connected coaching

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“Teaching and coaching are fundamentally about helping making other people better. Learning to do this can’t be done via shortcuts. It requires a willingness to be patient, to take your time and have a deep desire to develop your craft.” —@IamSporticus

My work over the past several decades has confirmed that the best leaders are constant learners. The essence of leadership or management in organizations today is helping make your networks smarter, more resilient, and able to make better decisions. Those in leadership positions need to be good learners.

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the new luddites

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Every fortnight I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds.

@Rhappe — “So much data. So little insight.”

@deewhock — “An intelligent, motivated person in a bureaucracy is like a long haired hunting dog in a patch of cockle burrs. Energy and capacity are diverted from the hunt to removal of the impediments.”

@lukewsavage — “Billionaires like Bezos and Musk are obsessed with space travel because it helps them maintain the illusion that they’re technological prometheans at the vanguard of civilizational progress, rather than greedy plutocrats who happen to own expensive bits of paper.”

@jatodaro — “So you’ve got a huge campus where employees can roam around and find a comfortable space to work. No one can locate you and everyone uses Slack to communicate, Zoom to talk, and Dropbox to share files. You’re already working remotely, you’re just driving to an office to do it.”

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chaos and order

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chaordic [kay-ordʹ-ic], adj., fr. E. chaos and order. 1. The behavior of any self-organizing, self-governing, organ, organization, or system that harmoniously exhibits characteristics of both order and chaos. 2. Patterned by chaos and order in a way not dominated by either. 3. Blending of diversity, chaos, complexity and order characteristic of the fundamental organizing principles of evolution and nature. —Dee Hock

Our institutions and markets are failing us. We need new structures and the return to tribalism currently manifested as populism will not save us. As the advent of the printing press helped usher in an age of inquiry, first in the Christian religion and later in the enlightenment and scientific revolution, so we have to engage in creating new organizational and governance structures for a global network era.

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self-determination ensures democracy

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Self-determination theory (SDT) is based on three innate human requirements: Competence, Relatedness, and Autonomy.

Deci and Ryan [the researchers] claim that there are three essential elements of the theory:

1. Humans are inherently proactive with their potential and mastering their inner forces (such as drives and emotions)
2. Humans have an inherent tendency toward growth development and integrated functioning
3. Optimal development and actions are inherent in humans but they don’t happen automatically

If we change our operating models we can change the world. Models premised on SDT will serve the needs of everyone, not just management or the shareholders.

“Psychological self-determination is expressed in three different dimensions. In the first dimension people want to live their lives the way they choose to live it. This is the sense of sanctuary. The second way people express their psychological self-determination is in the widespread desire for voice: we want to be heard and we want our voices to matter. The third way we want our psychological self-determination to be expressed is in our desire to be connected: we want to be part of communities.” —The Support Economy

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the new networked norm

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Our societies have grown from a collection of tribes, added institutions, and later developed markets. These aligned with revolutions in communications: from oral, to written, to print. The network era began with the advent of electric communications, though it is by no means completely established.

Each type of societal structure has required different types of leadership. Alexander the Great was probably one of the best tribal leaders. He led his armies from the front and created an enormous empire. After his death, some of his generals created long-lasting institutions not based on military tactics. Ptolemy’s library at Alexandria is one example. Later, institutions like the Catholic Church dominated more through soft institutional power, rather than wielding swords. Others did that for them when necessary. As a market society developed, new types of economic and financial power were exercised by the Fuggers and the Hanseatic League in Europe. Later, captains of industry in America, such as Andrew Carnegie, would dominate in their markets, often circumventing existing institutional power.

As we enter the network era we see companies like Apple dominating, often ignoring Wall Street pundits. With network effects, Google can control the online advertising market, making market competition almost irrelevant. Power shifts as a society’s organizing principles change. In almost all organizations today, positional power is alive and well. For some managers, this is all the power they have, and they are at the mercy of the organizational hierarchy. If they lose their position, they lose their power. More effective leaders influence people through their social leadership abilities. This is what most modern leadership training programs focus on developing. In the network era, effective leaders also have to build their reputational power through connected leadership.

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business schools are a technology of the last century

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Our dominant models of how we organize and work as a society are fundamentally changing as we transition from an Information-Market economy to a Creative-Network economy. Charles Green succinctly explained the order in which this transition happens:

“Ideas lead technology. Technology leads organizations. Organizations lead institutions. Then ideology brings up the rear, lagging all the rest—that’s when things really get set in concrete.”

I broke this down in detail in a post on the new business ideology. This was further explained in Adapting to Perpetual Beta, my volume on leadership in the network era.

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social finds

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Every fortnight I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds.

@BenRiseman: “W.E.B. Du Bois, in his last speech in 1957 said, ‘Believe in life! Always human beings will live and progress to greater, broader, and fuller life. The only possible death is to lose belief in this truth simply because the great end comes slowly, because time is long.’”

@White_Owly: “The fact that many who attended elite schools include it in their profiles decades later says more about social than intellectual capital.”

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out on the edge

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Last month in Berlin I gave a keynote at the Landing Festival entitled, It’s your Network, Stupid. I explained that to find new ideas and information, loose social networks are best. Weak social ties enable us to find a wide variety of information and ideas, often relatively quickly using networked technologies. In this way a diverse social network can yield a lot of information.

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what they don’t teach at university, but should

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Even after four years of study, many students leave their institutions of higher learning only to find themselves inadequately prepared for what is next. University graduates often go on to get a certificate in an applied area in hopes of getting a job. Frequently graduate students who do not go into academia will find themselves adrift.

So what the heck have these institutions been doing with the valuable time of their students? Four years is a good chunk of time to accomplish something. We are told they are mastering a field. A field that often does not exist outside the institutional walls. But there are portable skills that can be learned WHILE at school. These are skills, like critical thinking, that universities purport to teach but usually do not.

No graduate should leave their institution without a good knowledge of the professional field in which they want to continue. There is no excuse today for students not to be connected to professionals outside their school. Keeping students focused only on their academic studies is akin to a prison sentence, expecting that the same world awaits as the one they left several years earlier.

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viking finds

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Every fortnight I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds.

“It’s all right to tell a man to lift himself by his own bootstraps, but it is cruel jest to say to a bootless man that he ought to lift himself by his own bootstraps.”  —Martin Luther King Jr.

Return of the Vikings: Nordic Leadership, by/via @indalogenesis

So, let us start with something very central to the Vikings. The Nine Noble Virtues:

Courage, Truth, Honour, Fidelity, Discipline, Hospitality, Self-reliance, Industriousness, Perseverance

The virtues are derived from ancient Nordic Mythology. It is believed that the Vikings lived their lives according to this set of values. Values of which each can be found in many religions and cultures, but somehow, when you combine them they form a unique basis for leadership – and a way of living. Chris Shern interviewed 50 very different leaders with very different perspectives on Nordic Leadership as part of his research for the book. And what he found for them to have in common were qualities similar to the Nine Noble Virtues. But we will get back to that later …

To Chris Shern the thinking was, that the Nordic approach to leadership is better equipped than others to meet the challenges of a chaotic future. Gone are the days when a boss could sit back and hold on to all the knowledge and information and you repeatedly had to go and ask him whether you can or cannot do something. What Chris Shern saw among the Nordic leaders was courage to delegate great responsibility to their employees, and for the employees to have the discipline and self-reliance that is needed to handle great tasks. This kind of corporation is depending on fidelity and for everyone to take an honour in their work. Chris Shern also found that all the people he interviewed were driven by something more than just making money. It was about having a purpose and giving back.

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