Bowling regardless?

Putman’s work made me think that perhaps many corporations these days have a single objective: bowling. That is: keep moving, reaching targets and objectives, increasing the return on investment and pleasing shareholders, whatever it takes, whether their people do so bowling alone or in a league. Don’t get me wrong, for many this is what companies are for. But it is precisely this ‘bowling, regardless’ - whether alone, in groups, in teams or otherwise - that should worry leaders who are interested in the building of social capital.

If Putman is right and his findings could be extrapolated to the nine-to-five world, then, companies that truly profess a ‘bowling regardless’ philosophy should be in trouble in the long run. They risk losing the precious wealth of ‘associability’, the voluntary association of individuals in order to obtain a collective gain above the individual gain. A corporation of loners would be the equivalent of Putman’s ‘nation of loners’ and it would be equally dangerous because of its false appearance of ‘league-bowling’. As leader-builder you need to decide what kind of bowling you want!

The third component of the organisation’s I.Q. assets is architectural capital. This has to do with ‘ways of doing’ and ‘ways of being organised’. I explore some of these aspects in my book The Leader with Seven Faces in the face ’How you do it’.

The leader-builder-architect creates environments where collective I.Q. grows. He is a leader of tangible and intangible assets and the houses he built can be seen as his legacy. Which I will talk about in my next post.

Creating associability

If these ‘organisations within the organisation’ do exist (in the way the literature points to them), do they matter anyway? I suggest they do. The condition of ‘associability’ is perhaps one of the main sources of the so called ‘social capital’ of the firm. It is worth distinguishing between ‘associability’ and ‘sociability’. Whilst ‘sociability’ has to do with the universal propensity to socialise, ‘associability’ is defined by the ‘willingness and ability of individuals to subordinate personal goals and associated actions to collective goals and actions’. In other words, a sociable environment where people meet, discuss, interact and interchange communication is a prerequisite for ‘associability’, but does not necessarily lead to it; to the enormous added value of the ‘association’.

The social capital of the firm is based upon internal and external relationships. It produces mutual benefits, for the individual and for the organisation itself. It is an asset different from other forms of capital such as bricks-and-mortar (physical capital) or knowledge and technical ability of the individuals (human capital). As an asset, it must be managed like other types of capital. Volatile, short-term or superficial relationships will invariably also generate volatile and ephemeral social capital, or a so-called ‘low social capital environment’. In these organisations, any form of leadership appeal for collective goals is a contradiction in terms. Individuals may get on with their jobs (as in their ‘job descriptions’), and even do them well, but they may not be interested in anything else, certainly not in any form of collective collaboration that, in most cases, entails ‘going the extra mile’, beyond formal responsibilities. And it is in those circumstances where the real added value is generated and a real difference is made.

Robert Putman - a political scientist who has researched American social habits - discovered that, progressively, people are less inclined to join in collective activities, engage in communitarian projects, give money to charity etc. In other words, less donations, less voluntary work, less voting is converting American society – he says - into ‘a nation of loners’, where - and here’s the metaphor - ‘bowling alone’ has replaced league bowling (See his book Bowling Alone).

Putman also refers to the concept of ‘social capital’ which he defines as ‘connections between individuals, social networks and the norms of reciprocity and trustworthiness that arises from them‘. When social capital is diminishing, something precious in the fabric of the civil society is disappearing.

Is there a contradiction between Putman’s findings in a society that, to him, is composed of members ‘bowling alone’ and organisational life in that same society, where a constant sermon about ‘league bowling’ (we are a team, we work as a team etc.) seems to dominate?

Is it possible that there are two societies: the nine-to-five of ‘bowling together’ and the five-to-nine and weekends of ‘bowling alone’? Is Putman - by the very nature of his target research - ignoring that (professional) people spend most of their time ‘at work’, and therefore, bowling with others in the nine-to-five teamocracy? Are we in a schizophrenic society? At the cynical end of the questions, could Putman be right and his ‘bowling alone theory’ be extended to the nine-to-five world? In other words, is the bowling together in the teamocracy just a superficial appearance whilst in the individual’s heart he is still bowling alone?

Leading the organisation you can’t see

Stuart Kauffman, of the Santa Fe Institute (a world centre for the study of complexity), explains some of the mechanisms in the generation of networks in a metaphor about ‘buttons and threads’ (In his book At home in the Universe). Scatter 20 buttons on a table, randomly choose two, connect them with threads and put them back. Repeat and repeat. At the beginning you are likely to choose buttons that are unconnected and that you have not picked up before, but, after a while, you will start picking up at random buttons that were already connected. Clusters of connected buttons will emerge.

A form of ‘stable system’ has been created from an apparently chaotic and random interaction. At the mid-point of this journey, when the ratio of threads to buttons is 0.5, the system experiences a ‘phase transition’ or a sudden change in the size of the largest connected cluster. Suddenly, you realise that you have a ‘visible mass’ in front of you. This is the ‘transition point’ when, for example, water freezes into ice.

Kauffman explains via simulation how, in a similar way, the ‘interactions’ of the total number of human genes gravitate to a smaller number of ‘systems’. This is a number that - regardless of whether you are dealing with buttons and threads, genes, or any set of ‘units’ - tends to be pretty constant, roughly the square root of the number of original units. In the case of genes-to-cells, all the potential ‘gene interactions’ (for lack of a better way to describe them) do not generate a chaotic number of ‘clusters’: there is a definite number of known different types of cells in the human body.

The progression of genes-to-cells follows Kaufmann’s ‘order for free’ mathematics, as in the buttons and threads case. It’s a journey from chaos to stability, from something that seems like random or chaotic interactions to some sort of stable system: the ice from the water, the cells from the genes. Chaos and random connections do not seem to produce more chaos (which can be a consolation in one’s life).

What does this have to do with organisations? Quite a lot... Individuals in organisations establish networks of interactions and communications. Some of them are ‘official’ and ‘designed’: teams, task forces, committees etc. It is the teamocracy part. But more interesting are the ones that may be formed like Kaufmanns’s buttons: emergent clusters of individuals, not designed by the boss, but ‘self-generated’ by the interactions between them.

The literature describing ‘non-designed’ groups or associations inside the firm has become more and more solid in recent years. Self-managed teams are often interpreted in terms of semi-spontaneous associations that don’t need a formal boss to achieve their objectives. The largely fallen-from-grace ‘knowledge management’ movement has created the term ‘communities of practices’ to describe networks of individuals linked by a common objective or interest (including the finding of solutions to an organisational problem). People following the systems approach and the concept of ‘the learning organisation’, tend to refer to ‘networks of commitment’ with more emphasis on the mobilisation of motivation and energy in the organisation. ‘Emergent teams’ is another generic term frequently used. More on the spontaneity side, ‘hot groups’ have been described as mobilisation of individuals with common interests and drivers of real organisational creativity. Finally, ‘TeamNets’ have been introduced in the UK as a ‘way of encouraging voluntary relationships in team formation, information exchange and problem solving’.

All the above are examples of the richness of internal relationships within the organisation, a form of capital waiting to be unleashed and constituting part of the social capital of the firm. The leader-architect role is one of facilitating, enhancing, promoting and fostering relationships. He has two choices: collaboration by design (teams, task forces) and emergent collaboration. The second is much scarier to lead!

What do all those ‘emergent groups’ have in common? Despite the different labels, probably a lot. For a start, they live outside the organisation chart with different degrees of both independence and spontaneous formation. It may be that, like in Kaufman’s buttons, they are somehow invisible at the beginning of their life and it is not until some level of interaction has been reached that they manifest themselves as a proper system. Leaders can no longer ignore ‘the invisible world’!

Leadership and Social Capital

The second form of capital in the organisational I.Q. is social capital. This is the asset created by relationships, both internal and external, both in quantity and quality. The modern business organisation of today has a web of external connections. Alliances, partnerships, joint-ventures,etc. are common. The web may be so vast that it is bound to contain ‘nodes’ where competitors sit. Companies may find themselves competing and collaborating at the same time. It has been called co-opetition. Internally, organisations are rich in connections and relationships but most of the time they are ignorant, focusing only on a relatively small part of human collaboration models: the teams. I have called the current business organisation a teamocracy because this model of collaboration has become coterminous with ‘organisation’.

In today’s business organisation, the organisation chart is dead. The job description is dead. But, as of Mark Twain’s, the death of the structure may have been grossly exaggerated. For clues, see Biology.

Like biological organisms, business organisations are in continuous adaptation to stimuli (external and internal environments), and must change and evolve accordingly. Biological organisms do not understand one year budget cycles, quarterly reporting on activity, one-off post-retreat reorganisations, static organisation charts, two-page-forever job descriptions, or annual objectives set up in January and assessed in December. They grow, generate antibodies, move, reproduce, get smaller or bigger, and die at different paces and rhythms.

Their ‘ultimate structure’ is created by their functionality “The function creates the organ”, I learnt from my anatomy teacher. Also, they can not be fully explained without reference to another system to which they belong or are connected to. In fact, they are complex systems that are better understood through the glasses of complexity theory.

Organisations may be just the same. What happens inside them can’t be tracked by the static organisation chart and the job description manual. The different components (people, groups, teams, networks of influence, etc.) are linked by an information flow which is far from static. The organisation is an information network. Leaders today need to understand this. Organisation-chart-management - fiddling around with reporting, solid lines, dotted lines, any combination - is like grammar. It has to be right. But leaders should play their role in literature. Mistaking one for the other is not a good sign of leadership. Let’s take a further look at this property of the organisation to create its own connections, because if this is true, then leaders have to be aware and also lead this ‘more invisible part’.

The investors metaphor

Hosting talent is developing the organisation’s human capital. One of the roles of the leaders-architects is to build good hosts and hubs of something that they do not own: the individual’s talent. Nobody has put it better than Thomas O. Davenport with his ‘investor metaphor’ of workers (in his book Human Capital). Employees were once treated as ‘cost’, then as ‘most valuable assets’ and now they should be seen – he says- as investors, that is, investors of their own human capital. It is a very interesting concept from the leadership perspective.

What do you do when you invest? You go and find a place where your capital is going to grow! At the end of the year, or whatever other period, you are going to compare what you put in and what you got out! It follows that people should go and work at places where their human capital is going to grow, and where, in the process, it’s being used by the organisation. In this model, leaders are more like investment fund managers, creating the conditions for the growth. As such, they should be measured by their ability to show the growth. And this is a tricky one because whilst we are good at managing tangible assets, we’re not necessarily that good at managing intangible ones. If your people are not sure about what ‘intangible’ means, use this:

A rich American lady visits the most famous hat maker in Paris. She sees a beautiful, exquisite, long ribbon and immediately falls in love. The hat maker takes the ribbon in his hands, does a few twists with it and creates a stunning hat. Brilliant! The lady grabs it immediately. “How much is it?” she asks. “Five thousand Euros”, the hat maker says. “Five thousand Euros!” the lady exclaims, “But, it’s just a ribbon!” “Madam”, the hat maker says, “the ribbon is free.”

100K investment lost

It has always surprised me. Corporations are resigned to let their best entrepreneurs go on the grounds that it is normal for those people to want to exit corporate life. They are not good at dealing with many practices and procedures, hate too much reporting, need an agile ‘entrepreneurial environment’, want to be more free, to make decisions that matter and to feel that they can see the differences they make. So they have to go! Great! So we acknowledge that rigidity, over-reporting, lousy decisions and lack of freedom are an inevitable part of corporate life.

If a £2,000 laptop is missing from the office, we will launch an investigation. If an entrepreneur leaves to create his own show because he can’t stand the constraints of the company, we call it a ‘natural fact of life’. I heard this comment many years ago and it’s still valid today. How interesting! Instead of fixing the internal rigidity problems we prefer to let human capital go in search of a more motivating environment. We will even have a party to say goodbye and celebrate the loss. Accountants will be happier because they have just made a saving on the balance sheet. It’s the surreal world of management: let somebody go and you’ll save money.

It is probably impossible to pretend that the entire culture, systems and processes of a medium-sized or big company changes overnight to accommodate for entrepreneurial groups on the inside, but can we do anything about it? Yes, we can! Provided that the leadership is not too scared to ‘allow’ different operating structures to cohabit within the firm, that there is no obsession with uniformity of systems and that the focus is to make the most of those entrepreneurs at the gates (that is, in this case, entrepreneurs about to get out), there are definitely ways.

And I’ll look into that more in detail in my next post.

But I never heard the builders!

Space is not necessarily about solitude, as I said before. Constantine P. Cavafy, a poet who died in 1933, wrote a little poem called Walls. This is how it goes:

Walls

With no consideration, no pity, no shame,
they have built walls around me, thick and high.
And now I sit here feeling hopeless.
I can’t think of anything else: this fate gnaws my mind, because I had so much to do outside.
When they were building the walls, how could I not have noticed!
But I never heard the builders, not a sound.
Imperceptibly they have closed me off from the outside world.

Many people in our organisations reach late age surrounded by walls (their own career pathways, the single track pursuit of success, the 365/24/7 busy-ness as leader), only to realise that there are walls when it is too late. Those people will shout, “But I never heard the builders! I was doing my emails on my Blackberry and there was nothing in Outlook about any walls of any kind. Did I miss a meeting about walls? What’s happened to me? Julia! (calling his last PA) Julia!” Julia can’t answer. She is not deaf but those walls are so thick!

►Those who hear the builders

People who leave an organisation do so for a variety of reasons. One of them is sometimes the feeling that ‘the walls’ are getting thicker and taller. They realise at some point that their personal or professional development requires that they push themselves outside those walls. In some cases, it means the next job, next context. In many cases, it means to start a business on their own. In the last decades, there has been an explosion of people ‘going solo’, ‘liberating themselves’ from corporate life, ‘becoming their own boss’, etc. This has been particularly noticeable in the US. There is a healthy, entrepreneurial, adventurous side of this that fits very well in the traditional ‘American dream’, in whatever version there is these days. But there is also a sad side for ‘the company’.

And I will discuss that a bit more in my next post.

Sitting quietly alone

The French philosopher Pascal said that “all of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone”. It is a valid statement today. Modern life, organisational life, business life is not terribly conducive to letting ourselves be with ourselves ‘in a room alone’. But the need to find that ‘lost space’ is greater than ever.

All this stuff about psychological spaces and protection of time will also sound incredible stupid to the always-on executive, the one who never switches off. As Michèle’s husband says, this kind of leader and the company’s server are a continuum via a wireless umbilical cord recently called, amongst other names, Blackberry.

As leader, or leader-to-be, or leader in development…. you should look into all these issues seriously. Some people take a view that it is simply logistics, a question of good time management. Other people however tend to think that there is a more fundamental problem behind the pervasive and ubiquitous busy-ness of executive life.

There is little question that concepts of reality are different depending on what view you take. And - as I said in the introduction of my book Leader with Seven Faces and repeat in my Leadership seminars - the answers to these questions are personal. Unfortunately, the consequences of the answers are not.

As a leader who builds organisations (ideas projects, common purpose around a vision), how you choose to answer matters. And not only to you but to everybody else depending on you. Not a minor burden.

If you want to read more about leadership or want to continue reading from the above, you can read it all in my book The Leader with Seven Faces: finding your own ways to practice leadership in today’s organization.

You can also read some of the resources on leadership posted on the left or contact us for more information.

‘Social space’

Mothers are very often trapped in a vicious circle of child-feeding, nappy-changing and sleepless nights (My general practitioner says to them, “YOU will understand why sleep deprivation is barred under the Geneva Convention”). They are a good example of always-doing-not-much-time-for-being. Sometimes this period of their life becomes a-social (!) with baby-talk occupying much of daily airtime. Their need for ‘space’ is often translated not into need for sleep, isolation and tranquillity as you would have expected, although those are, of course, also very welcome! But into the opposite: opportunity to talk to other adults, socialise and recover a sense of connection with the world!

Also, people mistake this issue of protecting time and space with the famous ‘work-life balance’. It is often assumed by people that a work-intensive environment with not much flexibility for those protections must surely be compensated by a non-work one full of ‘space’ and ‘time’. (Watch the language! We call ‘life’ the other side of ‘work’ in the work-life balance, which says a lot about our concept of work.) But being trapped in an environment with perhaps reasonable ‘place’ but no ‘space’ and ‘no’ time is not exclusive to work. Family life with its commitments and challenges (and not only for mothers!) may equally be one of non-space, and the same principles apply. So, let’s not get this wrong. Space is not necessarily about solitude!

I make no apologies for my insistence on the protection-of time-and-space despite the fact that, statistically, only some privileged managers, executives, leaders, employers or employees have access to mechanisms such as the ones that create or protect them. Many people are trapped in jobs and levels of freedom and autonomy where their flexibility to seek a protection of space is limited. If they read this, they would think that you and I - lucky fellows who could still craft some spaces of freedom - are…well, just lucky! But everyone at every level should – and can - work at protecting whatever little time and space they can!

If you want to read more about leadership or want to continue reading from the above, you can read it all in my book The Leader with Seven Faces: finding your own ways to practice leadership in today’s organization.

You can also read some of the resources on leadership posted on the left or contact us for more information.

Leadership is creating spaces

As you may remember, in a previous post I said that the ultimate responsibility of the modern business leader was to protect time and to create ‘spaces’.

As a leader, the protection of time is intimately related to the creation of ‘space’ and possibly ‘place’. Space and Place are not the same. Space is mainly psychological. It gives people the ability to make the most of their ‘being’ by stop ‘doing’. People can work in a big place, like a big office, and have absolutely no space. All space and time may have been swallowed by Outlook, for example! Other people may work in not-very-big places and still enjoy (psychological) space.

As leader, a possible trap to avoid is to declare universal ways to create those spaces, the equivalent of telling somebody, “It is Thursday afternoon, have your space, think!” What leaders need to do is to be sensitive to our diversity and allow or create opportunities for a somehow tailored approach. However, ‘generic measures’ may work as a symbolic behaviour. Statistically, they may also reduce the amount of ‘trapped time and space’ for people. Some of them may look terribly simple such as a rule that says, “Do not reply to any email unless you are the main recipient”. That would exclude all replies in ‘cc’ and ‘bcc’ situations. Some organisations have tried ‘no meetings on Friday’ for example or ‘email server down’ for fixed dedicated hours. People may have a bit of laugh about these but sometimes this is the only way to instil new behaviours.

If you live a corporate life – corporate of a certain size, that is - you may have experienced the nuisance of ‘the server is down’ at some point. It starts as a small irritation because it is implicit that it will be solved soon by the IT department. The irritation grows enormously when this is not the case. Three hours later you are told that, in reality, you have a serious problem and it may take far longer than expected. Suddenly, people around you start looking relaxed!

There is a strong case for breakdown-time-by-design! The contagious beneficial effect of these otherwise simplistic micro-management measures is that people realise that, contrary to expectations, the corporation doesn’t go under, the sky doesn’t fall, projects continue and one was not as indispensable as one may have thought. General De Gaulle was quoted to say that cemeteries are full of indispensable people! Significantly, email traffic does not increase or bounce back after the blackout period, and the number of meetings on Monday to Thursday does not increase either.

How each of us interprets, feels and ‘uses’ space is perhaps different and can’t be imposed or dictated. You and I know people who seem to have ‘no space’, their constant ‘doing’ occupies their life. We also know other people who seem to manage to ‘protect themselves’ from the corrosion of non-stop-doing. When in my leadership seminars I ask people to reflect upon their own mechanisms and ‘label them’, they come up with long and in many cases amusing lists. Here is an example:

* Just-give-me-Space
* Inner space
* Space-Space
* Time-space
* Think-space
* Break space
* Parenthesis-Space
* Outside Course-Space
* Gone-Fishing-Space
* Beer-Space
* Awareness-Space
* How-are-you-Space
* Don’t-push-me-Space
* Embrace-silence-Space
* Doing-nothing-Space

People describe their ‘concepts of space’ in multiple ways. In some cases it means to physically transplant oneself to a ‘place’ where psychological space can be felt and experienced. One executive described his ‘gone-fishing-space’, meaning, don’t try, you’ll not find me, that’s it… Actually, he had never been fishing in his life but stole the concept from a movie where somebody stuck a sign outside the shop window. He liked the idea so much that he has used the ‘gone fishing’ since. Beyond the light idea and language that he used, what he portrayed was a genuine sense of a need to protect his individuality and ‘disappear’.

Another executive who described her ‘how-are-you-space’, told us (the group attending the seminar) that her daily business life did not have a moment for, what she described as, “a normal conversation with a normal person.” (Obviously she must have had a particular view of the normality of her business colleagues!). For her, the protection of her space, her individuality and her being meant almost the opposite of ‘gone-fishing’. In fact, her space creation and protection was about engaging herself with other (normal!) people in conversations that she qualified as ‘real life’. And that had to be done outside the office!

Which brings me to ‘social space’, which I will touch upon in my next post.

If you want to read more about leadership or want to continue reading from the above, you can read it all in my book The Leader with Seven Faces: finding your own ways to practice leadership in today’s organization.

You can also read some of the resources on leadership posted on the left or contact us for more information.

New Leaders now even easier to find

In the current business environment, success requires different skills, different mental models and different approaches to reality. So why do organizations still recruit people with the same skills they needed in the past?

Leandro Herrero’s book New Leaders Wanted explores the new skills and new approaches to reality. It maps the 12 kinds of people that can literally make or break a company's success and will guide you in your search to find those people. New Leaders Wanted will help you create the conditions for extraordinary success in your organization.

The book has been available in paperback from amazon.co.uk, amazon.com, Barnes and Noble, meetingminds and many other (online) retailers since July 2007.

It is now joined by the brand-new Adobe e-book version which is available from the following online retailers:

Powells - Diesel ebooks – Ebooks About Everything

You can read more about the book here.

Leadership and the End of Time

A consequence of the ‘no time’ ethos is the ‘fast ethos’. There is no time, so you have to run fast, be agile, be first, etc. Society, and therefore business, is working on a ‘time-space compression’. The American driven fast-food industry has known it for a long time. As it has been expressed, they have “taught us to eat standing, walking, running and driving and above all never to finish a meal, all in favour of the endless snack”. Eating has been reduced to “a purely instrumental, no-nonsense utilitarian activity which exemplifies a ‘re-fuelling ethos’, rather than an intrinsic source of pleasure to be anticipated”. No wonder the ‘Slow Food movement’ became a truly international one!

The ‘fast ethos’ goes hand in hand with the ‘ephemeral ethos’ that takes for granted that things will not last. It is a common feature in fast-cycle businesses where products become obsolete quickly, but it has also been extrapolated to the ethos of the entire new, 21^st century enterprise. We all have friends somewhere who have started their own company with the idea of selling it as soon as possible. Most of the ones I know, do not intend to stay with their own baby for long.

Venture capitalists and investors have long incorporated the ‘exit’ aspect as central to the deal. How to exit is as important as how to enter, and it is part of written business plans. I know of somebody who could not give me the name of his new company but had already thought out the ‘exit’. He is a young guy for whom this is the normal way to set up business. He did not know of any other, and looked at me puzzled at my suggestion of creating something that could last ‘forever’.

The end of time
A quick Amazon.com search will tell you that there are 800+ book titles which start with ‘The end of’. Affluence, man, distance, work, politics, nature, sanity, the future, ideology, capitalism are some of them. From those, there are more than twenty recent ones entitled The end of Time. This lot includes slow-digestion physics books sharing shelf space with more dubious ‘time management books’, which are an industry of its own. It’s funny to see what lives on the same shelf!

This ‘End of Everything’ may just reflect the fact that things have changed at an unprecedented pace, producing quantum discontinuity. In this accelerated time, fast is good, slow is suicidal. The fanciest business magazine is called Fast Company. Business Week, referring to the new start-up companies, announced a few years ago that it takes on average 10 days from idea to business plan and launch. It used to be months. Today, perhaps it’s an afternoon. Venture capitalists tell us that “whilst it used to be that the big eat the small, now the fast eats the slow”. ‘Speed’ is considered the new revered capability, a crossroads for new corporate competencies that include ‘surprise’.

This connection of no-time/ephemeral organisation/run fast in the meantime has profound implications on the reflection of your leadership style. Perhaps you have never stopped and reflected upon this (Ooops! I see, you can’t stop, you don’t have time, hm!).

Here are two different views on speed:

1. John Chambers, President and CEO of Cisco Systems, Inc.:

"Companies that are successful will have cultures that thrive on change, even though change makes most people very uncomfortable. In the end, you might just have speed, talent and branding. Those things may be the only differentiators”

Note speed first in the list!

2. Now meet Andy Grove, ex-CEO of Intel:

“This business about speed has its limits. Brains don’t speed up. The exchange of ideas does not really speed up, only the overhead that slowed down the exchange. When it comes down to the bulk of knowledge work, the 21st century works the same as the 20th century. You can reach people around the clock, but they won’t think any better or any faster just because you've reached them faster. The give and take remains a limiting factor.”

What I find interesting about those quotations from public statements is that they come from two leader executives of hi-tech industries, certainly involved in … making information flow faster, to say the least. They represent two legitimate views of the (business) world. What ‘side’ leaders take, matters because, as architects, the houses they build will be a reflection of their concepts of time and speed.

If you want to read more about leadership or want to continue reading from the above, you can read it all in my book The Leader with Seven Faces: finding your own ways to practice leadership in today’s organization.

You can also read some of the resources on leadership posted on the left or contact us for more information.

The ‘always on’ leader

You’re probably wondering why I find it so important to protect time. Well, time is an endangered species in the business world.

Meet Michèle. Born in France, she is a successful senior executive in an American company and has been living in the UK for the last five years. She is married to an Englishman, has no children, one big dog and a large country house close enough to Heathrow airport. She is first-and-last in the car park each day (first to arrive, last to leave) like a punctuality check for the security staff – “if this is Michèle, it must be 7 o’clock”. Because of the time difference with the USA, when she gets home, Michèle connects to her email system via the company-paid home broadband.

Evening glass of wine in hand, she often picks up the phone to talk to an American colleague if she sees something on screen that needs immediate attention. When travelling, she uses, of course, her Blackberry and laptop so flow of email is more or less ‘all the time/always on’. She uses all possible wi-fi spots in airport lounges or wireless internet in hotel rooms. She checks her voicemail system several times a day. Michèle has staff reporting to her in Germany and France and a boss in San Francisco. The latter likes to call her at ‘any time’. Michèle’s mobile is never switched off – it is not the number of calls from her boss (not many, to be fair) but the necessary feeling of ‘just in case’.

Michèle is a case of a 365/24/7 connected employee. She is an always-on executive. Her husband, an IT manager, told her once that she was in reality an ‘extension of the network’. Michèle’s contract says something about 38 hours a week but she is in fact working for her company ‘all the time’. She is part of a tribe of global managers with an unofficial, unwritten 365-days-a-year commitment who are ‘permanently on call’. Whether in the middle of cooking fettuccini or in the bath, Michèle is ‘never disconnected’. Her favourite verbal stereotype is “I have no time.” She usually means she is in a hurry but, in reality, the statement is actually a pure representation of her reality. She literally has NO time. She does not possess it anymore. She is part of an era described by Jacob Needleman, professor of Philosophy at San Francisco University, as ‘the time famine’. Michèle has given up her most valuable asset. Her last.

► 21^st Century Presenteeism

We all know one Michèle or two. Perhaps she is you? Forget all that stuff about work/life balance. The Michèles of this world have an all-in-one package. Corporations have reinvented ‘presenteeism’ (the old insistence that you must be at your desk, every day, clock-checked, etc.) in the form of a ‘365/24/7 on call, online, wireless, Blackberry, real-time manager’. In fact, for many senior managers, there is no longer the expectation of a nine-to-five physical presence at the office and the ‘rules’ have been ‘relaxed’(!)or replaced with occasional or, indeed, pre-agreed working-from-home days. Nine–to-five is no longer a good sign of commitment. 24h-open-shop is. What is largely perceived as liberation is nothing more than a sophisticated form of dependence. Place has been traded off for time. The company office or module has been traded off for a mobile telephone, a Blackberry and a fast internet access line at home.

Far be it from me to draw a picture here of malicious corporations with Machiavellian plans for a slave workforce, a subtle form of 24h control of people’s lives, written down by the Board in a secret black book. If there is any guilt at all, it is three-fold: employers, employees and the nature of the Information Era.

In the current knowledge economy, it is difficult to escape the multi-task, multi-assignment, any-place, any-time job. Technology allows us to be ‘anywhere’. Emails have brought an ‘end-of-distance’ to our desks. They bring to you instant data, and ask you for an instant answer from your instant knowledge pool (whilst you are probably drinking instant coffee). It is real-time business, a ‘24 hour society’. To be a successful manager progressing towards a bigger corporate destiny has become incompatible with a nine-to-five job or, indeed, a Monday to Friday one.

Airports on Sunday afternoons are full of executives ready to fly for a Monday morning meeting somewhere far away. Michèle does that. An additional problem is that she had not realised that fact until a colleague asked her recently to spend a few minutes on her own calendar. Michèle’s perception was: “Leaving on a Sunday evening? I do it occasionally.” In reality, for the previous six months, she had hardly had a full weekend at home. ‘Insight’ went out of the window in the company of ‘time’.

There is a real danger for organisations today to allow or promote the progressive evolution towards an entire always-on managerial and leadership class. Time-less leaders will be no good to anybody, corporations or families. When there is no time to think, there is no time for being. Time-less leaders are doing all the time, they have no time for being. If it sounds a bit New Age, so be it! Intelligent corporations, large or small, deserve intelligent leaders.

Intelligent leaders will have to encourage the protection of employees’ time as opposed to the absorption and further commoditisation of their last remaining asset. The more they act to protect a sort of endangered species, the more they will benefit from people with a functional brain who are actually capable of using their minds, as opposed to logarithmically multiplying the email traffic and skilfully contribute to the internal information pollution of the company. There is still time. Isn’t there?

If you want to read more about leadership or want to continue reading from the above, you can read it all in my book The Leader with Seven Faces: finding your own ways to practice leadership in today’s organization.

You can also read some of the resources on leadership posted on the left or contact us for more information.

Protecting time

For my first post in the New Year, I'd like to pick up the thread I started in my previous post.

I already touched on the time aspect in another of my posts and I'm going to continue with this post on protecting time.

I am not calling it ‘creating time’ because time is already there, we just need to ‘see it’ and protect it from all the usual physical and psychological invasions. Physically protecting time may look like a ‘close the door’ or ‘don’t come in’ behaviour, if you can do it! Psychologically, it means to carve out your own ‘space’ to be able to – and here the terminology is very personal - reflect, think, ponder etc. Those who ‘can’t’ because the simple constraint of pre-scheduled-time-to-think-and-reflect would block them from thinking and reflecting on anything, are the very same people who need protected time (and, incidentally, have back-to-back meetings in Outlook until 2023), and who have to learn to create those spaces. Period. Part of leadership development is to be able to become architects of those spaces, for oneself and the organisation they work for.

For many, the initial confrontation with ‘free time’ may look scary above all! But there is no other trick. Practice! In a recent seminar that I ran, I met somebody who disclosed to us that he organises ‘fake projects’ in his Outlook calendar and project-manages them accordingly. This is the only way to ensure that his time is not cannibalised by the thousand and one ways of time being used and commoditised in the organisation!

Managed by my calendar
Life in many organisations today looks like devolution of responsibility to Mr Microsoft Outlook. Outlook is in charge. (Apologies to the three or four other sole users of alternative systems!) It is the real boss. We may kid ourselves by thinking that it is a tool but, in reality, we report to it, which automatically makes Bill Gates our boss. Scary thought. ‘Managing my calendar’ has become a management term, de facto making the calendar and you one single entity. I am me and my Outlook.

As I mentioned above, it is no longer a joke that people ‘can’t find gaps in their calendar’ for many months in advance. Whatever you think of busy business life, it tells us a lot about the kind of organisations that we are developing, perhaps the one you are working for. I believe that time is man’s last asset. If this is true, and you have been booked until five p.m. on Wednesday 23 May 2016, you, my friend, have no assets left whatsoever and are mentally bankrupt.

If you want to read more about leadership or want to continue reading from the above, you can read it all in my book The Leader with Seven Faces: finding your own ways to practice leadership in today’s organization. You can also read some of the resources on leadership posted on the left or contact us for more information.

It’s time, stupid!

“It is time, stupid!” is how the much-needed campaign slogan would read. Time is man’s last asset. Perception of time is in part personal and in part cultural. Some people’s mind is of the ‘we-have-plenty-of-time-for’ type and others’ is of the ‘there-is-no-time-for’ type. Both may be looking at exactly the same issue, the same timetable, the same facts! These differences are well-rooted in our brains and differentiate us, one from the other. There are also big trans-cultural East-West differences although neo-global-capitalism is homogenising the business world and global executives start to look alike.

Yet, time is elusive. We have been taught that we have to make ‘efficient use of time’ but we are not sure what that means exactly other than being able to do what needs to be done! In the old days, we used to send our managers to time management courses. I have been invited (forced?) to attend several of these in my previous business life and always ended up with a new filofax, daytimer or some other kind of binder.

The fundamental flaw with these courses - both the old ones and the new electronic-world ones - is that they assume there’s a universal best way of managing a supposedly universal time-control-and-efficiency problem. They work for many people, don’t get me wrong. But they do not account for the individualised ‘concept of time’. For example, it is possible to dissect the day into bits and allocate them to, let’s say ‘meetings’. But it would be more difficult to universally distribute the time between let’s say ‘time to do’ and ‘time to think’. The latter is tricky because we all differ in the way we do it.

For many people, the simple dictation “now, stop and think” is a recipe for mental block. For these people, ‘thinking’ (about new ideas, new angles, possibilities of tackling A or B, solving X or Y, my next steps) is something that happens all the time. These people may have peaks of ‘aha!’ driving home, in the middle of the night or whilst attending a conference on a topic miles away from the ‘object of their thoughts’. Other people seem to grab this invitation with both hands adopting the opportunity to have a pre-scheduled afternoon dedicated to non-operational worries. It is part of our own personal and professional development to figure out what works best for us and - once we figured it out - to try to develop mechanisms to do what I have called ‘protect time’.

More on this in my next post...

If you want to read more about leadership or want to continue reading from the above, you can read it all in my book The Leader with Seven Faces: finding your own ways to practice leadership in today’s organization.

You can also read some of the resources on leadership posted on the left or contact us for more information.

A special kind of architect: the leader as builder!

From the multiple tasks, duties and roles expected, ascribed to or desired from the modern business leader, there is one that I would put well above anything else (and I really mean ‘ANYTHING ELSE’!) The ultimate responsibility of any business leader is the protection of time and the creation of ‘spaces’. In short, the leader as an architect. In my opinion, there are 3 dimensions of this leadership architecture:

• Time and space: good leaders build them, bad leaders destroy them. But in reality, these are vital assets for any organisation.

• Homes: leaders should build ‘homes’ for human capital, for relationships (social capital) and for ‘ways of doing’ (organisational capital).

• Legacy: what leaders leave behind DOES matter, because it has a direct impact on all of us. Unfortunately, this is usually explored a posteriori. Good leaders are conscious of their legacy all they time because they imagine and project a future.

And in the next few posts, I’ll be spending some time on those three dimensions. In the next post, I’ll start with ‘time’...

If you want to read more about leadership or want to continue reading from the above, you can read it all in my book The Leader with Seven Faces: finding your own ways to practice leadership in today’s organization.

You can also read some of the resources on leadership posted on the left or contact us for more information.

meetingminds Special Holiday Offer

meetingminds has published several of Dr Herrero's books which are all available from several online retailers (incl. but not limited to Amazon worldwide, Barnes and Noble, WH Smith, Borders, etc.). These books include so far:

Viral Change: the alternative to slow, painful and unsuccesful management of change in organizations

The Leader with Seven Faces: finding your own ways to practice leadership in today's organization

New Leaders Wanted: Now Hiring! 12 kinds of people you must find, seduce, hire and create a job for

meetingminds is now offering a special holiday promotion on all their books for the entire month of December. Order directly through meetingminds by December 31st 2007 and you will receive a 35% discount on the retail price of all Leandro Herrero's books!

(Order by December 10th 2007 and all your books will still be delivered on time for Christmas!)

How to get your discount?
Send an email to sales@meetingminds.com mentioning the title(s) of the book(s) you wish to buy and how many, including your full contact details. On receipt of your email, we will contact you to finalize the sale including your discount. It couldn't be easier!

For large orders, additional discounts may apply. Please contact us for more info.

meetingminds also offers substantial discounts to audiences where Dr Herrero speaks. If you would like to hire Dr Herrero for a speaking engagement, you can find more information here.

Married to your BlackBerry? Time to watch your assets (with ‘time’ being your last one!)

An article in The Times of a while ago (Don't let the boss get you hooked on BlackBerry) referred to a study soon to be published by Gayle Porter, professor of management at Rutgers University business school in Camden, New Jersey which amongst other things ‘foresees the day when workers will be able to sue their employers for insisting that they stay in touch with the office at all times’. The BlackBerry device has certainly become a pervasive vehicle for the 24/7/365/always-on executive that I described in my book, The Leader with Seven Faces. Though it’s quite popular in Europe, my experience with my US clients shows that it has reached full epidemic proportions over there. In my last meeting with a management team there, 100% of members had one, showed one off, paid attention to one. At the next meeting, I declared a blackberry-free zone and you could see some signs of withdrawal symptoms. It used to be the mobile phone (or cell phone as it is called there) and still is, but, boy, real-time emails are now the thing.

The article in question continued to quote the professor: “Owing to vested interests of the employers and the ICT industry signs of possible addiction — excess use of ICT and related stress illnesses — are often ignored. Employers rightfully provide programmes to help workers with chemical or substance addictions; addiction to technology can be equally damaging to the mental health of the worker.” And it quoted another study: “[…] which suggests that half of BlackBerry users would find it a matter of concern if they were parted from their device, and one in ten would be devastated. More than a third said that they would feel more stressed if they had to leave the office without it, and just over two thirds felt that the device improved the way they were perceived by clients, according to the research, which was conducted by T-Mobile. In all, 90 per cent of BlackBerry users described it as a business lifesaver.”

The tone of the article in The Times, by design, was one of employers actively promoting the BlackBerry addiction (as the current form of 7/24/365 ‘presenteism”, the old requirement of physically showing up 9-5 in an office) and employees, passively adapting and becoming slaves. This is a very simplistic view, which I am deliberately ‘reading’ from The Times in a caricature. The reality is that the cases of conscious employer-led toxicity may be far less important or greater than employees-led fashion and discovery of that continuous umbilical cord with the server.

In any case, the toxicity is mutual. It means that both sides (what ‘sides’?) have commoditised space and time. By being always-on, time has ended, not only in its simply pragmatic angle of ‘physically no more time for anything else’. Space has ended. Mailboxes are full. Disk-life space run out. Since time is man’s last asset (see ‘What you Build’ chapter in my book, The Leader with Seven Faces) employees and employers are jointly walking towards asset-less organisations. It is not apocalyptic; it is real and incredible stupid. As I described in the mentioned chapter, leadership has an urgent need to protect space and time, to create it. The BlackBerry-always-on executive has capitulated. He may kid himself with the idea that he is in control of things thanks to the continuous connectivity, allowing him a rapid response to any question (including the ones contained in the 85% of unnecessary email traffic) but he is giving control away and becoming time-bankrupt.

In the book, I said that if I could think of one key and crucial role of leaders, it would be the above-mentioned ‘protection of space and time’. In some of my Executive Seminars based on The Leader with Seven Faces, we start with this topic or we simply stop there for longer. The article made me think about this again…

Leadership development: the 45 degrees feedback system

There are two types of leadership development programmes that worry me: the adjustable and the prescriptive. The adjustable are represented by those that rely fundamentally on the 360 exercise by which the manager or leader asks others for their usually blinded feed back on a series of skills or abilities or behaviours. The feed back is received and all ends up in an exercise of adaptations: communication more please, empowerment more please, vision we are ok thanks, visibility we need more, micromanagement less, trust more etc. It is like refilling the shelves in a supermarket. For each 360 feed back system I know working well I can call 10 that are a box ticking exercise or in the worse of the cases one of a potentially dangerous outcome since it is used as a power exercise; Joe, there are some issues with you. You need a 360.
The other worrying type of leadership development is the prescriptive one. In this type there is an ideal norm of balance described as the five attributes or the six qualities. What is good and desirable has been crafted a priori sometimes almost with a religious flavour. Again, I have seen many box ticking built around this normative ideal.

I believe that we lack a third type that I would call reflective, in which what matters is to find the questions to ask, not the availability of beautiful ready made answers. The model I use which is the one behind my book The Leader with Seven Faces points to seven areas of questions for which we need to find answers: what we say as leaders or questions about language, where we go or questions about the journey as leaders, what we build or questions around what we leave behind, what we care about or questions about the values, how we do it or questions about what drive us, what we are or questions about responsibility and identity and finally what we do or questions about our behaviours. Somebody said that the real journey on personal development, and I would include leadership here, is not a long one to a Far Land for guru inspiration or a long method to achieve an ideal but a short one, a few inches journey down the skull. I respect the 360 degrees methodology but I prefer the 45 degrees which is about the angle required to look yourself in the mirror every day.