Using an unusual method for research on at-risk populations in a South American barrio, a friend watched as community members filed forward and placed individual matchsticks in specific areas of the map, thus creating a population density chart for her evaluation project. As one individual stepped up he broke the matchstick in half, said “this is me”, placed it on the map, and then walked away. Apparently all gathered around the table collectively held their breath – then a shared sigh passed through the room.
Measuring, making meaning and matchsticks
September 30, 2010 By Leave a Comment
3 dynamics for high AMPerage leadership
September 29, 2010 By Leave a Comment
Adaptive management paradigms (AMPs!) helped me think about the different toolkits needed for local and global management practice. The two contexts seem to be different, requiring different emphases. [Read more...]
The Prime Capacitor: management
September 27, 2010 By Leave a Comment
If a capacitor is an electrical device characterized by its capacity to store an electric charge, maybe we could imagine “community capacitors”?
Community capacitor: anything that generates “common ground”; any community/neighborhood function, entity, organization or agency that creates capacity before and provides resources during a community crisis. Capacitors are assets that generally or specifically mitigate areas of vulnerability. All capacitors lead to common ground and create social capital.
Is crisis management a form of social capital?
September 27, 2010 By Leave a Comment
Peter Drucker said management is making knowledge effective, and I like to add “through relationships”. One definition of Social Capital is “anything that facilitates individual or collective action, generated by networks of relationships, reciprocity, trust, and social norms.” There’s overlap here somehow. Management creates and integrates social capital, and takes on its property of increasing with use – it compounds itself. [Read more...]
3 steps to sustainability loops: the Jesuits
September 23, 2010 By Leave a Comment
Why are we intrigued by the Jesuits?
The Jesuits have thrived for nearly 500 years. Surely there is a sustainability loop here somewhere. [Read more...]
5 steps to sustainability loops: Simeon’s Trust
September 22, 2010 By Leave a Comment
Some management history…
While at Cambridge University several generations ago, I researched an historical management case study focused on sustainable organizations. An innovative clergyman, Charles Simeon, created a 5-step cycle that fixed a minority group in English ecclesiastical society “to the remotest ages” through a strategy that generated a balancing loop, which offset an existing reinforcing loop. Reinforcing loops are cycles that build momentum each time a loop is completed. They can work like virtuous circles or like death spirals. (The former are preferable, btw.) To counter a death spiral, you need a balancing loop. (But if it’s an airplane were talking about, better use the parachute.) [Read more...]
6 tips for Garden Variety Creativity: No sleeping bag required
September 21, 2010 By Leave a Comment
A popular article at the New York Times examines the hypomania we associate with entrepreneurs such as Seth Priebatsch, founder of Scvnger (pronounced “scavenger”), who quit Princeton and now occupies a sleeping bag on a couch in his office when he’s not working 96 hours in a row. The article claims that:
Keep The Circus Under The Tent – At Your Peril
September 12, 2010 By 4 Comments
Reflections on September 10, 2001
On September 10, 2001, I delivered a presentation on terrorism and interagency coordination to an audience of American and Mexican military and government officials in Mexico City. My slide-deck, as it is known in military parlance, included images of the World Trade Towers and details of the 1993 truck-bomb attack, as well as open-source information on Osama Bin Laden. I had no special insight into the prophetic timing of my presentation, or of the magnitude of the events that would prove the resolve of both the perpetrators and targets of this infamous attack. There was, however, a foreshadowing regarding problems leading up to September 11th and which are present in most crisis events: the factors of trust and its impact on effective communication and coordination. I look back with a mix of emotions on the events of the following morning, because lack of unity and the silo-effect were contributing factors that plagued U.S. efforts to effectively develop a collaborative strategy of threat mitigation.
B-Schools and “the rise of the rest”
September 10, 2010 By Leave a Comment
Clara Lovett’s commentary on “American” (I think she means U.S.) b-schools is timely. “The rise of the rest” should be some kind of global agenda item.
I am presently involved in starting MBAs in a developing region. In one country here, over thirty percent of the people live below the poverty level. Literacy is a struggle and the culture is not heavily invested in reading. Tourism provides a lot of revenue though “service” is not generally understood at a level the North American or European customer might prefer. Other revenue comes from overseas remittances.
Wealth must be created in this region for long-term sustainability and there are bright and eager entrepreneurs and business people who want to do this. With credit union loans and family help some might be able to afford to pay around $90 US per semester credit for an MBA, but could not stop working while studying. Part-time MBAs are the only option. As best as I can figure Harvard costs around $1,800 per unit; adding in the need to live there full-time it’s about $3,700 per unit for a family. One of the places I used to work now charges $1,785. My guess is that at least 99% of the world could never afford these MBAs. More to the point, even if they could, the education would quite likely have little to do with creating wealth back home.
Drucker, women and the dugout
September 9, 2010 By Leave a Comment
F
or those of you who missed it, the Economist picked up on a phenomenon in Japan worthy of notice. One of the hottest books of the year (it is said) titled What if the Female Manager of a High-School Baseball Team read Drucker’s ‘Management’ has been jumping off the shelves. (Over one million sold…)
The unlikely catalyst for this cultish enthusiasm is a fictional teenager called Minami. Like many high-school girls in Japan, she becomes the gofer for the baseball team’s male coach. Unlike many of her compatriots, she is the kind of girl, as the book says, who leaps before she looks. Horrified by the team’s lack of ambition, she sets it the goal of reaching the high-school championships. She stumbles upon Drucker’s 1973 book, and it helps her turn the rabble into a team.
Fantasy baseball & the meaningful Outside
September 9, 2010 By 2 Comments
Edgar Schein’s insights reminded me again of the all-consuming fire of group dynamics and how they waylay us. Schein’s classic work captures all the tacit activity that rumbles around in the background of both newly-forming and even well-established “groups”. This can mean anything from corporations to fantasy baseball aficionados.
Peter Drucker’s meaningful Outside postulates that all internal activity equals costs. Only external activity aimed at the meaningful Outside creates real results. But at the same time, without Schein’s “marker events”, “joint sensing of relief” and “shared emotional reactions” groups get nowhere. We have to slog through all that annoying stuff with other human beings to get at results. Until a group, team, start-up or corporation gets it together internally, nothing happens.
Thumper’s Law and leadership
September 8, 2010 By 2 Comments
Bob Sutton picked up on a pertinent subject once again in bad is stronger than good. I was initially most amazed by the need for five times as many affirmations as negatives in a marriage or romantic relationship. I confess to being a grumpy husband at times. John Gottman wrote some good books and in at least one, demonstrated that he could predict marital success just by listening to whether spouses despised each other in a brief, video-taped record of a marriage interaction.
10 Commandments that will inoculate your business grads against future misfortune
September 8, 2010 By 4 Comments
Preparing future business leaders to make wise choices is the principal objective for institutions of higher education that confer degrees in business and management. However, given a lack of crisis management curricula in many university business- management programs, it would be unrealistic to expect good decision-making of these “leaders” during times of crisis. Not taking the time to actively engage in thinking about and planning for crises is a major contributing factor in the current crisis of leadership. Curricula should be training students to apply effective and proven methods of engaging potential or emerging threats. Just as lawyers should not ask a question in court for which they do not know the answer, business leaders should not plan a business venture without carefully considering, and planning for, inauspicious contingencies. In addition to building a diverse and manageable crisis-action team, future business leaders should be taught how best to implement the following crisis-management practices:
The most effective organization (in crisis)
September 8, 2010 By 4 Comments
No, it doesn’t show up in the Fortune 500 or any other business list de jour. Peter Drucker thought the Salvation Army got the nod. At one point, the world’s largest nonprofit (supplanted by the United Way when they apparently started counting their branches differently), this group brings an entirely new dimension to effectiveness and crisis management.
When the sailors command the admirals: constituency decision making
September 7, 2010 By Leave a Comment
Peter Drucker said that constituencies were different in business than in politics. Essentially they were single issue groups who did not always seek to make their company or organization successful, profitable or effective. (Sometimes whistleblowers start out this way and that’s not a bad thing. Why they operate and where they end up is the true test.)
Part Deux: true emperors should always be naked … and hang out with circles of loving detractors
September 7, 2010 By 1 Comment
Observers of celebrities can move from natural skepticism to trust and followership. The celebrity leads through an assumed and artificial credibility. Observers become followers by buying into this credibility, essentially trusting a truth created and amplified by technology and made meaningful by an evolving brand, (whether well-managed or not), as the following crowd grows and sometimes even goes viral.
Leverage everything
September 6, 2010 By Leave a Comment
Each day has 24 hours – no more, no less. If you have defined your mO you know what your priorities are. If you don’t honor your priorities you won’t reach your mO.
Peter Drucker used to say that a minimum of six straight hours of concentration were needed to generate anything worthwhile. Especially in the summers he would hole up in his home office and allegedly not venture out until at least six hours had passed. A rough draft would then move from his home in Claremont to Orlene, the most loyal secretary in the universe, who reigned at his campus office a short distance away. Rough drafts never left the hands of Orlene until they were cleaned up and Peter claimed to never let a rough draft out of his or Orlene’s sight. I tried to look at one once, and my supposedly good friend Orlene nearly perpetrated some Middle East justice on the hand that reached for the rough draft.
True emperors should always be naked …
September 6, 2010 By 2 Comments
Leaders who metaphorically wear royal robes and query their followers might find that they were less clothed than they thought.
As soon as enough people give you enough compliments and you’re wielding more power than you’ve ever had in your life, it’s not that you become…arrogant…or become rude to people, but you get a false sense of your own importance and what you’ve accomplished. You actually think you’ve altered the course of history. Leonard0 DiCaprio[1]
Every Millennial leader needs a crisis
September 5, 2010 By Leave a Comment
If you want to lead you need a transformative crisis. This from Bill George and Andrew Maclean who write[1] about transformative leadership passages. (By the way, the lack of one may contribute to what holds many “gap leaders” in the nonperformance zone. They simply never had the tears or scars required to move on.)
But the price is high.
Is leadership a “discipline”?
September 4, 2010 By 2 Comments
Those annoying academics keep scoffing at leadership as a discipline. Why?
Top 40 recommendations for bridging the Millennial competence gap
September 2, 2010 By 1 Comment
Emotional and social competency may be a topic de jour. But might there might be such a thing as organizational competency?
A young person we know who recently finished her undergraduate degree started a new job, and immediately ran into a brick wall of sorts. Her quite expensive and highly-ranked liberal arts degree had not prepared her for an organization hard at work. Until she began contributing she lived in a precarious place. [Peter Drucker once said that a new graduate was a liability to any organization for eighteen months.]
7 steps to managing the core
September 2, 2010 By 1 Comment
Just when we had teams figured out, hierachies had disappeared (right.) and toxic leaders purged, the ground shifted and our world got more complicated. Cultural anthropologists sometimes talk about dynamic equivalence when translating a document or idea from one culture into another. This seems to be a good word for the shifting management landscape many leaders face.
Going “bump in the night” & missional GPS
September 1, 2010 By 3 Comments
Years ago, I spent some time on the bridge of a U.S. Navy destroyer, operating in waters stretching from San Diego to the coast of Somalia, with lengthy excursions in the South China Sea and Tonkin Gulf on the way. Often, other very large ships moving a high speeds often on moonless nights were steaming close by, at times within a few hundred feet if engaged in underway replenishment. The concept of “relative motion” became an ever-present life-and-death reality. If a bridge team could not calculate all the nuances of all the movements of all the other big vessels nearby and approaching, changing every minute, collisions were sure to come along. When over seventy thousand tons of steel goes bump in the night sheer terror is the only human response.
