LeadershipNow 140: September 2014 Compilation

Here are a selection of tweets from September 2014 that you might have missed:

• How Do Trustworthy Leaders Behave? by Roderick Kramer from @stanfordbiz
• Do Workplace Hierarchies Still Matter? by Jeffrey Pfeffer from @stanfordbiz
• What to Look For In Future Leaders by @KevinEikenberry
• 10 Great Leadership Quotes (And How To Use Them To Inspire Your Team) by @Starbucker
• 7 Commandments of Leadership by @RonEdmondson
• Why The Best Leaders View Vulnerability as a Strength by @JHaudan
• How To Be A Horrible Leader - 50 Bad Leadership Traits by @toddbnielsen
• A Recipe for Air Rage from the NYTimes
• 8 ways perfectionism holds you back by @LollyDaskal via @Inc
• The Marshmallow Test for Grownups by @edbatista via @HarvardBiz
• 16 Reasons People Don't Listen When You Talk by @Leadershipfreak
• Good Advice from by @WallyBock: 3 Things I wish I had learned sooner
• Great Read: 10 Theodore Roosevelt Leadership Lessons by @jamesstrock
• VIDEO by @scottmckain: What the NFL's Problems Mean To YOUR Business: Daily Dose of Distinction
• Scientists Cannot Explain This Crazy Ant Behavior from The Atlantic
• You Don’t Have to Go it Alone by @MarySchaefer
• FT: Commerce summer camps for teenagers
• No shame in taking a fresh approach to an old problem New for @Forbes Lesson from @RobertPlant
• Video: by @Mark_Sanborn - Effective leaders create commitment, not compliance.
• 7 Steps to Living a Bill Murray Life from @Vulture
• The Difference Between Great Leaders And Posers by @MikeMyatt
• 4 Core Elements to Winning Teams by @dbonleadership
• How Do You Check Your Leadership Intentions? by Jon Mertz @ThinDifference
• “If Risk Knocks At The Door: Will You Answer It?” by @LollyDaskal
• Great Work is Hard Work by @WallyBock
• Why the Robots Might Not Take Our Jobs After All: They Lack Common Sense by @Neil_Irwin
• Leadership is Built One Brick at a Time by @StrategicMonk
• FT: An itch to check the inbox is only human

See more on Twitter.

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Posted by Michael McKinney at 10:00 AM
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5 Leadership Lessons: How Google Works

How Google Works by Eric Schmidt and Jonathan Rosenberg is how Google created its innovative and productive culture.

The book is full of principles that if they can’t be implemented outright in your own workplace, they can by degrees. You won’t find debates about social issues, but then that’s not what this book is about. It’s about how Google goes about doing what it does do—day to day. It about managing smart creatives in a family-type atmosphere.

  Offices should be designed to maximize energy and interactions, not for isolation and status. Smart creatives thrive on interacting with each other. The mixture you get when you cram them together is combustible, so a top priority must be to keep them crowded.

  Don’t listen to the HiPPOs. The Highest-Paid-Person’s-Opinion. When it comes to the quality of decision-making, the pay level is intrinsically irrelevant and experience is valuable only if it is used to frame a winning argument. Unfortunately, in most companies, experience is the winning argument. We call these places “tenurocracies,” because power derives from tenure, not merit. It reminds us of our favorite quote from Jim Barksdale, erstwhile CEO of Netscape: “If we have data, let’s look at data. If all we have are opinions, let’s go with mine.”

  One of our early engineers, Matt Cutts, recall how he would often see Urs Hölzle, the engineering executive who led the creation of Google’s data center infrastructure, pick up small bits of trash in the hallway as he walked through the office. With these actions, the leaders demonstrate their egalitarian natures—we’re all in this together and none of us are above the menial tasks that need to get done. Mostly, though, they do it because they care so much about the company. Leadership requires passion. If you don’t have it, get out now.

  Our ideal candidates are the ones who prefer roller coasters, the ones who keep learning. These “learning animals” have the smarts to handle massive change and the character to love it. Most people, when they are hiring for a role, look for people who have excelled in that role before. This is not how you find a learning animal. Favoring specialization over intelligence is exactly wrong, especially in high tech. The world is changing so fast across every industry and endeavor that it’s a given the role for which you’re hiring is going to change.

  Google[x] has a simple Venn diagram that it uses to determine if it will pursue an idea. First, the idea has to be something that addresses a big challenge or opportunity, something that affects hundreds of millions or billions of people. Second, they have to have an idea for a solution that is radically different from anything currently in the market. We aren’t trying to improve on an existing way of doing something, rather we want to start over. And third, the breakthrough technologies that could bring that radical solution to life have to be at least feasible, and achievable in the not-too-distant future. Before the [x] team starts pursuing any idea, it first checks to see if the idea fits into this three-part paradigm. If it doesn’t, it is rejected.

There’s a lot more on communication (You need to say something twenty times, but if you do and they still don’t get it, then the problem is with the theme, not the communications), competition (“If you focus on your competition, you will never deliver anything truly innovative”) and hiring (“Great talent often doesn’t look and act like you”), including ten or so pages on Google’s hiring dos and don’ts and career advice.

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Posted by Michael McKinney at 11:29 PM
Permalink | Comments (0) | Five Lessons

Are We Too Busy Competing to do Anything New?

PETER THIEL’S Zero to One is a quick and engaging read, but the ideas are not as quick to digest.

Zero to One is based on the idea that progress can take two forms: horizontal or vertical progress. Horizontal progress is doing more of what works—going from zero to n. Vertical progress is doing something new—going from zero to one. Thiel explains it this way:

"Vertical progress is harder to imagine because it requires doing something nobody else has ever done. If you take one typewriter and build 100, you have made horizontal progress. If you have a typewriter and build a word processor, you have made vertical progress."

Most of us are busy making horizontal progress. We are competing—trying to better or make incremental improvements to what already exists. Certainly, there is a value in this, but it leads to the creation of commodity businesses. Thiel recommends: avoid competition as much as possible. Instead, be a monopoly.

Monopolies occur when some is doing something no one else is doing. “Monopolies deserve their bad reputation—but only in a world where nothing changes….Creative monopolists give customers more choices by adding entirely new categories of abundance to the world.” To make a finer point, Thiel writes: “Every business is successful exactly to the extent that it does something others cannot. Monopoly is the condition of every successful business.”

Part of the problem is that we have developed a mindset of indefinite optimism or hoping the future will get better with no plan—the future just-sort-of-happens approach. What we need says Theil is a mindset of definite optimism. That is to say, getting on with building the future you envision—working the plan. “Arguing over process has become a way to endlessly defer making concrete plans for a better future.” A definite optimist believes the future will be better if he plans and works to make it better. We need to get back to making a plan for the future.

Successful start-ups and monopolies are built on a secret. “People at a successful startup are fanatically right about something those outside it have missed.” What everyone knows will not give you an edge.

What we need to restore is our sense of adventure—our sense of possibility. Are we too busy competing to do something new?

"The next Bill Gates will not build an operating system. The next Larry Page or Sergey Brin won’t make a search engine. And the next Mark Zuckerberg won’t create a social network. If you are copying these guys, you aren’t learning from them."

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Posted by Michael McKinney at 11:09 AM
Permalink | Comments (0) | Creativity & Innovation

Why Reframing is Important to Great Leadership

LEADERS need to be able to look at the situations they face from different perspectives. The need to be able to reframe a situation in order to understand what it really going on and deal with it effectively.

A leader’s “ability to reframe sets them free” and helps them to “avoid getting trapped in cognitive ruts,” write Lee Bolman and Terrence Deal, authors of How Great Leaders Think. “Leaders can expand how they think by using different mental models to determine what’s going on and what to do in complex situations.”

Bolman and Deal are the authors of Reframing Organizations. They have taken the model they introduced there and applied it specifically to leadership. The model has four frames, scripts, or perspectives. Each has its advantages and shortcomings and we tend to lean towards one more than the others. This idea, of course, is to develop the ability to use the appropriate frame or script to generate a unique approach to handling challenging circumstances instead of relying upon our tried and true default approaches.

Our single approach will only be “right” a small percentage of the time. Too often leaders will approach everything they deal with the last approach and insist they are right as they head right over the cliff. They insist that the world is as they see it. To grow is to recognize your blind spots.

The four frames are:

Structural — Leader’s role as architect. An emphasis on finding the right design for the task at hand. Structural leaders help groups get clear about why they’re there, who is in charge, who is supposed to do what, and how team members can work with on another to achieve the group’s purpose.

Human Resources — Leader’s role as coach. The central theme is improving the fit between the individual and the organization and begins with caring—or in a word, love. Leaders who commit themselves to key practices of effective people leadership—developing a philosophy for managing people, hiring the right people, keeping employee investing in their future, empowering them, and promoting diversity—have repeatedly built businesses that thrive on the strength of employee talent, energy, and creativity.

Political — Leader’s role as peacemaker. Organizations and societies are networks as well as hierarchies, and the power of relationships is a crucial complement to the power of position. Misreading the political map and overlooking the power of potential players can lead to catastrophe. That’s why it’s critical to treat the map as a work in progress—a guide to be tested as you move along.

Symbolic — Leader’s role as storyteller. The central theme is the way humans discover and create meaning in an ambiguous and chaotic world. Symbolic leadership begins with the leader’s deeply rooted faith and passion. Symbolic leaders infuse magic into organizations through their artistic focus on history, shared values, heroes, ritual, ceremony, and stories, and serve as icons who embody a group’s values and spirit.

The authors write: “Consciously or not, we all read situations to figure out what scene we’re in and what role we’ve been assigned so that we can respond in character. But it’s important to ask ourselves whether the drama is the one we want and recognize that we have latitude as to which character to play and how to interpret the script.”

The authors provide practical lessons from examining these frames through the leadership of Jeff Bezos, Howard Schultz, Tony Hsieh, Ursala Burns, Steve Jobs, and others.

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Posted by Michael McKinney at 07:51 PM
Permalink | Comments (0) | Leadership Development , Thinking

First Look: Leadership Books for September 2014

Here's a look at some of the best leadership books to be released in September.

  The Virgin Way: Everything I Know About Leadership by Richard Branson
  The Future of Work: Attract New Talent, Build Better Leaders, and Create a Competitive Organization by Jacob Morgan
  Smartcuts: How Hackers, Innovators, and Icons Accelerate Success by Shane Snow
  Learn or Die: Using Science to Build a Leading-Edge Learning Organization by Edward D. Hess
  Hard Times: Leadership in America by Barbara Kellerman



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“No two persons ever read the same book.”

Posted by Michael McKinney at 10:19 AM
Permalink | Comments (0) | Books