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The Death of BIG Ideas

November 21, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Late this summer, I read a column in the The New York Times Sunday Review by Neal Gabler that drove me mad.   Gabler believes that Americans do not think anymore and, as a result, we no longer formulate BIG ideas that have the power to transfix and transform society.  In his editorial, Mr. Gabler points to an earlier time – pre-social networking and pre-Googling – when BIG thinkers were cultural icons – Albert Einstein, Betty Friedan, Marshal McLuhan. He makes the rather strange point that “a generation ago, these men [I assume he means “people” since he includes a few women in his examples of BIG thinkers] would have made their way into popular magazines and onto television screens.”  He seems to mean that we no longer want to hear what scientists have to say if we can’t consume their ideas in a Tweet-stream.

But, I wonder about that when I watch the Daily Show or the Colbert Report with my 20-year-old son and we are listening to the US Ambassador to the UN discuss why the UN matters to the US or a Senator discuss the debt ceiling debate. Okay, okay – it’s a six minute interview with snarky humor laced throughout, but that’s about three minutes longer than the so-called major networks’ coverage of important topics and about as long as NPR gives a story (and that’s called an “in-depth” treatment). These are BIG problems calling for BIG ideas and they are not solely problems of the marketplace, the one domain in which Gabler acknowledges that BIG ideas are clearly being born.

But, if Gabler gives, he also takes away.

“Entrepreneurs have plenty of ideas, and some….have come up with some brilliant ideas in the ‘inventional’ sense of the word. Still, while these ideas may change the way we live, they rarely transform the way we think. They are material, not ideational.”

I have to say, that I am still trying to make sense of this assertion. It seems to me that many commercial inventions do, in fact, change the way we think. They create new frameworks which change how we see things and this is precisely how understanding is transformed. The fact that these ideas are embodied in a product or a service (are experienced in the corporeal world) does not – to my mind, at least – negate their “ideational” impact. And, the notion that ideas in the marketplace and ideas in the… “non-marketplace(?)” are fundamentally different also makes me wince. Are there any corners of human activity that are free from the curse of “monetization?” The marketplace subsidizes some pockets of activity, insulating them from its daily concerns – non-profits and government – but they are not immune or outside of its reach (ask any university that relied on its endowment funds for operations in 2009 or NGO that relied on donors).

Finally Gabler goes full bore and lets loose about what he calls our “post-idea” world. This is the world in which we are more concerned with amassing information to stay informed than to make sense of the world. We live in a gap between apprehending and comprehending the world in Gabler’s terms. Reducing our expression to 140 characters or video clips and restricting it to our circle of online friends (even if they number in the millions as they do for Lady Gaga and Ashton Kutcher) traps us in an endless loop of opinions which are the antithesis of BIG thinking.

I admit that I find it impossible to keep up with the flow of information that comes my way. But this was the case 20 years ago – before the Internet, before Kindles, before iPhones and iPads and netbooks and Blackberries and instant messaging and Twitter. It was nice not to be so accessible, so 24/7, but it didn’t make it any easier to be thoughtful.

In some of the work that I do, BIG ideas are afoot and they are engaging many people in provocative and energetic discussions that seek to enlarge our understanding of what it means to live in an increasingly inter-connected world in which seemingly small choices ripple outward with surprisingly large impact over long periods of time. Strands of thinking that come many different fields – complexity theory, evolutionary biology, particle physics, finance, philanthropy – are being woven together to form new ways of seeing, of understanding our world.

My children’s education at the elementary, middle and high school levels is far more concerned with understanding than it is with simply acquiring information – a marked contrast to my own experience. And, my kids are every bit as connected 24/7 via text messages and video chats as any of their peers. Yet somehow, BIG ideas still entrance them as they struggle to make sense of their world in all its close immensity. I am not a betting person, but I would still bet that there are BIG ideas out there that are heading our way and that as a species our drive to make meaning will prevail.

And, that’s as a good a reason as any on this Thanksgiving Holiday to be thankful.

 

Source: “The Elusive Big Idea,” Neal Gabler, Sunday Review, The New York Times, August 14, 2011.

Filed Under: Change

Timing Might NOT Be Everything

October 18, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Recently when I’ve been in the middle of political discussions with friends or family, I’ve found myself on the side of an argument where I rather sadly concede that President Obama might not be the right person for the times.   It occurs to me that this point of view might have less to do with the President and more to do with a middle-aged belief about what has limited or supported my personal accomplishments to-date – a belief that I’ve been fortunate to have predilections about what I do to make a living and a temperament about how I do it that have been well-suited to the particular state of the business world during my career lifetime (so far, at least).  A feeling that timing is everything.

A few weeks ago, I attended a one day seminar on the topic of Forecasting in the Face of Risk and Uncertainty.  Most of the people attending this event were involved in the financial markets and their main (and in most cases, only) interest is figuring out how to make money.  Ironically, virtually all of the presenters (other than the final session panelists) were people who are mostly interested in thinking about BIG problems – scientists and academics – and relatively unconcerned about how to convert their ideas into money.   The seminar’s major themes that interested me were these:

  • Risk = Hazard x Vulnerability
  • Risk should not be confused with Uncertainty.  Risk implies that future events will occur with measurable probability.  Uncertainty implies that the likelihood of future events is indefinite or incalculable.
  • It appears that uncertainty is increasing as systems become more complex and tightly coupled.
  • The more complex and tightly coupled the system, the greater the likelihood that there will be accidents.  In these environments, adding more controls or safeguards in attempts to offset the likelihood of accidents will have the perverse effect of increasing the likelihood that accidents will occur because the controls increase both the complexity and tight coupling of the system.
  • But, simplicity is not necessarily the solution to complexity because simple systems are just as vulnerable to phase shifts or environmental disruptions.  In fact, simple systems and complex, tightly coupled systems share one design feature – they tend to be optimized perfectly for a specific environment.  If the environment changes even slightly in a way that makes it difficult for the system to adapt, the system is prone to collapse.

During the final session one of the panelists observed that the cockroach is a very successful creature – having survived massive disruptions in its external environment time and time again.  Apparently, cockroach survival has been enhanced by its extreme sensitivity to puffs of wind (indicating a potential predator on the move).  Puff of wind, cockroach senses it,  and initiates evasive maneuvers (turns and moves in the opposite direction).  However, cockroaches are not very well-designed insects.  In fact, this panelist described them as a perennial runner up in the competition for best insect design.  However, their less than perfect optimization for the environment has served them well in the long run.  They haven’t gotten to dominate the planet at any given time, but they’ve outlasted many other perfectly adapted insects (and other life forms as well).

Optimizing for a particular set of circumstances (tightly coupled complex or simple system design) is analogous to being the right person at the right time at the right place (etc., etc.).  In business settings we often talk about a process being well designed if it gets the right information to the right person at the right time.  But what if all this rightness is wrong?   What if it’s better in the long run to be almost right?  What if the right time is too short a timeframe for rightness?  What if timing is not everything?

Organizational innovation, it seems to me, is an attempt to survive (retain relevance) over the long term.  But, some of the limitations that organizations place on themselves in order to manage the inherent risks and uncertainty that accompany innovation might inadvertently increase those risks and not effectively manage uncertainty.  For example, companies believe that it is risk limiting to hew close to their existing markets – explore adjacencies where they can leverage existing resources and expertise.  And, on some level, this makes sense – you’ve got all this stuff (resources, expertise, infrastructure, systems) available and you know how to use it to make money (or create value if you’re a non-profit or an institution with a mission that has a broader definition of value than a financial one).  But what if by staying close to what you know and using similar or the same resources and expertise, you are adding complexity to your system and more tightly coupling success to the same set of value drivers and risk factors?  What if what looks like you’re managing risk is actually creating more risk and giving you a false sense that you are prepared to handle uncertainty?  Rather than having created a more robust and resilient organization, you have created one that is ever more sensitive to slight shifts in its environment and has a reduced capacity to adapt.  So you get to be the perfectly right organization for the time, but you have not become the organization that has a better chance of being around for a long time.

So, how do organizations use innovation to help manage for the long term?  First, I think we need to distinguish between the long term and forever.  While this might seem obvious, I’m not sure that most of us really acknowledge that every major organizational system will cease to exist at some point – nothing is forever.  Even serially successful innovative companies like Apple will not last forever.  Among the many musings about the significance of Steve Jobs and Apple in the wake of his untimely, recent death, one rang most true to me because it seemed like a perfect restatement of Clayton Christensen’s theory of innovation from below.

In this article (some of it is excerpted below), Cliff Kuang makes the point that Steve Jobs understood design better than anyone.   For a long time, personal computing devices were pretty ugly and hard to use – they were badly designed – but they were fast and powerful.  And, for an equally long time, design was too costly to be delivered to or desired by more than the elite.  (Market penetration of Macs was always a fraction of the PC.)   But, not very long ago, the price point of delivering great design in computing devices fell within reach of the many and computing power was a given, no longer a differentiator.  Today, great design has become a standard feature required of computing devices.  So, it’s possible that the wave of great design as an innovation in technology has passed.  That, more than anything else, may cause Apple to stumble going forward, but Apple has already figured out how to use innovation to manage for the long term.  The company has survived failures (NeXT Cube, Lisa, Newton), customer unhappiness (the iPhone 4’s antennae), and now, the death of its visionary founder/leader.

So, what makes systems resilient?  Just the sort of things that have been engineered out of lean organizations – slack and redundancy – the less than perfect design.  I frequently hear executives bemoaning the “hobbies” that employees pursue as evidence of innovation gone wrong.  But, I think that hobbies are the quintessential redundancies that pop up when there’s a bit of slack.  They’re good and necessary for innovation.  At the same time, organizations must also be willing to invest in some of the hobbies that appear to be scalable which requires leadership in the face of risk and uncertainty.

And what does it look like if you’re on the wrong side of a bet?  Ask yourself if you’d like to be Reed Hastings of Netflix – a guy who is experiencing what looks like BIG failure at the level of the institution. Or if you’d have been happy being Steve Jobs when Apple decided to offer Lisa customers the option of trading in their purchase for a Mac as a mea culpa for having sold them an expensive product that the company was not going to support because it was a failure.  Probably not.  But, if you are almost right (rather than perfectly right) and if you have a resilient organization that can absorb shocks to the system, you probably have a much better chance of thriving over the long haul because timing is not everything, even if it helps.

Sources:

“Wind Direction Coding in the Cockroach Escape Response: Winner Does Not Take All,” Rafael Levi and Jeffrey M. Camhi, sourced on 10/12/11 at  http://www.jneurosci.org/content/20/10/3814.full.pdf

“What Can Steve Jobs Still Teach Us?,” Cliff Kuang, Fast Company Newsletter, October 5 2011, sourced on 10/14/11 at http://www.fastcompany.com/design/2011/what-can-steve-jobs-still-teach-us

From What Can Steve Jobs Still Teach Us?:

A decisive factor that aided Steve Jobs was fortuitous timing. He came of age just in time to become a founding father of the personal-computer movement. And he was still young enough when he returned to Apple, in 1997, that his own instinctive sense of what a computer might become could be brought to life. In the 1980s and 1990s, computers were sold on their speed and technical capabilities. But by 2000, these features had largely become commoditized–it no longer mattered how fast a computer was when basic issues of usability and integration became paramount. What did speed matter if you didn’t know what all the menus meant, or if you were hit with pop-up errors every time you clicked your mouse?

Before 1997, Jobs was ahead of his time: The computers he made were overpriced for the market, because he thought that usability was more important than capability. But as computers reached maturity and became a staple in every home, his obsessions became more relevant to the market. Indeed, many of Apple’s recent signature products, such as the iPad or the iPhone, were ideas first conceived in the 1990s or even the 1980s–they had to bide their time.

Jobs is ahead of his time in other ways too: He has taught his entire organization to play in the span of product generations rather than product introductions. Apple designers say that now, each design they create has to be presented alongside a mock-up of how that design might evolve in the second or third generation. That should ensure Apple’s continued success for a long time, aided, of course, by the tremendous momentum that Jobs’s leadership has provided the company.

And for fun, it appears that cockroaches will NOT inherit the earth even though they are more resilient than humans.

Filed Under: Business Model, Innovation, Risk Management

Friendship – the perfect blendship!

September 12, 2011 By Leave a Comment

 

Pixar makes magical films – Toy Story, Up, Wall-E, Cars – so you might expect that it would be magical place to work.   And yes, it seems to be every bit as employee-friendly as every other high tech enterprise in Silicon Valley you have ever read about (even though it is not located in Silicon Valley, but in Emeryville – also outside of San Francisco, but in another universe altogether apparently).

You know what I’m talking about – the carefully designed workspaces that encourage collaboration and serendipitous interactions, the mind-body solicitousness of the fitness center and outdoor sports areas, the “you could live your entire life here” cafes, bars, and eateries.  But what I think is really remarkable about Pixar is this:  employees really like each other.

When John Lasseter, Pixar’s CEO, describes how the Toy Story team “saved” the project when it was imperiled, he says, “’We went back to what we wanted, and that was: the characters liked each other.  Because we liked each other.’”  And this, according to Anthony Lane, one of The New Yorker’s film critics and the author of a Pixar profile story, is the essence of Pixar distilled in the message of Toy Story – “You got a friend in me.”  At Pixar, friendship is cemented by intense devotion to craft that is married inextricably to technologies that continue to extend the possibilities for the special brand of enchantment that the company produces.  Lane notes that friendship is often the most enduring form of human relationships   He writes:  “[friendship is]…that practical momentum, conservative in its emotions, but radical in its taste for adventure….”

But (I can imagine you thinking out loud) they are Pixar – a smallish company with highly skilled (PhD-techno nerd-graphic design-type) employees operating in a rarified atmosphere making animated movies.  What does this have to do with anything other than a highly specialized corner of the entertainment industry?  What indeed?  To me, the idea of friendship – its practical momentum, conservative emotions and radical taste for adventure – is the energizing, forward-moving spirit that the corporate world says it wants and then crushes with a deadening, faint-hearted  version that it calls “employee engagement.”

Just compare the two – would you rather be friends with the people you work with or engaged to the company you work for?  (I know that you don’t really get engaged to a company, you are engaged with the work you do for the company, but just humor me a bit.)   The whole construct of employee engagement seems devoid of feeling which is odd because it’s supposed to be about attachment.  Just imagine, for a moment, if organizational life was built on friendship.  If products and services were really all about making friends with customers, suppliers, and other stakeholders.  If the strong bonds of friendship were what underpinned business decisions – a balancing of short and long term consequences, a desire to sustain relationships, trying to make something last beyond the ups and downs of the moment.

I believe that the nascent corporate social responsibility movement (another label that just kills all of the passion and power of what’s going on) at its most basic is an embodiment of friendship  There is something in the air these days and it’s bigger than engagement.

Perhaps it’s a consequence of how quickly changes that once seemed to take more than one person’s lifetime to experience have now become observable well within the boundaries of one person’s lifetime.   We might just well have come to a point in history when kicking the can down the road doesn’t really achieve the goal of palming problems off to another generation.  It may be that we are going to have to dig in and be responsible for the world in which we live – whether we inherited it or we created it.

How observable?  In an article discussing the US government’s investment in lithium battery production as part of a highly controversial US-style industrial policy (betting on certain industries having the potential to create jobs and economic leadership in the world economy),  the unforeseen consequences of having outsourced industrial production to Asia in the 1960s is identified as one of the major contributing factors to our lagging position industrial technologies.    The author quotes a seminal article by Pisano and Shih, two Harvard professors, who believe that globalization has had the unwitting effect of tearing apart the ecosystem that generates future innovation.

Pisano and Shih write that “…US corporations, by offshoring so much manufacturing work over the past few decades, have eroded our ability to raise living standards and curtailed the development of new high-technology industries.”  When consumer products companies offshored production to Asia, the drive to improve battery technology migrated to that part of the world too, because that was where it was needed – for toys and then small electronic devices.  Fast forward to 2010 and now the transportation industry (manufacturers of essentially large consumer electronic devices) needs this technology, but its locus is in Asia.

While no one is prescient enough to foresee how the arc of history will bend, if one takes a long view, it’s easy to see that caring for interlocking relationships in the present might serve to strengthen the foundation for future endeavors.  And what else is friendship but relationships that we tend today with a view towards tomorrow?

If we want our organizations and our economic systems to have a better chance at withstanding the vicissitudes of time, perhaps friendship is the best template we have.

 

Sources:

  • “The Fun Factory,” Anthony Lane, The New Yorker, May 16, 2011
  • “Make or Break,” Jon Gertner, The New York Times Sunday Magazine, August 28, 2011
And, another take on Friendship (thanks to Cole Porter, Ethel Merman and Bert Lahr)

Filed Under: Business Model, Collaboration, Sustainability

The Future Just Creeps On In

April 28, 2011 By Leave a Comment
There’s a big ol’ hole that’s gone right through the sole of this old shoe
And the water on the ground, ain’t got no place else it found
So it’s only got one thing left to do
Just creep on in, creep on in
And once it has begun, it won’t stop until it’s done, sneaking in
(“Creeping In” by Dolly Parton)

“Our imagination is stretched to the utmost, not, as in fiction, to imagine things which are not really there, but just to comprehend those things which are there.”  Richard Feynman

Last week, as I emerged from Penn Station in New York City, I strolled up Seventh Avenue and out of the corner of my eye caught sight of the large Borders book store that commands the corner of Seventh Avenue and 32nd Street.  What flashed through my mind at that moment was “I never thought I’d live to see the end of books.”  As a kid, I’d spend the entire day closeted in my room reading a book with a dictionary beside me on the bed. I loved unlocking the meaning of big, prepossessing words as I made my way through stories that were just a little too difficult for me.  Looking back on it, I see that I was making a kind of intellectual journey through worlds that were otherwise inaccessible to me as a child of Jewish middleclass suburban Baltimore.  Later on, in my undergraduate years, I used to sit in the Divinity School Library at Duke University, my Biblical Hebrew text before me, surrounded by dictionaries and concordances – all in an effort to untangle a foreign, dead language and try to reconstruct a way of experiencing the world that could only be understood through surviving fragments of text.  When I got out of college and no longer had to read what was on a syllabus, I went on wild reading binges, foraging through the St. Mark’s Bookshop in New York City.  For me, reading has always been another way of seeing and experiencing the world and books have been my passport.

But, now I own a Kindle and my dictionary is no longer beside me.  Instead, I click my Kindle’s home key and enter the word I don’t know to instantly have it defined by my favorite dictionary (the OED), and then click back to exactly where I stopped reading.  I made the transition to the Kindle with some trepidation – after all, I LOVE books.  I had about three days of feeling very strange about not flipping a page and the heft of the reading device not feeling right and not really liking the percent completion display which was my only way of knowing how much I’d read and how much more there was to go.  But then, that was that, and I was on my way to loving that my dictionary was right there, all the time.  When I saw the Borders bookstore in New York City, I had just finished reading an article in The New York Times about the coming-to-me-soon future in which I would be able to borrow books from my library on my Kindle.  In fact, if I owned a Nook or a Sony e-Reader, I could do that already.  In my soon-to-be future, I wouldn’t have to go to my library to borrow a book.  I already don’t have to go to a bookstore to buy one and I don’t have to pay at all for classics like my favorite Edith Wharton or to finally read Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.  The future has already arrived and I am smack in the middle of it, I just hadn’t noticed.   

Yesterday, I read another article in The New York Times about supercomputers used for scientific visualization that are called macroscopes.  Macroscopes are “…a new class of computer-based scientific instruments…composite tools, with different kinds of physical presences that have such powerful and flexible software programs that they become a complete scientific workbench.”  These supercomputers make “…it possible to uncover phenomena and processes that in the past have been, ‘too great, slow or complex for the human eye and mind to notice and comprehend.’”  Macroscopes can see the future creeping in on you in ways that human beings cannot. 

What’s also amazing about these supercomputers is that the technology itself is affecting the very nature of the scientific research process.  From the lone independent researcher toiling away in isolation, it is now more likely that hundreds or even thousands of researchers in disparate geographies and ranging across many different disciplines collaborate on and jointly publish research, no longer isolated, but intensively connected through these supercomputers.  And the supercomputers themselves are not one piece of equipment or software housed in one place, but can themselves be collaborations of different pieces of equipment and applications in far-flung corners of the world.  The unrelenting force of collaboration – called the “killer app” by one scientist in the article – is also making what seemed like a risky approach, developing software in an open-source mode, now seem like the only way forward.  Technology has managed to destroy a culture and build a new one, in this case, seemingly without the calamity that accompanies most destruction. 

The same is going on in the organizations where we work.  They are already different, but we are swept along in the currents and can’t really appreciate the full extent of how much the future is already here until, perhaps, we read an article about borrowing books from a library on an e-Reader without visiting the library and catch a glimpse of a Borders bookstore on the street corner 15 minutes later.

 Sources:

  • “Digging Deeper, Seeing Farther:  Supercomputers Alter Science,”  John Markoff, The New York Times, April 26, 2011.
  • “Kindle Users to Be Able to Borrow Library E-Books,” Julie Bosman, The New York Times, April 21, 2011.
Filed Under: Change

Make Your Own Mistakes!

April 4, 2011 By 1 Comment

I have never liked best practices. In part, this may be due to my contrary nature. My first impulse when I’m told what to do is to push the advice far enough away until I can examine it at arm’s length and determine whether or not it makes sense for me to follow it. I’m not inclined to think that just because someone else is doing something that is working out for them that it means it’s something I should do or that even if I do it, I would necessarily get the same results. If you put a better spin on my attitude, you’d say that I have a strong independent streak.

So, some of my reaction to best practices is a matter of temperament. But some of it has to do with a feeling that the whole notion of best practices is deeply flawed.

Best practices is about the “what.” What does that company (or group or individual) do and how does it compare to what we do? Teasing out the differences, the “gaps” in business-speak, is like panning for gold. You find the little (or big) nuggets that, if adopted, can help your organization improve performance.

Part of the problem is that best practices really don’t stand the test of time. For the aspirant, it takes time and real effort to make the changes required to perform the best practice and by the time that this has occurred, it’s more than likely that the best practice itself is no longer a best practice (the best practice organization having perfected an even better practice). For the best practice organization, if it doesn’t move on and continue to evolve, the best practice is no longer best and it is no longer the bellwether.

But the most flawed aspect of best practices is that they seem to be about avoiding mistakes. They are about learning from the mistakes of others, so you don’t have to make them yourself. But what if the only way you can really learn, really master anything, is precisely by making mistakes yourself? What if it’s more risky to avoid making mistakes than to figure out how to become good at making them?

When people acquire new skills they typically progress through three stages:

Stage Characteristics
1. Cognitive intellectualize the task, discover new strategies to accomplish it proficiently
2. Associative concentrate less, make fewer errors, become more efficient
3. Autonomous become as good as we need to be, run on autopilot reaching a sustainable plateau

For a very long time, the autonomous stage was viewed as the highest level of innate capability. Sir Francis Galton identified it back in 1869 as a point beyond which an individual “…cannot by any education or exertion overpass.” However, it seems that hitting the wall is more a matter of belief than reality.

Very high achievers, those who continuously bust through limits, develop strategies to stay out of the autonomous zone. These masters use three main strategies: 1) focus on technique, 2) stay goal-oriented, and 3) get immediate feedback on performance. Nothing too shocking or out of the ordinary here. However, the first strategy is not as obvious as it might first appear and the way in which masters go about it is different from those who are good or even very good.

The key to the first strategy is technique. Observations of amateur and virtuoso musicians note that when amateurs practice, they typically play musical pieces. When virtuoso musicians practice, they play scales and difficult parts of pieces. I’d put it this way, the amateur wants the kind of feedback that makes him feel good. The virtuoso is looking for feedback that tells her how to improve. The virtuoso is looking for opportunities to make mistakes and is paying close attention to why and how failure happens. Achieving mastery is very boring and tedious. That’s why very few have the passion and commitment to persist at it.

If what it takes to be the best is a constantly moving target and requires a huge amount of humility (how else can one persist in seeking out opportunities to make mistakes and then make them?), it’s clear that simply aping a best practice is hardly likely to transform an individual or an organization. It seems to me that what does have the potential to transform performance is the process of making mistakes as one seeks improvement. But to do that, individuals and organizations have to make their own mistakes and never stop making them, something that is not readily apparent in the flawless performance that we see when we observe best practices.

Source for information about achieving mastery:

  • “Secrets of a mind-gamer,” Joshua Foer, The New York Times Sunday Magazine, February 15, 2011
Filed Under: Innovation, Knowledge Management

The Value of Experience

March 1, 2011 By 1 Comment

I have a friend who has held several senior level executive positions at very large companies over the past 20 years. She is currently looking for a job and, times being what they are, she finds that unless her experience completely matches up against the new opportunity, she’s not considered as desirable a candidate as someone else whose experience is a more perfect fit. As a strategy and innovation consultant, I’m frequently asked to provide referrals for work that is the same as the work I’m proposing to do. In effect, there is an assumption that my previous success can be replicated if somehow the situation is close enough and if I do exactly the same thing again.

We treat experience as extremely valuable – as if it embodies deep knowledge and insight and is highly predictive of success in the future. We believe that because someone has managed a particular situation in the past successfully, he or she is a better bet to achieve success in the future when placed in a similar situation. But what if experience at best is irrelevant and at worst is misleading? What if how we understand correlation is deeply flawed? What if the truth wears off?

If we define experience as the proven ability to achieve a particular result under certain conditions, it is analogous to the scientific principle of replicability which is a foundation of the scientific method. In a scientific experiment, recreating the conditions under which a particular outcome has been observed is supposed to yield the predicted outcome. But, scientists are finding is that this is not the case. In many scientific experiments, the probability that predicted outcomes will occur actually decreases relative to the number of times the experiment is recreated increases. This is called the decline effect.

Many of the obvious culprits – regression to the mean, publication bias, selective reporting – do not provide a satisfactory explanation for the problem (which is a BIG one for science). After all, if a fact is not a fact – that is, something true that remains true – then what are these things that are being observed? What is the truth?
Regression to the mean is a statistical phenomenon that common wisdom captures in the phrase “the law of averages.” So, any experiment that shows a big effect at first might be expected to show a small effect another time and then bounce around until the effects cluster about an average. However, for many experiments with statistically solid data sets, the data doesn’t regress to a mean, the data thoroughly degrades, for which there is no satisfactory explanation.
Publication bias is the tendency of scientific journals (or almost any publication) to prefer to publish research that supports previously published research. After some period of time, the insight becomes orthodoxy, and then these same journals are more open to disconfirming research. While this explains some of the reasons why certain scientific facts become enshrined and then discredited, it doesn’t explain early positive results.

Selective reporting is the perceptual bias that humans bring to observation. An example of selective reporting can be found in an experiment where scientists look for physical symmetry, which is supposed to be a marker for a preferred mate, in animal subjects. If the scientist knows that the observed subject has successfully mated and is looking for symmetry that is expressed in something as minute as tail feathers or whiskers, there is a predisposition to see it. Experiments that test the efficacy of acupuncture provide another window into the problem of selective reporting. During a 30 year timeframe, experiments were conducted in Asia and the US/Europe. All of the experiments in Asia supported the effectiveness of acupuncture and only about 60% of the US/European experiments reached the same conclusion.
The most disturbing new information that I learned about the scientific method was not that scientists and scientific publications are biased or that judgment based on beliefs turns out to be more important than decisions based on a so-called solid set of facts, but that the notion of a threshold for statistical validity, that a phenomenon’s occurrence is not likely to be caused by chance – the 95% probability level – was originally set because it made “pencil and slide-rule calculations easier.” And much research chases after achieving results that meets this criterion so that they can be treated as facts.

If it turns out that facts are slippery and no more solid than beliefs, how do we understand the value of experience? Our contention that experience matters derives from the scientific model of replicability. But that model is not as firm a foundation as we may have hoped. If we can’t rely on the scientific construct of replicability – find someone whose experience matches up precisely against the current situation to better predict a successful outcome – what can we rely on? Turning to science for answers means a long wait, because science is only now beginning to grudgingly acknowledge that it has a problem. Even though it is much more challenging, I believe that we need to acknowledge that we are not sure what the value of experience actually is and that we might be as wrong about it as much scientific research is turning out to be.

Source: “The Truth Wears Off,” Jonah Lehrer, The New Yorker, December 13, 2010

Filed Under: Decision-making, Leadership, Risk Management Tagged With: , ,

Dessert, Happiness, and Innovation

February 2, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Reading about the dessert revolution that was sparked in Barcelona a decade ago made me think about how limitations and the lack of them combine in subtle ways to unleash innovation.  Around the same time, I had come across the concept of synthetic happiness which also examines the interplay of limitation and freedom.  I began to wonder:  How much freedom and how much limitation create the optimal conditions for innovation?  Are happiness and innovation somehow related?

The dessert revolution was kick-started by the molecular gastronomy movement – the ascendance of chemistry in the professional kitchen.  Molecular gastronomy has been a rule-breaking phenomenon.  Rules like the order of tastes, flavors, and sensations in a meal: the rules that say savory comes before sweet and hot before cold.  Molecular gastronomy has appropriated the tools of industrial food-making and applied them to haute cuisine.  Tools that extract essential oils from fruits and flowers and tools that blow air into liquids to create foams are used to transform food and the experience of eating.  Suddenly, main courses are sweet and cold while desserts are savory and hot (one holy grail – hot ice cream).  Textures and flavors upend expectations and suddenly eating dinner is an adventure.

What is most interesting about the culinary transformation in Barcelona is that it emerged from the realm of the pastry chef in regions of the world where the pastry chef does not dominate the food culture and from individuals who are mostly the younger or youngest sibling in a family business.  As the younger or youngest sibling, these men were forced into the pastry chef role because it has lower prestige; the higher prestige roles went to the older siblings.  In this region of Spain, the culture of dessert had been limited to a few custards and cakes.  It is the antithesis of places such as France or Germany with dessert traditions that span tarts, creams, cakes, cookies, and more.   Stuck in the pastry chef role, but unburdened by a well-developed dessert culture, these young pastry chefs experienced both limitation and freedom and an explosion of wildly innovative desserts have emerged from their kitchens and spilled into the rest of the meal, putting Barcelona on the culinary map.   

What, you might ask, does innovation in Barcelona’s dessert culture have to do with happiness? 

Let’s start with a definition of happiness that comes from Dan Gilbert, author of Stumbling on Happiness. Gilbert differentiates between natural and synthetic happiness.  Natural happiness is how you feel when you get what you want – when you are not forced to face limitations.  Synthetic happiness is how you feel when you change your view of how much it really mattered that you didn’t get what you wanted – when you are face to face with a big solid wall that stands between you and your aspirations and there is no way around it.  In Gilbert’s TED talk (I encourage you to listen to it), one of his main points is that we believe that natural happiness is better than synthetic happiness. But evidence suggests that both kinds of happiness make us equally happy.  That turns out to be a very good thing because most of the happiness we experience is synthetic.  Few of us go through life without experiencing setbacks or bumping into limits. 

Gilbert then moves on to describe the series of non-conscious cognitive processes that allow human beings to revise our view of the meaning of certain experiences.  Gilbert calls this capacity a psychological immune system and it is essential to synthesizing happiness.  We might not need these processes so much if we weren’t also blessed with a capacity to simulate experiences before we have them thanks to our frontal cortex.  This unique aspect of our brain structure allows us to imagine outcomes from situations before we actually experience them and guides us to make certain choices.  For example, presented with a choice between eating mud or a nice warm buttery croissant, we will choose to eat the croissant because we imagine that we will be happier doing so (good choice!).  However, there are many more instances where what we imagine will make us happy and how happy we report feeling after we have had the experience suggest that we really don’t have a clue. 

Gilbert cites several different experiments – most of them share similar characteristics.  Groups that have what most people would call a lousy experience (becoming a paraplegic) and groups that have a terrific experience (winning the lottery) are basically as happy or unhappy as they were before the experience after some time has passed (sometimes as little as 3 months).   People who were generally happy before becoming paraplegics dig something positive out of the experience as awful as it is.  They synthesize happiness (make lemonade out of lemons).   Even in less dire circumstances, we tend to be poor predictors of what will make us happy.  And, as mentioned earlier, we tend to believe that natural happiness – not having to deal with limitations, having ultimate freedom – is better than synthetic happiness.  But, it turns out that this is not the case.

To demonstrate this fact, Gilbert describes another set of experiments in which students are allowed to select a print of a photograph that they can keep.  (I’m going to simplify the experiment design here, go to his TED talk for the more complete description.)  Some students are told that they cannot change their minds – they must keep the photo print they choose.  Other students are allowed to have several days to think it over.  You can probably already guess which group turns out to be happiest with their paintings several weeks later.  Yes, it’s the group that didn’t get to think it over; the group that had to deal with limitations.  Freedom to choose – the ability to make up your mind and change your mind – may be the friend of natural happiness but it is the enemy of synthetic happiness.

When we think about innovation we often imagine that it requires a completely unbounded intellectual space in which we are free to explore anything and everything, a space in which we will find something new and exciting.  Gilbert says that this is the prevailing view of natural happiness – it is something that we must find.  Somehow we believe that this approach – that of seeking in complete freedom – and the happiness and innovations that emerge from it are the best kind.  But what if another equally valid and productive path to innovation is more comparable to synthetic happiness?  The same path that the young pastry chefs in Barcelona experienced – faced with limitations and only afforded certain degrees of freedom.  That would be especially good news since few organizations operate without limitations.  Start-ups lack resources and established organizations have brands to protect.   How we synthesize happiness might provide an alternate way of thinking about how to pursue innovation – without contriving situations that bear little resemblance to the realities that most organizations experience.  If natural innovation requires being out of the box, perhaps synthetic innovation can be produced inside the box as long as the lid is open.  And, it is highly likely that they are both equally good kinds of innovation that will lead to happy results.

Sources:

Filed Under: Change, Innovation

Bye Bye Business Model

December 20, 2010 By Leave a Comment

It seems a fitting way to wrap up 2010 by looking at business models that are on the way out as we head into 2011.

Business models change without warning to those who are invested in them.  Standing outside of an industry looking in, it isn’t hard to see when big changes are in the works or to conclude that the way things are is not going to continue.  In a conversation with a former Chief Investment Officer of a foundation a few weeks ago I heard the phrase “expected surprise” which I think nicely expresses what I’m talking about.  While it may be close to impossible to predict when a change will occur, it’s not at all difficult to predict with certainty that it will occur.  Yet somehow, the argument among those cashing in on an existing business model shifts to knowing when it will occur which has the effect of kicking the can down the road.  If change isn’t imminent, then more important and pressing things take precedence, always.  Which is why when the change inevitably comes, it seems to have been utterly unpredictable and unknowable – a complete (unexpected) surprise. 

Story #1:  The book publishing industry.

The paper-based, time-intensive, highly complex process that brings us books has been convulsing for many years now, but the glue that has bound writers and editors and publishers and publicists and book sellers and even e-sellers of books and e-books is rapidly losing its stickiness.  In August 2010, Seth Godin, a prolific, best-selling author, announced his departure from his longtime publisher, Pearson PLC’s Penguin Group because “…his blog attracts an estimated 438,000 followers…” and that means he knows who reads his books.  “’Publishers provide a huge resource to authors who don’t know who reads their books…”, but that isn’t the case for Mr. Godin.  What are Mr. Godin’s plans for the future?  He’ll hire his own editor and someone who can format his book for electronic distribution and then, it’s up to him to decide how he wants to “package” up the work, how to price it, and how to sell it.  

While Mr. Godin thinks that there still is role for publishers, not everyone agrees.  An e-book publisher, Mark Coker of Smashwords, says that not only will major authors consider this approach, but also those mid-list authors who don’t get much marketing support from publishers.   Those who are not on any list are already in the business of self-publishing, self-promoting and self-distributing.  If top-list, mid-list, and not-on-a-list writers don’t need publishers – who does?

 Story #2:  Knowledge creation.

That’s right – knowledge creation.   When the developers of new knowledge (scholars and researchers) seek to publish their work in career-making academic or professional journals – the ones that christen what is and what is not knowledge – they participate in another time-intensive, complex, opaque process – peer review.  But even in the change-resistant halls of liberal arts academe, a big change has come to the business model of peer-reviewed articles.  A crowd-sourced approach has emerged.   

The Shakespeare Quarterly “posted online four essays not yet accepted for publication, and a core group of experts…were invited to post their signed comments on the Web site MediaCommons, a scholarly digital network.”  This process contrasts with the traditional method in which a hand-selected and small group of academics evaluate submissions anonymously over a period of time which can drag on for years.   And how did what is now regarded as the traditional process come to be?  Like so many traditions which are resistant to change, “[it]…is not so much a gold standard but an effective accommodation to the needs of the field.”   

Yet, the belief persists that democratizing the peer review is not in the best interests of academics.  Many hold fast to the dogma that only experts in the field can truly evaluate whether work makes a significant and unique contribution to the field.  This belief is anchored by the reality that to receive tenure, scholars must be published in peer-reviewed journals.  Only when the authors of the articles that underwent this new process were assured that, if accepted, their pieces would be counted as “peer-reviewed” were they willing to participate.   (Much like the process of ending foot-binding in China, the system (a set of practices) has to change in order to make change stick.   See a previous blog post Formula for Positive Change.)

Story #3:  Manufacturing by printer.

Order of magnitude cost reductions, extreme customization, and just-in-time production – the 3-D printer is bringing all of this to the manufacture of prosthetics, architectural models, furniture, fixtures, cars, and houses.  3-D printers deposit layers of material, often plastic or metal, one on top of the other, controlled by algorithms, to build up an object, layer by layer. 

Bespoke Innovations will use the technology to create customized prosthetics at about one-tenth the cost of traditional prosthetics which are, by comparison, generic templates.  Contour Crafting is using the technology to transform the business of building homes.   A 3-D printer that sits on a tractor trailer does away with most of the manual labor involved in the construction of the structure of the house by not only fabricating walls, but also structural supports and conduits for electrical, plumbing, and heating and cooling systems in one pass.  The Urbee is a completely printed car.  Kor Ecologic, the venture behind the Urbee, is using a volunteer-based, collective approach to bring the car to the market (you can make a donation via PayPal to fund the project).  The president and chief technology officer of Kor Ecologic (Jim Kor) says that the 3D printing technology “lets us eliminate tooling, machining, and handwork, and it brings incredible efficiency when a design change is needed…If you can get to a pilot run without any tooling, you have advantages.”

As the software required to create the design programs plummets in cost and the cost of accessing the printers puts them in reach of more commercial applications, a new business ecosystem is developing in which designers use software to encode their visions and then send these programs to printers whose equipment produces them.  As entire classes of labor costs are removed from the equation, the dynamics of labor cost arbitrage are rebalanced making outsourcing to cheap labor countries which must factor in shipping costs less attractive.  What has seemed inexorable, the United States’ inability to retain its position as a dominant player in the manufacture of goods, might not be as much of a foregone conclusion as it once appeared.

Conclusion

These stories about systems that are in the midst of or on the cusp of radical disruption are all stories about expected surprise.  If you are willing to move outside of the system of which you are a part, and look at it as if you were an outsider, no matter what system you are part of, you would most likely see signs that big changes are coming.  If you subscribe to the idea of the expected surprise, then you know what happens to the rest of a business model when one key element undergoes a transformation. It’s like dominoes that are lined up in such a way that they connect ever so slightly with one another – when one falls, the others must follow.

Sources:

  • “Author to Bypass Publisher for Fans,” Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg, The New York Times, Tuesday, August 24, 2010.
  • “Scholars Test a Web Alternative to the Venerable Peer Review,” Patricia Cohen, The New York Times, Tuesday, August 24, 2010.
  • “3D Printing Spurs a Manufacturing Revolution,” Ashlee Vance, September 13, 2010, sourced on 12/17/10 at: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/14/technology/14print.html
  • “The Urbee Hybrid – the first 3D printed car,” Ariel Schwartz, October 29, 2010, sourced on 12/17/10 at :   http://www.fastcompany.com/1698943/the-urbee-hybrid-the-first-car-to-have-its-body-3-d-printed
Filed Under: Business Model, Change, Innovation

Formula for Positive Change (Creating the New Normal)

November 2, 2010 By 1 Comment

If you’re PieLab, a café in Greensboro, Alabama that is the brain-child of design collective Project M, the formula for creating positive change in the world is simple:

PieLab = a neutral place + a slice of pie = conversation = ideas + design = Positive Change

Initially, what grabbed my attention about PieLab wasn’t the formula for positive change, but the fact that PieLab was envisioned as a kind of pop-up community center.  I had just come back from facilitating a visioning workshop where among the many ideas that were explored, the notion of pop-up facilities (inspired by the increasing prevalence of pop-up retail clothing stores and restaurants that have become possible because of the excess of empty retail space) was bandied about. 

The article suggests that applying the term pop-up “…implies that a concept may be too cutting edge to sustain.”   And, in the case of PieLab, that proved to be true.  PieLab’s story in a nutshell involved a mostly young group of visionaries who aspired to do good, descended on a disadvantaged town, and earnestly set about working their mojo.  They scored some early, modest successes, but failed to grasp the broader context in which they were trying to make change.  As a result, they slipped up and were forced to adjust to the reality that change is a long-haul commitment.  Most of the original team left and PieLab is now known informally as Pie – operating as a traditional cafe that is more integrated into the social and economic fabric of Greensboro.

I think that what the PieLab founders got wrong in their formula for positive change is that it doesn’t capture the element of the long-haul, uncertain process.  The end result of the formula is not positive change, but rather, the potential for positive change.   With that alteration, I think that the formula captures most of the necessary ingredients for change.

I set about applying it to my experience running a successful visioning workshop with a group of people who had never worked together before.  First, I thought about how a workshop devoted to organizational change and a café devoted to social change are similar and came up with these equivalencies:

  • PieLab = Safe, Secure Place/Space
  • Slice of Pie = Something to share/bond over/experience together
  • Conversation = High trust exchange
  • Design = Problem-focused questioning

My revised formula is this:

Workshop = Safe, Secure Place/Space + Something to experience together = High trust exchange + Problem-focused questioning =Potential for Positive Change

If it’s possible to create the potential for positive change (clearly in more environments than a workshop), what has to be in place to realize it? 

A special issue of the The New York Times Magazine devoted to women’s empowerment can be viewed as a series of inquiries into creating positive social change.  The approach that brought about the relatively swift (over the span of one generation) end to the practice of foot-binding in China is one notable example. 

 From my perspective, these are the major factors that led to changing the long-standing practice:

  • Understanding the larger system of which the practice/behavior is a part.
  • Creating institutions that support the changed behavior.
  • Positioning the change as outgrowth of the group’s natural positive progress, rather than a corrective response to failure.
  • Luck (or timing or patience)

Here’s a very condensed version of how the practice of foot-binding ceased in China:  Those advocating against foot-binding at the outset were Christian missionaries.  They invested the time necessary to understand the Chinese culture, learning the language and studying the texts essential to formal Chinese education.  The anti-foot-binding advocates formed relationships with influencers – leaders in the Chinese political and social structure.  China while continuing to believe that it was superior to Western civilizations had suffered military defeats at the hands of Westerners which caused some of its leaders to think about engaging with the West so that China would be better able to deal with global challenges.  

The anti-foot-binding advocates shared information from the West that convinced these leaders that Westerners thought that the practice of foot-binding was a sign of cultural and intellectual backwardness.   These leaders realized that such opinions would create a political disadvantage for the Chinese and they became vocal opponents of the foot-binding.  However, foot-binding was a requirement for marriage in China – so part of changing its practice had to include changing the practices surrounding marriage.  The anti-foot-binding advocates worked tirelessly to form a community of parents who pledged that they would not bind their daughters’ feet and they would not permit their sons to marry women with bound feet.   In this way, the anti-foot-binding advocates created a “new normal” which did not so much disrupt society as hurry it along in a positive direction.  Of course, none of this would have been possible if these factors had not occurred at the same time – which you can view as a matter of luck, brilliant timing, or long-suffering patience.

A formula shorthand that sums up how to realize the potential for positive change:

Realizing the Potential for Positive Change =  PieLab + No More Foot-binding in China = High trust exchange + problem-focused questioning + understand the system + the right change agents + luck = The New Normal

Sources:

  • Project M website
  • Pie + Design / Change, John T. Edge, The New York Times Magazine, October 10, 2010
  • The Art of Social Change, Kwame Anthony Appiah, The New York Times Magazine, October 24, 2010
Filed Under: Change

Do we need to rethink leadership?

October 13, 2010 By 1 Comment

A recent article in The New York Times, “The Boss is Robotic, Rolling Up Behind You,” describes mobile or telepresence robots that are being used in settings as diverse as hospitals and software design companies to get closer to delivering the promise of a hologram – bringing a real-time, interactive version of a person into a place when they are physically located somewhere else, usually hundreds or thousands of miles away.  The robots look nothing like a person – they are all clearly machines and from the photos appear to be about 4-5 feet tall, topped with video monitors that broadcast the operator’s face.  What’s so amazing about these robots is that over time, people begin to interact with them in the same way that they would if the operator were there in person. 

Knowledge and skill gained from building robots for the military to dismantle bombs and complete other dangerous tasks has allowed the companies that design and build them to develop a class of robots that do less complex tasks and are positioned in commercial markets at much lower price points.   It seemed to me as I read the article, that this is the classic disruptive innovation from below that Clayton Christenson described in his book, The Innovator’s Dilemma.  These robots are cheap (relatively speaking), have limited functionality, and it’s not exactly clear “what job they are doing” (it’s tempting to say that they deliver just-in-time expertise at the lowest possible cost, but still, I suspect we can’t yet know).   As a result, it’s not really clear what industries they will disrupt – commercial real estate?   Air travel?  And, it’s not really clear that they themselves will be the disruptive force.   Instead, it’s more likely that they are another point along a technology continuum that has created new organizing principles which change the possibilities for how we work together. 

I remember when the way in which I have worked for the past 20 years began to be possible.  In the late 1980s/early 1990s, low cost overnight delivery (Fed Ex), low cost information storage (floppy disks), and low cost real-time information transmission (the fax machine and the break-up of AT&T) converged to create a different set of possibilities for working.  At that time, I was working for a small (now it would be called a boutique) consultancy with locations in three cities on the east coast.  These technology and industry innovations meant that our work teams no longer had to physically be in one place to get work done, nor did the team members have to physically travel to exchange information rapidly.   And the changes kept coming – from floppy disks to CDs and CD-players to the internet to video chatting on a PC for free on Skype, to replacing the landline with a mobile phone and then with VoIP, from desktops to portable computers (lunchboxes) to laptops to netbooks to Blackberries to iPads.   Suddenly, I could be part of large company with a national position and work primarily from my home.  And now, I can be the hub of a one-woman consulting network working exclusively from my home office and in the future…who knows, have several robot/avatars that are activated at client sites to bring me inside their organizations so that I can work alongside project teams? 

All of the changing possibilities in the way in which work gets done made me wonder why there has been so little change in the way in which many large companies conceive of and implement leadership (which I loosely think of as providing the guiding force from within the organization).  When technology is moving in a direction that allows roles within work teams to be filled with the best talent from anywhere, why are leadership roles still embodied in one person over time instead of whoever is best at filling the role at various times?   Why haven’t dramatic changes in the possibilities for how we work together had a greater impact on the way that our organizations are led?

Most leadership theories examine the individual in the leadership role and the relationship between his/her competencies, skills, style and organizational success.   Very little of the leadership literature questions whether a leader has to be a single individual who is in a role for a fixed period of time or whether a leader can be a rotating cast of characters filling a role whose parameters shift frequently, even though this is what technology suggests is becoming possible.   Even Hersey and Blanchard’s situational leadership which proposed that leadership style needed to be relevant to the task at hand, didn’t propose that the leader him- or herself might need to be relevant to the task at hand.

Back in 1996, James Traub’s article about the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra captured my imagination because it presented a case in which leadership was not vested in a person, but was filled by different people at different times.   Traub asked us to consider in what situations “…the need for final authority is so overwhelming that the model of the benevolent dictator must apply” by challenging us with a case study of the orchestra which “…is a community of people dedicated to achieving a degree of unanimity that is almost unimaginable in a democratic society.”    The conductor-free chamber orchestra was conceived as an antidote to the extreme dissatisfaction most musicians who play in traditional orchestras experience.  “…[W]hile symphony musicians score extremely high on questions designed to measure ‘internal motivation,’ they rank seventh among thirteen occupations – right behind federal-prison guards – on ‘general satisfaction.’”  

Orpheus has developed an approach to playing music called “the core” which is a form of representative democracy.  “…[T]he executive committee chooses a concertmaster, and each instrumental section a representative for every piece; this group works through questions of interpretation and phrasing before the orchestra’s first full rehearsal.”  Those who have studied Orpheus and the Orpheus musicians themselves believe that the intensity and extremely high degree of musicianship that they achieve is because of rather than in spite of their unique approach to leadership.   This brand of temporal fit-for-purpose leadership places responsibility and authority with each musician not only for his or her own contribution to a particular piece of music, but also for the entire piece. 

A high level of commitment not only to the narrow contribution that each individual makes, but also to the outcome achieved by the group as a whole is the holy grail of employee engagement that almost every organization strives to achieve.   Resources are poured into organizational development – performance management systems, competency models, talent management, leadership development, strategic alignment – but rarely, if at all, is the construct of leadership challenged in this thinking.  Could this be one reason why the hoped-for results of these efforts are frequently disappointing and elusive?  Is it time to radically reconsider leadership in an age when technology is transforming the possibilities for working together and when organizations desperately need a highly engaged workforce?

Sources:

  • “The Boss is Robotic, Rolling Up Behind You,” John Markoff, The New York Times, September 5, 2010.
  • “Passing the Baton,” James Traub, The New Yorker, August 26, 1996.
Filed Under: Leadership