Leadership through ideas, not management by numbers

The global financial collapse is not just about the failure of the invisible hand of the market (à la Adam Smith) but the end of the road for the technocratic model of management. Changing the rules, or even organizing another committee to add a little bit of regulation here and there, will not change the fact the business world is between a rock and a hard place. And doing more of the same even better than before, will not work.

All bets are off as the $700bn loan, err, gift, err don’t ask questions is now seen politically as “socialism for the rich” in the US (see the hilarious Jon Stewart on the daily Show). And as the rest of the world looks to support the collapse of the global banking system then these strategies seem more like a PR announcement from the chief executives of Alice in Wonderland inc. and Groundhog Day Industries. Nobody seems to know which way is up, everybody is going round in circles, and real leadership, leadership through ideas seems to have gone missing in action.

Right now we stand at the threshold of a paradigm change. And real change, world change comes about from lived ideas, not optimization. The business world must surrender its dominant model of management which confuses man and machine. Human dreams, feelings, thoughts, experiences cannot be irreducibly reduced to figures. The meltdown of the global financial institutions and their “tyranny of numbers” offers a window of opportunity for the business world to make a step change and embrace leadership with ideas, real ideas that require courage and endeavor to grow human potential.

Strategic innovation is not about cutting costs, or lean work processes… or any of that mumbo jumbo language so favored by large consultancies singularly bereft of ideas and born with a DNA in which everybody avoids risk or real responsibility. Changing the game is about courage, it is about individual responsibility, IT IS ABOUT TAKING RISKS, it is about Noble Leadership, Noble Business, which puts human values, human rights, the world we live in  before the buck and sees value propositions not in $$ terms but in shared meaning :)))) and human experience.

These two attached quadrants show four questions of strategic importance. They reveal the real truth behind organizational innovation and collaboration. These questions show that game changing ideas cannot be subsumed under technocratic camouflage which skillfully avoids real innovation. I am sorry but changing the title of Quality Director to innovation director only leads to discovering new and imaginative ways of cutting costs whose proposals we see littering billboards in most major airports. Innovation has been reduced to a mechanistic structure akin to the re-organization models of the 90’s, swop a few names, change a few titles, pepper your speeches with the latest lingo and Bob’s your Uncle we have the new fashion of the business of “innovation” which ensures you do nothing new.

You see questions, real questions are anathema to business executives because this means that you have to think, and thinking is not something they are paid for, they are paid for doing. And you see the business of management is the business of being right and doing the right thing[i] while the business of innovation is discovering the right question and through trial and error discovering new things. Noble leadership is about helping, encouraging and fighting with the organizational emotional gravity, the learned incapacity[ii], which keeps people circling the status quo.

Noble leadership begins with ideas, ideas which move the human heart, ideas which help people step in the direction of change and transformation. Sharing these ideas, prototyping, testing, failing and their co creation through collaboration is the platform for innovation. The new social technologies provide the framework from which collaborative experiments can begin and find traction and avoid the hierarchical controls of vertical organizations. It is funny but in a recent telephone conference with a top VP of innovation at a consulting firm he constantly missed the point of our reference to “horizontal collaboration” and kept being drawn back to the concept of flat organizations. He said that there are inefficiencies in flat organizations. Not what we meant. We mean the horizontal digital revolution out there, which your kids are playing in, listening to and growing. Man, tell that to the music and video businesses executives who are still struggling with an online revolution that is still killing their business model. It gets worse, when asked to define what “thinking out of the box” meant he said that they don’t use that phrase because nobody knows what it means and ended the conversation on trying to keep things in “frames…  but this is not the same as boxes.”

Thinking in boxes is the root cause of our problems. And because we pay scant attention to the fact that our experience is organized into emotional pre established patterns… words, labels, duh, hence boxes we remain locked in experience by the power of these boxes. It is simple, if you think in straight lines well you are going to keep going round in circles. The technocratic model is about “business at the speed of thought”[iii]… this is the mantra of the knowledge economy, get it right, get it quick. Bada-bum. Well the Lotus economy is about business in the space between thoughts. You what. Yep. Between thoughts. Now this is going to come as a bit of shock to you people who have been living six feet away from your body and mind. But yes, you can observe experience. And yes there are different levels of skill involved. And yes it hurts. Finding that space between your thoughts is the personal journey of leadership to create and foster new ideas, to create, to live, to find meaning. It is the whole of the artistic endeavor writ large and then some. It is not about attending a two day workshop at Art school. It is about turning Art and life into one as the co creation of your life and dream. It’s the real work. The real day job. And the power of the real day job, the job of dream making, is that we can transform the other world of work and change the world.

Our technocratic model of management recognizes the need for creative thinking and new ways of releasing and deploying imagination but it doesn’t have a philosophical basis which includes personal experience. Technocratic management structures are held together by bureaucratic process and supported by data driven technologies that turn the wheel of productivity. People are numbers, subject to market forces, to which they keep getting released to. Hehe. That’s the economist’s definition of freedom. You got released to the market. You got fired. The whole job of management is to be more productive and then as if by magic all problems will be solved.

Copying Web 2.0 technologies will not help your business drive innovation because Social technologies are not data driven; they are emotionally fuelled by human beings not bloody machines. Just using Facebook or Youtube or any of those will not guarantee you success, you have to have ideas… great ideas, huge ideas.

And to those business schools who still don’t get it… human good and ethics and emotion and learning and transformation are the products of tomorrow not a sideline for executives busy getting rich and then doing a bit of good… to keep you in good stead with your conscious and “him” upstairs.

Those consumer groups who are hunting the “bucks before health” global pharmaceuticals, bucks before nourishment, food companies… and the sickening thing is this list is endless, had better be aware that this is just the tip of the iceberg as people really realize just how empowered they are and the power they can wield.  Somehow the technocratic mindset has fused the brains of the world of politics and business in that they see ethics as just a subject of PR, a utilitarian mindset, which puts pragmatism before philosophy. In truth the word value in business parlance is inseparable from dollar benefits and human ethics. One of the most Kafkaesque business statements ever has got to be we are a “value driven business”. It gives new meaning to the principles of double-think. Human ethics cannot be reduced to economics. Business executives need a wakeup call. They just cannot see that their rational business model is destroying lives. Just check out the history of the tobacco industry and oil industry then scan how the business world deals with their products and people and their environment.

The business world needs to wake up because young people will seek change, and when you harness their need for change and the change that is needed in the world with computer power and networking capabilities greater at home than in the work office then standby. Normal service will not resume. You haven’t seen anything yet.

Imagine. If one young man can come out of Burma horrified by the brutal government reaction to the saffron revolution of the monks and nuns and within six months of setting up a Facebook page have half a million members, protests self-organized in a very major city of the world, 30 odd Noble prize winners, and Gordon Brown, prime minister UK writing a keynote address… then the door lies open to a whole range of possibilities. Barak Obama is a Presidential candidate whose appeal is emotionally based on hope and the need for change, individual responsibility and a fostering of new relationships in the world and at home. His campaign is one of the first in the history of presidential campaigns to make such use of online technologies strategically and driven by the young people in his campaign offices which has given him such a superiority in connecting with people, securing funds and donations via individuals and driving an unsurpassed supporter base.

So will the real leaders please stand up! You know the ones with ideas and passion. The ones who have been excluded by business schools that churn out bureaucratic clones whose only concept of adventure is scaling the heights of organization charts. The ones in the business schools who want to get a life. The ones in the world of business who haven’t lost touch with day dreaming. Because the world of business needs you, and your ideas, and your passion and drive, and willingness to have a go. The world of business needs leaders with ideas who can think and act without frontiers. Change the world of business; change the business of the world. Roll on the Lotus Economy please.

[i] Kevin Roberts Saatchi and Saatchi

[ii] Karl Albrecht, Intelligent Organisations
[iii]Bill Gates, Business at the Speed of thought