry the following warning: ‘Editing of this article by
unregistered or newly registered users is currently disabled’. This
ensures that casual browsers cannot leave a graffiti-style edit on
something they don’t like. Articles in this category have ranged from
Sex to Genetic Engineering. The more draconian use of locking a
page for protection is full protection. In this case the protected page
can only be edited by administrators. Full protection is often used to
stop what has been called an ‘edit war’, where two sides take it in turn
to make their opposing views known by editing the page. This is why
such pages often carry the warning: ‘This page is currently protected
from editing until disputes have been resolved’. This status is often
reserved for highly contentious and politically loaded pages such as
the entry on the 11 September 2001 attacks.
But as well as the pigs who show their commitment, there are
Wikipedian chickens who are involved. These are the millions of
dependents who have come to rely on Wikipedia as a source of know-
ledge. But whilst dramas can be played out and knowledge can be
disputed, the encyclopaedia’s ‘neutral point of view’ rule ensures
Wikipedia remains a serious effort at cataloguing knowledge. Finally,
the Wikipedia Foundation can be seen as the platform creator in the
same way as Linden Lab created the Second Life platform. It has an
all-important role to play in the existence of the encyclopaedia but, in
reality and in status, it is still a chicken.
The main acid test for the value of an encyclopaedia is the reliability of
the knowledge it contains. So whilst pigs do not have to be authorities
in their field, an intricate system of verifiable and published sources
is used to determine the accuracy and the value of contributions.
Of course some masters and shapers are experts in a subject area,
but the main source of expertise is the community. However, as in
all fast-growing communities, debates are rife inside Wikipedia about
how to best cope with that growth. And this is where we get back to
Barbie. There is a debate raging in Wikipedia that goes right to the
heart of the engagement issue and, you’ve guessed it, Barbie is partly
responsible.8 Some argue that it is that balance of credibility through
consensus rather than credentials that encourages the richness of
the community and warrants the ‘anti-elitism’ label Wikipedia has
often received, whilst others see it as a problem. The participants in
this debate can be polarized into two camps – ‘inclusionists’ versus
‘deletionists’.
In the inclusionists’ corner sits the belief that Wikipedia should never
be limited. Inclusionists argue that given its web rather than paper
format, Wikipedia’s growth is unlimited. So what if the community
writes more about Barbie the doll than they do about Barbie the Nazi?
Shift 1 – from clarity to simplicity 93
In the deletionists’ corner sits the strong sense that the more topics of
debatable value are included (they cite such entries as side characters
from the Pokémon cartoon or the Heroes TV series as examples), the
more dependents will see Wikipedia as a source of fun rather than
knowledge. They are worried that the brand is at risk of losing its
value. In a deletionist world, Wikipedia would exert more control over
what it publishes. Feel free to have a few key Pokémon characters
covered (and even some words about Barbie) but work hard to ensure
Klaus gets a serious mention. The more trivial articles are included,
they argue, the more participants will see Wikipedia as their chance to
write about their obscure pet projects.
What this debate raises, however, is not just what the engaged com-
munity might do, but rather how you engage the community in the
first place. What both camps agree on is that defining what is worthy is
not easy. Is it really the case that Klaus Barbie is more important than
the Barbie doll? As silly as it may seem at first glance, they have both
profoundly impacted society’s image of itself.
The problem for anyone other than the most ardent of masters and
shapers is that the whole process is not only difficult to understand
but the acronyms and precedents used are impossible to get your
head around if you want to put up a worthy defence. As a result, the
community finds itself deadlocked. An inward-looking army of hacks
who have learnt to enjoy the fight rather than the overall vision risks
replacing a thriving community of ideas. As it becomes ever more
complex, the community could split. Already, competing projects
have been put in place, including the entry of almighty Google into
the fray with ‘Knol’, its own version of Wikipedia. Alternatively, it
might disintegrate into a side project or even, gasp of horror, a normal
encyclopaedia.
Now think about what happens when the battery in either your car
or your MP3 packs up. When that happens, things no longer make
sense. You suddenly realize that what had coherence is rather more
complicated than at first thought. Your car is no longer a car but a
pile of separate parts that are quite complex and no longer operate
in harmony. The MP3 player is no longer a software-driven clean
customer experience but a pile of plastic and metal bits glued together
that refuse to function as one. When one part stops functioning, the
entire system lacks coherence.
Social network theorists (ie people who study how networks form and
stay together) call our ability to make sense of objects as one cohesive
whole rather than a complicated number of parts ‘punctualization’.
They stipulate that it results from numerous, repeated interactions
in the systems. The more you use your MP3 player and discuss it with
others, the more likely it is that ‘punctualization’ will happen and the
MP3 player will become a tool that brightens your day.
That which is true of objects like cars is also true of how we relate to
the world at large. The increase in complexity (interdependence) in
our world is making it more difficult for us to comprehend. As we
experience depunctualization in our local conditions as a result of
actions in global settings, stress increases.
That which is true of the world at large is also true of the world of
work. As we experience complexity inside our organizations, leaders
seek to deliver clarity by removing obstacles (ie simplification). This
reasoning appears, at first, faultless. If you remove obstacles, you end
up with something simple to understand, easy to cope with and indeed
straightforward to engage with. Leaders hope that clarity will remove
the stress we experience when facing ambiguous ‘depunctualized’
situations.
The answer is not clarity but rather what Philips have called ‘sense and
simplicity’. ‘Sense and simplicity’ comes as a result of understanding
that disengagement is the direct result of depunctualization. What we
require as a first step towards engagement, therefore, is not so much
clarity as it is coherence, which we gain primarily through simplicity.
That is to say that what the community at Wikipedia is expressing
by decreasing contribution is not that they need more clarity about
the mission of Wikipedia, but rather that they need a simpler way to
engage with it. There are two elements to simplicity – simplification
and coherence.
On its own, simplification is a futile exercise. Forget cars and MP3s and
look at your mobile phone. Mobile telecommunication technology
has come a long way in a relatively short time. In fact, crystal clear
calls can now be made from one mobile device to another. For years,
engineers worked on the best possible way of tackling the ambient
noise that could interfere with your call. Like with most things human
beings set their minds and resources to, the holy grail of clear calls was
eventually reached.
Calls could finally be made with all white noise filtered out. The result
was not the one expected, however. The introduction of the technology
led to more negative feedback from users than any previously received
as a result of white noise. The clarity we seek in our calls is no different
from the clarity we seek more broadly. Yes the calls had become perfect
and as simple as they could ever be, but callers were lost.
At the end of every sentence, in the absence of any noise before the
other person’s reply, callers were forced to ask ‘Are you still there?’ as
they thought the absence of white noise meant the line had gone dead.
After one mobile phone exchange when both parties have to ask ‘Are
you still there?’ about 15 times, you start to yearn for imperfection.
Give us back white noise. And so they did. Engineers had to construct
Shift 1 – from clarity to simplicity 99
So, back to organizations. Our ability to get rid of the white noise
doesn’t actually increase simplicity, and nor for that matter does it
create sustainable engagement. We have all witnessed how changes in
processes and structure (even if as a result these are becoming simpler)
tend to decrease, rather than increase, levels of understanding. We
have all seen employees trying to figure out who and what matters
once a new structure is announced. So whilst the simplification
process is a worthwhile thing to do, it is not the only thing that matters
to increasing engagement. What we ignore when we put our focus
solely on simplification is the interplay between simplification and
our second element of simplicity – coherence. The white noise in our
phone example actually made sense to people. It was an integral part
of the call experience rather than a complicated add-on.
The role of the leader must be to deploy strategies that can help bring
different elements together to build a coherent whole. The leader
becomes a primary agent in helping the community stage discussions
on what it stands for. The role of leadership is to help communities
articulate the problem they are looking to solve. Leaders become
representations (as well as representatives) of their communities. It
is their role to establish themselves as the ‘obligatory passage point’
(as agent network theorists call them) between the community and
its actors.
In the case of Jimbo, this takes the form of building his credibility and
the community at the same time. Leaders spread the word internally
and externally, projecting an image of the community they aim to
foster, thus helping the community participate in a discussion on its
value. Through their actions, they provide a steady beat against which
the community can improvise. By keeping a consistent message that
reinforces a vision of the community’s value, leaders help a community
find its own rhythm.
This may seem somewhat abstract for a business book so let me try
to make it practical. At its core, any organization (whether open or
closed) has a beat. It may be a routine (we always meet on a Friday) or
a calendar (we do weekly updates, monthly calls, quarterly results and
yearly reviews). Or it may be less obvious but no less rhythmic than
that (we always argue about who should buy coffee when we run out).
Whatever they are, these instances are sources of rhythm the leader
can draw on to become the central focus of communal discussions.
They establish routines and rituals that make things coherent and
therefore easier to engage with.
the different actors. Where do they meet? What do they talk about?
Is it for information, for discussion, for decision-making? Answering
all of these questions will help us focus on the events that mark our
communal life.
whatever you want but one thing you can be sure of is that it will be a
consistently high-quality, ethically produced drink. That’s coherence.
In this instance, 87,000 is the most efficient point of simplification to
make that claim. It is that claim, based on simplicity, that ensures we
engage with the brand.
Notes
1 If you are looking for a complete biography of Jimmy Wales, the best
place to start is Wikipedia itself at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
Jimmy_wales.
2 Jimmy Wales Will Destroy Google, an interview by RU Sirius for
10zenmonkeys.com, [Online] 29 January 2007.
3 In many ways Richard Matthew Stallman, who founded the GNU
project (the project started to create a Unix-like operating system)
and the Free Software Movement (free as in ‘free speech’ not ‘free
beer’ as defenders of the movement are keen to point out) which
became the open source movement, can be credited with starting
the collaborative revolution that would make the ‘web 2.0’ trend
possible.
4 Jim Giles (2005) Special Report: Internet encyclopaedias go head to
head, Nature, 438, pp 900–01.
5 Jimmy Wales (2005) Jimmy Wales: How a ragtag band created Wikipedia,
TED talk, Global TED Conference [Online] www.TED.com.
6 For more details on the structure of the Wikipedia community
there is no better source than Wikipedia itself. As well as the main
encyclopaedia article dealing with Wikipedia, it is worth looking
104 Leadershift
It’s not often that you hear an 84-year-old grandmother use the words
‘A lot of people like to use dyes, sequins and crap but that’s so 1940s.
I’m going to show you a kickass technique that’s going to be pretty
dope’. But Granny Sue is no ordinary 84-year-old. When it comes to
explaining how you can customize a pair of sneakers using a wood
burning kit or mashing up some tunes at a turntable (ie merging two
songs into one), no other words but hers would do. Drinking through
a straw from her trademark can of PepsiCo Mountain Dew, Sue was
one sweet switched-on granny. She died shortly after recording the
first two episodes of her video blog. With condolences flooding her
MySpace page she left a big hole in the hearts of the 80,000 or so fans
she had amassed on YouTube during her short career. When a video
entitled ‘Sue Teller R.I.P’ mixing a Boys II Men song with clips from
her shows was posted online, many a fan heeded the cry of ‘Pour some
Dew out for Sue’ and emptied a can of Mountain Dew in their garden
as a sign of affection.
people off their sofas to ‘do their own adventures’ as her show was
called. Despite her humble beginnings and noble cause it was her
style that turned her into an internet phenomenon. With camera
work and scripts reminiscent of the best of amateur television, Sue’s
use of street language, her incredible sense of fun and titles such as
‘Sue Teller Mashes it Up’ and ‘Customize Your Kicks’, there was every
chance that she would be propelled to internet stardom. Sue became
a viral phenomenon: the Blentec of grannies. She fulfilled the two
conditions we highlighted in Chapter 7 – she was worth talking about
and easy to talk about.
The reason I mention Sue is because her work highlights the second
critical marker for anyone trying to benefit from the energy of mass
collaboration – narrative. If simplicity is about generating the energy
that propels a community forward, then narrative is the vector that
helps that community move on a coherent path. A narrative helps a
community in two ways. First, it clarifies the role of mass collaboration
in a business, and second it helps participants align their actions to
the delivery of value. Let’s take these in turn.
Remember George? His problem was that, on the one hand, Club
Penguin offered him a prize (being able to have his own world) but, on
the other hand, it didn’t offer him the opportunity to decide what he
could do with it (being able to write the rules of the game). The same
is true with many businesses. The brand (the classic manifestation of a
narrative) often promises something that the business cannot deliver.
Employees are told that they are the most important asset of the
organization but when times are tough some find they are no longer
quite so indispensable and are assets that can be disposed off.
business model and the business narrative. Here is how this plays out
with Sue.
The thing is, Granny Sue might not have been quite all she seemed.
Following on from the posts on YouTube, a number of media-savvy
bloggers sensed that the videos were almost too amateurish. It all felt
like the unpolished amateurism was a bit too polished. It had a Blair
Witch Project feel to it. The fact that the ubiquitous can of Mountain Dew
is never very far from sight, mixed with a number of inconsistencies
(such as her MySpace page declaring that she was 89 and the R.I.P
video released showing her as 84 at the time of her death), made
people wonder if this could be another ‘fideo’ (ie a fake video – a
fairly usual occurrence in the world of YouTube viral marketing). As a
result of their investigations many bloggers went on to speculate that
Granny Sue’s videos were not those of an amateur video blogger but
rather might well be a piece of viral marketing produced by Pepsi Co
to be used in the run up to their Super Bowl advertising campaign. The
plot thickened when avid viewers of Current TV (the 24/7 channel
mentioned in Chapter 4) spotted that during the credit sequence of
the Mash-Up video the words ‘promotional consideration has been
paid for by Mountain Dew’ appeared. Could Granny Sue be the new
LonelyGirl15?
Given so many video bloggers out there, how did this one in particular
become so popular? Sure her username might have attracted a few
hopeful boys to start with, but the video had to be good enough for
them to want to come back. And Bree was indeed very funny, sweet,
provocative and intelligent and whatever else she needed to be to
attract an ever-growing audience. As we saw in Chapter 7, by being
108 Leadershift
worth talking about, Bree had made herself a prime candidate for
viral status. This is all interesting but not of interest for us here, until
you find that, like Sue Teller, questions started to be raised about how
genuine she really was.
As The New York Times was eventually to claim, the issue was that ‘Lonely
Girl (and Friends) Just Wanted a Movie Deal’.1 That was the really
deceitful bit. It’s OK (even if mildly embarrassing) to be interested in
a 16-year-old girl talking about her life. It’s pretty common to enjoy
watching a series in which an actress pretends to be someone else
(that’s her job). What felt wrong to the 70 million or so combined
viewers was the deceit of pretending to be something you are not. You
end up feeling pretty cheated or stupid when you realize that a 16-
year-old’s diatribes are in fact written by three men (who happened to
be a screenwriter turned director, a surgical residency drop-out turned
filmmaker and a former attorney turned, well, former attorney). That
hurts.
The word ‘narrative’ comes from the Latin verb narrare, meaning to
‘recount’, and is related to the adjective gnarus, meaning ‘knowing’
(derived from the root to know). In that sense the narrative tells us what
we need to know and clarifies our relationship with these video blogs.
The reason you feel cheated when you discover that LonelyGirl is in
fact an actress, or that Granny Sue is the human face of a global soft
drinks company (although the jury is still out on that one), is because
you have adjusted the nature of your relationship with their stories to
fit the narrative. You have posted comments you felt were responses
to a genuine girl’s concerns. You have poured out your Mountain Dew
because you felt you were paying your respects to a granny, not to a
corporation. As the narrative unfolded so did your relationship with
it, including your actions. When this narrative profoundly changes,
the role you had previously adopted (ie your character) no longer fits
in. You were the voyeur of a normal life and suddenly you are asked to
become one of the audience for a scripted story.
For some, the dishonesty of finding out that the narrative they
followed was in fact a fraud is enough to make them reject the story.
They switched off, never to log on again. Others simply accepted this
new narrative and adjusted their behaviour accordingly (no longer
commenting on the sadness of Bree’s life but focusing instead on the
production value of the video for example). One blogger commenting
about whether or not Granny Sue was real said ‘who cares’. Clearly he
didn’t. The narrative for Sue wasn’t about whether or not she was a
corporate instrument. The narrative was that a cool granny was worth
watching. Whether or not Sue was a PepsiCo Granny did not matter
that much – she was still an elderly woman switched on to youth
culture and for some people, that was enough. Once you accept a new
narrative you are willing to put energy into the new story.
110 Leadershift
If your brand positioning is that your products are all about innovation
and design in support of a simplified user experience, many people
will forgive the teething problems (everybody knows innovation is not
always perfect) as long as the design is genuinely groundbreaking. If,
on the other hand, engineering on a grand scale is your bag, you’re
unlikely ever to get anywhere if your product doesn’t work 100 per cent
of the time. ‘Where do you want to go today?’, the question Microsoft
asked of all of us, takes on a whole different meaning when your
web browser doesn’t want to load and certainly warrants a different
response than the ‘think different’ Apple promised.
This first rule of narratives (that they help us define our involvement
in a social process) is only one side of the coin. Narratives do much
more than that. As we saw in Chapter 6, in mass collaboration no
one seems to be in control. And if no one is in control, how can
the organization ensure that any mass collaboration effort actually
delivers value? The fear a leader experiences when faced with the
logic of ‘crowdsourcing’ is legitimate. The answer to that problem
still lies with Sue. The narrative is the source of social alignment. It
is the story participants build that helps them fulfil the engagement
created by simplicity. A narrative environment helps people orientate
their effort. Here is how it works.
During the past decade, researchers have looked at how insects, despite
their lack of intelligence and awareness, still manage to behave in a
way that appears social. Whilst at a cursory glance each insect seems
to have its own agenda, the colony as a whole still looks coordinated.
They all seem to be moving together (they seem aligned) despite the
absence of leadership or supervisory control. The mechanism they use
to coordinate their actions is relatively simple to describe – by leaving
traces in its environment, one insect stimulates the performance of an
action by another insect. This process is called stigmergy.
One year later, the president asked the lead architect to come up with
him on a helicopter ride with the overall site plans. As they gained
altitude he just pointed down at the natural paths students had carved
into the lawns by repeatedly walking across the same grass. Looking
at the puzzled architects he then said, ‘These muddy areas are where
we’ll have our paths’.
What visitors to these two universities can now witness is one Canadian
university with beautiful, logically laid but never-used paths and a lot
Shift 2 – from plans to narratives 113
the term has been overused if not abused in recent business contexts.
Important cultural artefacts, however, help us orientate our behaviour
through the lessons they teach. Narrative environments are the places
within which this coordination takes place.
Narratives help us focus and align. That’s why children the world over
(and a few adults too) accomplish complex actions through talking
to themselves while they work. By doing so, they develop narratives
that help them modify their understanding of the problem at hand
and facilitate their search for a solution. They deposit conceptual
pheromones along the natural pathways of their minds to create
logical, well-laid and efficient paths. They do not have a plan to go
from problem to solution. Instead they create a narrative that helps
them make sense of the world around them in search of the best
solution. It is that capacity for sense-making that makes communities
so incredibly efficient. Free from interference, the processes they use
for inquiry create the most efficient and sustainable way to get from
A to B.
Let’s move away from the viral world of marketing and the academic
world of biology and see how these things play out in the world of
organizations. The open systems we looked at in the early chapters
of this book showed complex, adaptive and reactive structures with-
out the control, planning and even communications afforded by trad-
itional organizations. Each member of the system is both attracted
to contribute by adopting a role in the community (master, shaper,
participant, dependent or rebel) and able to adapt that role to align
behind the delivery of the value demanded by the community. We
saw in the last chapter how this attraction to the communal aims is
not the result of strategically induced clarity but rather the result of
simplicity.
Shift 2 – from plans to narratives 115
Next time it happens to you, notice how it started when, for a brief
moment, you interrupted your journey to stare at the other person,
suddenly realizing their presence on a collision course with your path.
It was at that stage that you thought through what steps you would
take (literally) to avoid them. That cursive glance you exchanged
also meant that they too formulated a course of action. And your
combined lack of imagination or the availability of only two strategic
options encouraged a few missteps. That’s what happens when you
formulate a plan.
You could formulate an entire plan to take you from the beginning of
your street to the shop you need to go to. Indeed, when we search for
something specific in places we don’t know, we do just that. In fact, it is
when we walk with our heads up, trying to follow our plan, that we are
most likely to catch someone else’s eyes and shuffle. Plans generate
shuffles and shuffles are not efficient! A plan as used in organizations
to secure alignment is just like that. You describe every single step.
Back to your shopping trip. It is not a plan (I will take three steps left
and four right) nor is it a goal (I need to be at the store) that gets
you efficiently from A to B. It is a rich narrative that does it. It is that
need to get that present for your daughter’s birthday that you know
will raise a smile bright enough to light the route a shuttle could take
from here to the Moon. It is you imagining the weeks of anticipation
she has gone through and the day of the birthday party where all
the anticipation will finally be realized. That narrative ensures that
you navigate your way along ‘Main Street’ avoiding shuffles as you
adjust your behaviour against the commander’s intent (assuming your
daughter, like mine, can easily fulfil the role of commander in your
family). The narrative environments we inhabit facilitate our achieve-
ment of goals, not the plans we formulate.
The role of the leader is not to design plans, rather it is to help the
organization construct a narrative by nurturing the narrative environ-
ment. It sounds a bit more woolly but it’s a whole lot more effective.
Nurturing a narrative environment (ie being a president who can let
muddy paths point to the right way) is about helping the organization
acquire a tone.
The tone of the organization is the type of story it will tell. Is the story
of your department, your function, your organization one of conflict
or is it a story of change and cooperation? Is it a story of survival or
one of growth? To nurture a tone forces a leader to understand the key
moments in organizational life and frame these in a way that clarifies
their significance. What are the key moments in your communal life?
What is the beat of your business? Of course meetings and deadlines
provide the rhythm to any organization, but think about this more
broadly in terms of narrative. What are the moments that need to be
highlighted in the life of your community?
A good example of the ability to focus on the key words and the mood
that help the narrative environment is Twitter. Twitter was created by
Obvious (a San Francisco-based company) in 2006 and has become
one of the fastest-growing social networking applications. Twitter is a
service that helps people stay connected by exchanging short, frequent
answers to one simple question: What are you doing? In Twitter people
use 140 characters or less to update others on what they are up to.
They update their status throughout the day whether they are ‘getting
to work’ or ‘struggling with getting the kids ready’ or even ‘trying to
solve some big IT problem’. Whatever it is, their Twitter status helps
forge connections between a disparate community.
Now transpose this idea to the workplace and you have Yammer.
Instead of resting on some publicly accessible server, Yammer aims to
provide the same functionality that has proved so popular on Twitter,
but this time on the enterprise server. Basically, it takes anyone sharing
a similar e-mail address and links them together. There are two reasons
why, despite having won the TechCrunch 50 awards, it is a fair bet to
assume that Yammer will never be Twitter.
The first is that Yammer doesn’t have the 140-word limit. You would
have thought this would be a plus but it isn’t. The 140-word limit is
Twitter’s killer app. Everyone in organizations has e-mail. They could
use it to update anyone else. But the 140 words force you to decide
what is important. When you are faced with the attention trend, the
140 words is what helps separate the narrative from the noise. The fact
is that someone in a conversation has to separate signal from noise.
Remember Jimbo in the last chapter. His key ability is to put the words
of the community in perspective. This is the ability to link the different
words the participants use into a tone for the overall organization. It
is essential for creating a flow that can guide individuals through the
narrative of the organization.
So what does all this look like in practice? First the leader must help
the community identify its tone. This is done by focusing on three
key questions. Who are we (ie who you and I are and where we come
from and what we stand for)? Where are we going (ie why you and I
are here and what we aim to get from our relationship)? Why are we
going there (ie what is it that you and I can do together that cannot
be done more effectively by anyone else)?
Notes
1 Virginia Heffernan and Tom Zeller (2006) The Lonely Girl That
Really Wasn’t, New York Times, 13 September.
2 I actually came across the story again recently, this time in Brain Rules,
the fantastic book by John Medina exposing how our brain works.
Medina recounts hearing the story told by a speaker at a university
conference and describes it as an urban legend. Either he is right or
my friend’s brother was that university speaker. Who knows?
10 Shift 3 – from
roles to tasks
It seems nothing can stop our relentless fascination with and search
for extra-terrestrial life. Far from being the stuff of science fiction, the
area that quickly became known as SETI (Search for Extra-Terrestrial
Intelligence) has entered the realm of mainstream, government-
sponsored science. The methodology underpinning much of the
search is simple. Instead of staring mindlessly into the sky, researchers
listen for any potential radio transmission (and I don’t mean some
kind of alien FM) coming from outer space. This is a book about mass
collaboration and it doesn’t come more exciting than this, for here
too you can participate.
whenever you are not using it. The more people get involved, the
more computing power becomes available to analyse the signals from
outer space in search of potential intelligence.
He wasn’t the only one asking that question. Producing detailed maps
of Mars is an arduous task but finding out about crater markings is
key to, amongst other things, producing age maps to get a better
understanding of the planet. But there too, the Westphal problem
occurred. The question facing NASA Mars scientists was how do you
produce detailed maps of craters when you have literally millions of
pictures and only two eyes?
What NASA and Westphal figured out was that they could use the
same trick as SETI@home did. They could enlist you and me. They
realized that whilst some scientific tasks require deep expertise, others
are mainly about looking at things with a bit of training and a lot
of common sense. Identifying craters on Mars and detecting space
particles fall into that latter category. Enter ‘the clickworkers’.5
Now let’s think about the accountability issue again. This time it is
not just your computer that matters, but your devotion to the work.
In organizations we use roles to define a set of accountabilities. At
its simplest, a role is a collection of inputs (eg skills and knowledge),
throughputs (ie the act of transforming something using the input)
and outputs (ie the results). We could safely use a similar approach for
clickworkers. We know what the three variables are so we can develop
a set of expectations about clickworkers and build accountabilities
necessary for the organization’s smooth running within these roles.
In this sense the role becomes a set of expectations.
Legend has it that a child named Jacques learnt to carve stones early
on in his childhood and eventually left his home, aged fifteen, to work
in the trade. We find him again, aged 36, this time known as Master
Jacques, on the site of the building of the Temple of Solomon, where
he was heading up the stonecutters, carpenters and masons divisions.
The legend of Master Jacques, rich in the kind of intrigue that would
make The Da Vinci Code pale with envy, is a great story to tell but matters
little to us here. The important thing is that the legend of Master
Jacques led to the development of a community (the compagnonnage)
that can teach us a lot about accountabilities.
Think about it in SETI@home terms. What is your role when you are
co-opted into the search? Are you an engineer? Are you a pioneer?
Are you a computer geek or a dreaming adventurer? The choice,
quite frankly, is yours – the accountability of downloading a piece of
software is only a mechanism towards becoming what you set out to
be.
The answer to that is simple – the bakers wanted to, once again,
bake bread! Sennett remarks how the bakers experienced confusion
in their status. They longed to be bakers once again, rather than
machine operators. He tells the story of one baker saying that when
he gets home at night, he actually bakes bread to regain the pride he
once had in the work he did.
This conflict between the role we are required to play and the role we
are looking to fulfil is the source of many of the social dysfunctions we
are starting to experience in the workplace. When we are in a cohesive
company with mutual reinforcement of group norms, we not only
make the group but also ourselves stronger. But when our group and
personal identities become separated we find ourselves in a state of
constant flux and dissatisfaction. The apparent conflict between work
and life and the rejection by a new generation of what has been seen
as meaningless hierarchies bears witness to that conflict. So how do we
establish a sense of accountability in such an environment? The truth
is not only that we can’t but, more importantly, that we shouldn’t.
We assume that people will put up with anything if they derive mean-
ing from a bigger aim. We try to make our stonecutters believe that
they are building cathedrals. In practice it means that we try to manipu-
late both the cultural environment (through incentives, rewards
and punishments) as well as the individuals themselves (through
performance appraisals and development discussions) towards a state
where we hope they will recognize the importance of the account-
abilities to the fulfilment of their lives’ purpose. This represents
much wasted effort as it is unlikely that our actions alone will generate
sufficient buy-in to eradicate the role conflicts embedded in our
trends.
Think about a project you have been involved in or you have witnessed.
When a project team is brought together, usually to work on something
outside the normal everyday function of the organization, people pull
together in a way seldom seen. It is as though the project team has
an energy all of its own that carries it forward. People cooperate and
collaborate, picking up tasks along the way irrespective of whether
these form part of their role description. This is not due to some novelty
somehow built into projects, or some group normative technique that
distorts the reality of the menial nature of a particular task. It is simply
because the usual process has been reversed. Instead of having to
fulfil a role that fits into a bigger picture, bounded project teams have
as their primary purpose the fulfilment of the bigger picture. Let me
put it another way.
130 Leadershift
In a world where the social role drives the creation effort (ie a world
where people want to be accountable for the success of the company)
the need to drive accountabilities becomes less of a concern. That
is not to say that roles will disappear – this is unlikely. But their
prevalence in the creation effort will be less. Even in complex industrial
environments, we will need to realize that the roles we develop are
only necessary for us to organize the process of creativity, they will
Shift 3 – from roles to tasks 131
When tasks are well defined, time bound and necessary, they form the
words in the company’s narrative. Who wouldn’t want to stare at dust
particles if they always wanted to be a space explorer? Who wouldn’t
want to carve a stone when they are dedicated to building a cathedral,
and what point is there in wasting energy by constantly reminding the
cutter that they are building a cathedral, when what they really need is
help in producing the best possible carving to make their contribution
the best it can be?
The fact is that in order to fulfill their self-image, people will choose
to complete tasks that make the community sustainable. Some of
these will be what we may want to call accountability tasks (ie going
to the immediate fulfilment of the organizational purpose) whilst
others might be best described as maintenance tasks (ie tasks that are
contributory to the fulfilment of accountability tasks).
Notes
1 Data obtained from SETI@home website, Current Total Statistics
page, last updated 13 January 2008.
2 Eugenie Samuel Reich (2004) Mysterious signals from light years
away, New Scientist, 1 September.
3 Eugenie Samuel Reich (2004) Mysterious signals from light years
away, New Scientist, 1 September.
4 Amir Alexander (2008) From SETI@home to Hominid Fossils: Citizen
Cyberscience Reshapes Research Landscape, SETI@home Update, 15
January.
5 The clickworker project was born out of the realization that only
a minimal proportion (about 20 per cent) of all data gathered on
scientific missions are ever used. The Mars Global Surveyor generated
some 25,000 images in its five-year mission. The clickworker pro-
gramme was put in place to ensure these images would be fully
capitalized upon.
6 For a more detailed comparison of the efforts of clickworkers against
those of trained scientists you can visit http://clickworkers.arc.nasa.
gov/documents/crater-marking.pdf.
7 Study by the Department of Information and Computer Science,
University of California, Irvine.
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11 Shift 4 – from
money to love
Ready or not, Tim Sanders was willing to take on the fight. In 2002
he released his first book and boldly entitled it Love is the Killer App.
And it seemed business was ready for love. Love is the Killer App made
the New York Times bestseller list and Tim made the big time. In
what is, as far as I am concerned, one of the most powerful ‘how to’
136 Leadershift
The assault of love on the corporate consciousness didn’t stop with Tim.
The first decade of the new millennium seemed to be a fruitful ground
for the growth of the idea that business and love weren’t mutually
exclusive. The year 2005 gave us ‘Lovemarks’, the new marketing
technique introduced to the world by charismatic Worldwide CEO
of Saatchi & Saatchi, Kevin Roberts. Following Tim’s example, he
introduced another three-dimensional model, suggesting that by using
Mystery (ie great inspiring stories), Sensuality (appealing to all the
senses) and Intimacy (showing empathy and passion) organizations
can do something that fads and brands can never sustain – command
both respect and love. Granted it took Saatchi & Saatchi producing a
series of groundbreaking films as part of a US $430 million contract
that helped reposition JC Penney’s brand before Kevin’s ‘Lovemark’
idea was taken seriously. But the book eventually left its own ‘Lovemark’
on the business landscape.
The L word, so often heard in the dot com 1990s, so successfully used
by Tim when he was still Chief Solutions Officer at Yahoo, and so
well marketed by marketing supremo Kevin, could have switched off
many executives. But their timing was impeccable. At the same time
as love was entering the business dictionary, executives were already
investigating the issue of commitment. They knew that in turbulent
times commitment underpinned organizational success. What makes
anyone committed to the organizational cause is a question many HR
and marketing professionals have pondered for some time. Answering
it underpins an organization’s ability to create. Making the answer
compelling underpins a business’s ability to trade. As much as we have
tried to disguise it, our answer has been painfully predictable: money.
In social engagement terms this answer will no longer suffice.
The debate about the role of money in business has indeed become
painful. It seems that anyone arguing that human motivation is too
Shift 4 – from money to love 137
There are only two occasions when the question ‘Why should I do
what you want me to do?’ might arise. The first is when the purpose
of the endeavour is not in line with the purpose of the customer
or the employee (ie social engagement is not possible). In these
circumstances you may buy effort but you will never gain commitment
(ie at least one of the parties involved doesn’t want a relationship).
The second is when the task is not seen to be in line with the implied
purpose (ie there is no narrative linking task participation to purpose
realization). In this case, a monetary reward might cover the cracks
and make someone perform, but it will not buy their commitment
either.
What is clear, whilst not always remembered, is that the ideas under-
pinning commitment are in fact the same whether in a work context
or outside this. This is important, as many of the decisions we see
as being appropriate when seeking to establish commitment at work
would stand little scrutiny if exercised in a non-work relationship. Few
personal relationships would survive intact an end-of-year appraisal
designed to determine how much effort will be given over the coming
year! Commitment is emotional whilst organizations rely on policy
to underpin relationships. However much we might like to disguise
it, the prime factor in, at least starting, a relationship between an
individual (be they a customer or an employee) and an organization
is money (in the form of price for the former and salary for the latter).
So does money buy commitment? To find out, let’s look at the kind of
circumstances where money is a key factor.
Let’s choose the financial services sector, or sales roles in any sector
where there is a clear line of sight between performance obtained
and reward gained.1 In these roles, money underpins the contractual
relationship. Typically the reward package will contain two parts. One
is the salary paid to the individual, which, whilst it may be high in
comparison to many other people’s salaries, in fact forms the smallest
Shift 4 – from money to love 139
part of the package. The largest part is the variable element attached
to a number of targets to be met. There is an inherent simplicity to
this package. You will get paid if you fulfil expectations and you risk
your job if you don’t. The difference between achievement and failure
can run into millions of dollars. These situations are extreme indeed
but they are helpful to us as they help us contrast them with the
communities we have looked at so far, where money does not feature.
So what can we learn from these cases in terms of commitment?
The first lesson is that money alone does not buy you commitment.
Now, arguably, leaders looking to fill these roles are not necessarily
looking for commitment. When you pay incentive plans running into
the millions you are buying a certain kind of performance. You are
buying a name and a track record. Executives talk about recruiting
‘rain makers’ or ‘masters of the universe’ in the hope that the new
employee’s name will be the brand that will attract clients. In this case,
money might make sense as a tool for the strategy you are pursuing.
The narrative is clear and seldom mentions commitment on either
side. But can money actually deliver commitment?
the part of the other party, money can give you the illusion of love.
But when the financial contract is removed the only outcome is one of
the parties being poorer and the other one lonely. The Beatles were
right – money can’t buy you love. The fact that money does not buy
commitment is clear to anyone who stops for long enough to assess
the nature of human affairs.
But even if money does not buy commitment, far be it from me to say
that it does not motivate if, by motivate, we mean encourage certain
behaviours. I personally have always found being paid to be a great
incentive to actually delivering a service, so I can vouch for money’s
effectiveness in that regard. However, the relationship between money
and motivation is not as straightforward as it first seems. The second
lesson from looking at extremely salary-geared jobs is that money is
not actually the prime motivator. Money is a currency for motivation,
not the motivation itself.
Let’s go back to our ‘rain makers’. Are they really money obsessed? Yes
they are. Does that mean they are motivated by money? No it doesn’t.
Money is the currency that helps them purchase their motivation.
Think about it this way. Maybe they are motivated by being the best
at what they do – being number one. Maybe they are motivated by
having a big house and a fast car. Maybe they are motivated by the need
to keep their family financially secure. Regardless of what motivates
them, money is a means to provide it, not an end in itself. It is as easy
to forget as it is easy to observe in the thick of the action on the trading
floor or when closing a big deal – that motivation does not reside in
money. But if that is true, why the conventional organizational wisdom
that money lies at the core of motivation?
Let’s recap how we got here before we tackle that last point. So
far we know that money does encourage certain kinds of desirable
behaviours, but when it comes to creating commitment, money is far
from being the most efficient tool at our disposal. But let’s be fair,
most organizations and their leaders understand that and, as a result,
try to build social norms that will replicate the sense of obligation
many have towards a community. We figure that by encouraging
employees and customers to view the organization as a company we
will get more of their discretionary effort and spend than if we work
through contractual obligations. The fact that these efforts invariably
lead to a narrative breakdown (why if you want commitment do you
always reinforce the contract?) seems to escape us. Here is why.
It’s your last meeting of the day and you know you will be cutting it
fine to pick up your child at the day-care centre. You know you’re
going to have to chair the meeting in a masterly fashion if you are to
finish in time for your train so you get everyone together and hope for
the best. Halfway through the meeting, someone presents a new idea.
You hadn’t thought about it before, and let’s face it, it’s a brilliant
idea. The conversation is intense and the promise of the new idea is
amazing. Thoughts of chairing the meeting have gone out of your
head and before you know it, you realize you have missed your train.
You call the meeting to an end, pack up the laptop and run for the
next train.
At the day-care centre, the last room has been closed and the lights
have been switched off. Your child is now in the lobby, being looked
after by an assistant who has agreed to stay behind. You come in
flustered, late and apologetic. That day-care centre is worth its weight
in gold to you. You know they won’t let you down. Your child smiles,
you smile, the teaching assistant doesn’t. It’s the second time in a
month you’re late.
Of course, twice is bad enough, but imagine being the owner of the
day-care centre. With one hundred children to look after, late parents
are beginning to cost you money. You need to pay overtime for the
assistant left behind. Having been pushed over the limit by these
inconsiderate parents you decide you are going to introduce a fine
system. If parents are late, from now on they will have to pay. Now get
back into your role as parent.
When you receive the newsletter introducing the fine system you aren’t
best pleased (after all you are only late in exceptional circumstances)
but, being in business yourself, you understand the owner’s intent and
swear to yourself you will do better on your timekeeping. A month
goes by and you stick to your promise. Everyone is happy. A week
later, you know you shouldn’t have, but you couldn’t avoid it – you
have booked another late meeting. And guess what, the bright idea
of some weeks ago has now become a project and things aren’t going
smoothly. You get the status update and go into crisis-solving mode.
You talk about options. Your occasional glances at the clock tell you
that you’re cutting it fine. What’s going on in your head? Are you going
Shift 4 – from money to love 143
Is the fine I am going to pay the day-care centre owner worth the
money I am standing to make for my business? Assuming everything
else stays the same (ie your child will not suffer irreparable trauma
or the day-care centre is not going to expel your child) you decide to
stay.
The incentive has had the exact opposite effect to the one anticipated
by the day-care centre owner. As opposed to making sure parents
arrive on time, a lot of parents have now taken the view you have
taken. In fact, many now welcome the convenience they now take for
granted. The owner who wanted to cut down on parents being late
has now effectively increased the centre’s opening hours. This wasn’t
meant to happen but in the experiment conducted by Uri Gneezy
and Aldo Rustichini it did just that. What is going on? You may well
point out to a badly designed incentive system. You may argue that if
the penalty was exorbitant, parents would not risk this (conveniently
forgetting that if the death penalty worked, at least 70 countries on
Earth would be crime-free).
When we have been thinking about commitment, I have made the point
that we seem to live in two separate universes – the work universe and
the life universe. In the work universe resides an economic language
where economic incentives rule. This is the universe of contractual
obligations – the world of financial incentives and rewards. It is the
world that we have used in organizations. It is a world where you weigh
the pros and cons of a behaviour in relation to its financial impact
(after all, money does affect behaviour). But as human beings, we also
operate in a social domain full of social incentives and obligations.
This is the world of morality and relationships. It’s a world where you
feel guilty and swear you’ll never be late again.
centre owner has encouraged you to manage the situation rather than
your emotions.
So, here we are. We now have three lessons from the world of money. We
now know that money alone does not buy commitment. We recognize
that money is not a prime motivator and that, indeed, it can destroy the
very social and moral obligations we seek to introduce. But what can
we learn from the world we have looked at so far in this book? In the
communities I have described money plays a negligible part. I grant
you that there might be some side financial benefits to belonging to
one of these communities. Maybe being a master at Wikipedia might
get you invited to share a few platforms on the lucrative conference
circuit, or being a participant in SETI@home might enable you to
write a few, paid for, articles in a magazine, but even that tends to
be reserved for the platform owners. It is also true that a few of the
million bloggers out on the web are managing to support their habit
through online donations and click-through advertising, but for every
one of them who makes a living out of the blog there are thousands
who don’t. So by and large, here we have a world devoid of direct
financial incentives. What can we learn about commitment in that
world? There are two lessons for us to take on board.
Few would argue that a relationship is healthy when one party decides
to ignore their own needs in order to bolster the needs of the other.
Even fewer would advance that a loving relationship is possible when
one party does not share that love, and hopefully no one would ever
suggest that unrequited love leads to a higher state of consciousness
(unless they are keen to advance the cause of poets of the romantic
age). Because a community can only survive if the intricate system
of relationships that underpins it is thriving, when one party falls
out of love, the other suffers. If masters decide that they no longer
care for the needs of participants or dependents, the community
will ultimately descend into chaos, confusion and in-fighting (which,
to a lesser extent, is what we witnessed when looking at Wikipedia’s
growth). Someone’s contribution will only happen if that person is in
love with what they do, who they are doing it for and with, and feel
loved as a result.
146 Leadershift
eBay knows that little can be done by the organization without first
generating input from the community. Executives know that the
community is the linchpin of their success. They understand that
their marketing efforts have been largely superseded by those of the
community. Looking inside eBay (or any other online community-
driven business for that matter) will help you see the areas leaders
must focus on.
The first is to ensure that you love what you do. There is little that is
more destructive than professing love when it isn’t felt, or asking for
love without being prepared to give it. Whether intended or not, eBay
has been caught a few times introducing policies (mainly focused on
revenue) that the community has taken as lack of care for their work.
There is nothing wrong with the business having to survive (all those
who rely on it for their existence are not stupid enough to wish its
death); however, the relationship between the organization and the
community is symbiotic – neither can drive the other. The key for
leaders is to remember that without a genuine love for the community
they work in they can never expect commitment to be given.
This means, as eBay has found out, endless debates and discussions
that provide encouragement and reassurance and sometimes the
inevitable fight that provides relief. A relationship is healthier and
more likely to engender commitment when both parties acknowledge
their fears, frustrations and needs. Too often I find myself talking to
leaders who are tired, disillusioned and on the verge of leaving an
organization, whilst at the same time trying to put on a show of asking
for passion and commitment from others. The alternative route of
honesty, reciprocity and trust is indeed ‘a road less travelled’ but it is
also one that forges the respect on which commitment thrives.
The second thing leaders have to focus on is the fact that social
incentives can be created by focusing on the community rather than
the individual. This can be a counter-intuitive idea for leaders who for
years have been told that they not only need to know what motivates
their followers, but they need to appeal to these motives.
It is true that in the business world, just like in the real world, most
of us get to impact only those people in our immediate sphere of
influence. But our constant focus on the individual has been to the
detriment of social incentives. Our obsession with engineering each
piece to perfection has meant that we have taken our eye off the
148 Leadershift
bigger picture of our purpose. The role of the leader is to make the
community stronger so the individual can find themselves in it. Think
about the eBay business.
Notes
1 I know many will point out the collapse of financial systems across the
world as proof that there is little to no correlation between shareholder
value and executive. But I am here talking about the setting of highly
measurable objectives and the payments arising from them rather
than looking at whether these objectives (or indeed the legitimacy of
the means used to obtain them) are the right ones.
2 Uri Gneezy and Aldo Rustichini (2000) A fine is a price, Journal of
Legal Studies, 29 (1), pp 1–17. This piece of research has entered the
realm of everyday business having been talked about in Freakonomics
and Predictably Irrational, two business bestsellers. Readers of my first
book The Connected Leader might also recognize the parallels between
their research and my own failed experience of using incentives to
reinforce behaviour with my daughter, Charlotte.
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12 The Elvis fallacy
show you how often and broadly the song title was used as a shorthand
by journalists and commentators (proving once and for all that, when
it comes to headline writing, our imagination is as limited as our ability
to jump on a bandwagon is great).
The first is that words can pretty much predict the nature of the
actions likely to be taken. Consider the following. If the eyes are a
window to the soul then the written word is the vista to emotions.
Every day, evidence shows us clearly how words are a good way of judg-
ing someone’s mental and physical state of health. If I tell you I feel
depressed and tired, you don’t need to be a doctor (or indeed a mind
reader) to know that I might not be on top form. But what about if I
don’t tell you how I feel? Can you still guess from the words I use when
discussing a topic totally unrelated to my health how I am? James W
Pennebaker, Roger J Booth and Martha E Francis think you can and
they can even help you out.
and Martha have devised a way of finding out how to read our health.
They call this Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC).1 LIWC is
a piece of software that sorts the types of words used in a text into a
dozen categories (eg social words, big words, self references etc) to
assess a person’s health. For example when people feel good, they
tend to rely less on the use of first person pronouns. The team have
analysed the words of many famous and infamous people.
They have looked at the words of McCartney and Lennon and put
the transcripts of the presidential election debates between Senators
Obama and McCain through the software. They have even found
that whilst Osama Bin Laden’s words show little change over time,
those uttered by his ‘lieutenant’, Al Ayman al-Zawahri, show growing
feelings of insecurity.2 Whilst I am yet to analyse this book for fear of
what it might reveal, the idea that we can, literally, read someone is not
that far-fetched for self- and socially-aware leaders.
We know that our moods are contagious. We can feel how the atmos-
phere in our workplace changes as the mood changes. This happens
because of the words we use and the attitude we display. Clearly our
words and our actions, and by extension the actions of others, are not
disconnected in the way conventional managerial wisdom would have
it. Words speak at least as loudly as actions.
The second element we need to consider to put the fallacy to rest is our
belief that actions and conversations exist on two separate continua.
Whilst I have always been fond of the saying ‘When all is said and
done, more is usually said than done’, not least for the cleverness of
the turn of phrase, it does not hold up to scrutiny. The fact is that
there cannot be efficient actions without effective conversations.
For the last two years I have been conducting a small experiment.
Whilst I am loath to tell you about it for fear of never again being able
to use it as an energizing start to a speech, the result is telling. Every
time I have been asked to speak at a conference I have started by
giving the audience the same test, and irrespective of which country,
continent, industry, audience profile and seniority, the results have
always been the same.
154 Leadershift
By the time I end the test (no more than minutes) a pattern emerges.
Most people will have done about 20 calculations out of the 40 pos-
sible. A few will have done more and a few less. As you would antici-
pate, the result is somewhat of a bell curve. But invariably about a
tenth (at most) of the audience will have done a lot less than the rest
and obtained a completely different set of results. When I call out
the answers, the majority of people suddenly realize there must have
been a trick they had not spotted. And, without fail, they realize that
at the top of the page there are two lines of instructions that clearly
state that ‘In the following simple arithmetic problems, a plus (+) sign
means to multiply, a divide (÷) sign means to add, a minus (–) sign
means to divide, and a times (×) sign means to subtract. Complete the
problems following these directions’.
The first reaction is, of course, to blame me! After all I said this was
simple and there was no trick other than the challenge of time. I must
have been lying. I point out that I gave them all the same instructions
and that, to my mind, eight times two is no more difficult than
eight plus two. You can feel the pride of the people who read the
The Elvis fallacy 155
instructions. They know that leadership is not just about taking action,
it is also about having sufficient self-control to read the instructions
and understand the reality of the test. But that is not what makes this
test so interesting.
We act on the basis of what we hear, not what is said. After all, even
directives are words that give rise to actions and we all know that even
the strongest directives may sometimes not be enacted. To ensure that
this doesn’t happen we look to make directives clearer and incentives
156 Leadershift
Embracing the idea that conversations are the only effective and
efficient route towards effective actions is critical to achieving success in
the new world created by the DEAD trends. This is why understanding
and eradicating the Elvis fallacy is so critical in achieving success in a
post-DEAD trend world.
But when the reach of the social networks extends beyond the
boundaries of the formal organization the role of conversations
becomes even more important. Companies are not organizations.
They rely on a broader set of actors than can be found inside their
formal boundaries. The distinctions between old and new, expert and
novice, involved and committed or customer and employee blur as a
result of the four trends. Involving an entire community in an act of
dialogue becomes critical. Let me give you a clear example of what
this looks like in a ‘real’ business.
to keep close to their core base. Finally, the fifth and last was the
autonomy of the local membership to keep the business grounded.
Eventually these local businesses would come together under one
umbrella to enable them to coordinate and minimize their running
costs.
I have been lucky to meet many people who work for Rabobank.
All share one characteristic that many leaders say they value in their
people, but would probably and understandably prefer they didn’t
experience in practice. Rabobank people are questioning people.
They question everything. They discuss any idea or concept you put
their way. They think frustratingly deeply about whatever issue is at
hand. I experienced that frustration firsthand as I debated at length
the idea of advantages and disadvantages of cooperative structures
with them. Whatever we seemed to be agreeing on, someone would
point out a flaw and start the conversation all over again.
In most cases, executives know they will have to sell their ideas. But
most of them know that the selling happens after the decision has been
made. They normally will gather a team of advisers and colleagues
to discuss options. They will make the decision, communicate it
and look for it to be implemented whilst they continue to sell it. In
Rabobank’s case, however, the situation is different. As custodians of
the cooperative spirit, leaders see their job as communicating ideas
before a decision can be made. And they don’t do this just to a team
of colleagues, they need to do it to everyone from farmers to branch
managers. Imagine, if you will, trying to get a cost-cutting exercise
underway when most of the people who are likely to suffer from it
need to sign on the dotted line first.
What makes these executives able to cope with this is their ability to
draw people into conversations. They don’t have anything to prove.
They have a point of view and are comfortable with their place in
the world. So they cope with challenges not as personal attacks but
as furthering the search for the best solution, which they do not
automatically assume they have. At a time when banks are collapsing,
Rabobank’s cooperative essence has given it the checks and balances
that have ensured it has stayed true to its purpose. It never swayed too
far towards risk.
A few years ago many might have accused it of being boring. But if
boring is keeping your AAA rating and tier 1 solvency ratio, attracting
The Elvis fallacy 161
ever more retail customers looking for a safe home in order to lend to
your stated cause of agriculture, food and environmental technology,
then give me boring any day. As I look to the future, it is not hard to
imagine that the cooperative system is the closest we will ever get to a
DEAD trend-proof governance structure.
There are four steps that I believe will prove crucial in developing the
strength and resilience leaders will need to foster simplicity, narratives,
tasks and love in their organizations.
Finally, the last step is one that I spoke about in the last chapter but is
so crucial that is worth repeating – learn to love what you do. The idea
that work must carry meaning is not that easy. Indeed searching for
meaning and purpose at work is more likely to leave one wanting and
depressed than energized. However, if we refocus away from role to
task and learn to embrace our strengths and passions rather than our
measured contribution it is likely that we will find more energy.
Notes
1 To learn more about LIWC visit http://www.liwc.net/liwcdescription.
php, where you will find relevant information including, for the geeks
amongst us, discussions on the psychometric validity of the method.
2 J Wapner (2008) He Counts Your Words (Even Those Pronouns), New
York Times, 13 October.
3 Linguists amongst you may rightly point out that things are somewhat
simplified in my explanation. For those concerned about getting
detailed definitions or wanting more information, you may want to
read Speech Acts: An essay in the philosophy of language by John R Searle,
published in 1969 by Cambridge University Press.
4 Rabobank has a long, complex and fascinating history to which I
cannot do justice in this book. If you want to know more, as well as
paying its website a visit (www.rabobank.com) I have drawn from a
book called The Bank with a Difference – The Rabobank and cooperative
banking, published by the bank itself in 2002.
5 100 Ways to Succeed #11: MBWA Lives & Rules & Is Ubiquitous! in
DISPATCHES from the NEW WORLD of WORK, www.tompeters.
com.
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Concluding thoughts
Since their formation in 2002, the Arctic Monkeys had only played in
small venues to a small but loyal army of followers. Being unsigned,
they decided to make demo CDs to distribute freely to their fans. They
figured that if the fans had heard the songs before the gig they could
sing along to the words, thereby making the atmosphere better. So
when their followers started ripping and distributing bootleg copies
they saw this as something to be encouraged, not feared. When those
same devotees started a MySpace page the band’s following increased.
The web became the tool of choice for Arctic Monkeys enthusiasts
168 Leadershift
The DEAD trends do not, in any way, diminish our yearning for leader-
ship. We want to follow. We want to be inspired. We want to be led.
This is not because we are weak or paralysed by fear, nor because of
some deficiency that leaders need to fix. Instead, it is because we want
someone to typify the changes we wish to make. We want someone to
be the figurehead of a movement we want to drive.
In 2008 the United States of America found itself with a new president.
Regardless of geographical location or political affiliation, no one can
deny the historical nature of the landslide victory of the 44th President
of the United States.
His powerful rhetoric created simplicity. The message had been simpli-
fied not dumbed down. ‘Yes we can’ gave the movement coherence
through communal values. Simplicity enabled people to engage.
But above all, it was love that carried the day – love for the image
their candidate projected of themselves. This was love for a vision
of the United States of America, love for a world people wanted to
reconnect to, love for an ideal and an idea. That idea was that no
matter where you are from, no matter what the colour of your skin
is, no matter what the problems you face are, you too could be called
upon to lead.
So, let me close this book in the same way I opened it, reflecting on a
quote from Antoine de Saint-Exupéry that you will find at the top of
these concluding thoughts. As I close this journey through the maze
that is ‘leadershift’, I can’t help but think that the ultimate leadership
challenge is not the erosion of the powers and tools thrust upon us by
a turbulent environment. The ultimate challenge for any of us is our
ability to take Saint-Exupéry’s first step. We cannot second-guess the
future. There is no point looking for a truth that will answer all our
concerns. It is not out there. Our job as leaders is to take the first step,
without trying to second-guess or fearing what might lie ahead. Our
future lies in our ability to march proudly into our future – at some
times leaders and at others followers – working together, building on
each others’ strengths. With that in mind I wish you a fruitful journey
and thank you for allowing me to take up some of your precious
time.
Don’t take my
word for it
To get deeper into the trends and explore some of the more interesting
facets of our potential futures here are the five books I recommend.
They are great entry points into further research for those in search
of answers or a powerful take on the trends for those in search of a
second opinion.
Below are the books that I recommend you start with if you are trying
to understand more about the implications of our trends. The first
is in fact three books as it contains three volumes covering different
ground. However, as the old book clubs, who used to advertise
their special offers on the pages of Sunday newspaper supplements
(remember them), would have said, the three volumes count as one
choice!
Once You’re Lucky, Twice You’re Good – The Rebirth of Silicon Valley
And The Rise of Web 2.0, Sarah Lacy, Gotham Books, 2008
This is a book about the people who are shaping social communities
in web 2.0 and are being shaped by them.
Not surprisingly, the subjects of complexity and clarity are hot topics
in business today. The advent of complexity theory a few years ago has
meant that bookshelves are now full of titles that promise to make life
easier (or at least help you cope with it better). I have chosen the five
books that I reckon should give you as wide an overview as possible of
the whole area.
The Social Atom – Why The Rich Get Richer, Cheats Get Caught And
Your Neighbor Usually Looks Like You, Mark Buchanan, Cyan, 2007
This book is for all of us who have struggled to understand some of the
finer mathematical insights of Nobel Prize winner Thomas Schelling.
The big lesson is you will only find coherence if you ‘look at patterns
not at people’.
Storytelling seems to be all the rage so many books have been written
about it and most are somewhere on the bestseller shelves of your
local bookstore. I am worried however that a lot of what is written is
more about how to create a convincing story to encourage people
rather than about the role narratives can play in creating real adaptive
communities. I therefore like to look outside the business genre for
deeper insights into the power of narratives.
With over 700 pages, this is not a book for the faint-hearted, but a
book that took 34 years to write deserves at least 34 of your precious
hours to be read. It explores how stories emerge and looks at the
human condition’s need for them.
Love Is The Killer App – How to Win Business And Influence Friends,
Tim Sanders, Random House Inc, 2002
I recommend this book to anyone looking to make an impact in their
organization. Read it please.
Stumbling On Happiness – Why The Future Won’t Feel The Way You
Think It Will..., Daniel Gilbert, Harper Collins Publishers, 2006
Covering a wide and varied field and using some of the latest findings
on how our brain works, Professor Gilbert shows us how we make
decisions on our future and how poor those are.
Communities form, grow and dissolve in line with the nature and
strength of the conversations their members generate. Strong social
and cultural ties help adaptation and change. If we want to once and for
all get rid of the ‘Elvis Fallacy’ we’re going to understand the practical
value of conversations. Titles in this field span many disciplines and
schools of thought. I have chosen the five books below because they
provide a balance between thoughts and practice. Reading these
should help you perceive the Elvis fallacy for what it is – a short road
to failure to engage.
Made To Stick – Why Some Ideas Take Hold And Others Come
Unstuck, Chip and Dan Heath, Random House Books, 2007
By laying out the elements of ‘stickiness’ (simple, unexpected,
concrete, credible, emotional, stories – SUCCESs) and providing
examples that meet all of them, the Heath brothers illustrate the
power of conversations.
The books in this list are all available somewhere either first- or second-
hand. Some may need a bit more searching than others but I hope
you find the search rewarding and if you have any more suggestions,
do let me know.
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180
Index
“We are at our best when we feel a part of something meaningful and
important. Emmanuel Gobillot goes beyond helping us to envision
effective leaders to creating the power of possibilities with engaged
leaders. He integrates observations from a huge number of fields and
industries to bring a fantastic exploration of the essence of great
leadership relationships – being connected and engaged!”
Professor Richard Boyatzis, Departments of Psychology and Organizational
Behaviour, Case Western Reserve University, Adjunct Professor of Human
Resources, ESADE, co-author of Resonant Leadership and the international
best-seller Primal Leadership
“Reading The Connected Leader you feel as if Gobillot has invited you
to join his informal network, to be one of his special contacts, and that
you have been given a privileged insight into understanding through his
vast array of assessment tools your own organization, and how informal
networks can be used to make change happen.”
Michael Millward MSc for the CIP North Yorkshire Newsletter
“The virtues of this book are its lucidity and practical approach. Gobillot
sets out a road map for leaders who want to reject formality in favour of
seeing what is really happening… The sharp sassy style and a sense of
realism ultimately keeps this book on track.”
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