Author: Brook Manville

Categories
Democracy Featured

Will Technology Kill Democracy—Or Reinvent It?

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Once upon a time, many thought the internet would spawn a digital democratic utopia: harmonious, boundary-spanning decision-making, reflecting liberty and equality in a global community of “netizens.” Today, sadly, we witness identity theft, cyber-bullying, manipulative analytics, fake news, and authoritarian surveillance— hacking elections and polarizing open societies. Social media companies are hiring thousands of editors to fight hate speech and robotic information corruption, while U.S. state election commissions are scrambling to reinstate paper ballots. Will today’s democracy survive the onslaught of technology-delivered malice?

Polity Press, 2019 BY PERMISSION OF THE AUTHOR

Yes, maybe: but only if we stop blaming bits and bytes, forget about “global democracy,” and instead tackle the structural deficits of our current representative systems of national self-governance. Thus argues Dr. Roslyn Fuller, a Canadian-Irish academic lawyer and author of the new In Defence of Democracy.

This lively polemic asserts that the problem for western civic societies is not so much defending against hostile and abusive use of technology. Instead, it’s failing to use technology to rediscover what democracy should be for the modern nation state: citizens participating personally in public debate and having meaningful say in policy decisions that affect them—without the distorting and corruptible role of legislative proxies or elitist agency officials. If we’re going to defend—and keep alive—democracy today, she insists, we need a revolution: go back to what the ancient Athenians invented in the 5th century BCE, where every citizen regularly participated in discussion and voting for the laws that would steer their livelihoods and survival. Dr. Fuller believes new technology and communication tools can now provide the means to scale up for millions of people what ancient Athenians did with perhaps (at most) 50,000 citizens.

Roslyn Fuller BRAD ATEKE

The book builds on Fuller’s earlier research, further detailing her back-to-the-future proposition. Her central premise is that any modern representative democracy— e.g. U.S. constitutional government, or Britain’s “monarch-lite” parliamentary model—will inevitably slide towards a gridlocked, gerrymandered, influence-peddled partisan morass. “The small number of seats in legislatures serving a major population means elections aren’t really representative—allowing money to grow in influence, which in turn sets up factional fighting and winner-take-all strategies. Meanwhile, what these representatives discuss is increasingly out of touch with most common people’s priorities—leading to rising frustration, disengagement, and declining voter turnout. Which then invites more winner-take-all by powerful interests and increasing partisan focus on policy that entrenches elites. To break the cycle we have to authentically give power back to the people.”

Why not reach for some blue sky ideas? GETTY

Re-imagining Reinvention

Yes it’s blue sky, and of course fraught with a host of implementation issues (e.g. levels of geographical engagement, infrastructure design, process protocols, security assurances, discussion moderation, etc.). But take a moment to consider other alternatives: what will it actually take “to fix today’s democracy?” Is limiting campaign contributions, changing the tax code, or reforming the Electoral College going to be enough to rebuild freedom, equality, and the pursuit of happiness across America?

Here are five further insights from our conversation for your own imaginative reflections:

1. Technology for large-scale, direct democracy is less about elections and more about empowering policy debate and decision-making en masse. Fuller acknowledges the problems of hacked balloting and cyber-meddling—but no election reform will solve the bigger problem of disconnected citizens working through proxies: “A few hundred legislative members or a president can be easily corrupted by rich powerful lobbies. Which now happens every day. Also, the current pace of decision-making, and the two- or four-year cycle of change in representative government can’t keep up with the global economy. Using technology to give millions of citizens direct involvement in policy-making is faster and more flexible. And lobbyists can’t bribe or intimidate the population of an entire nation state.”

2. Our corrosive political media thrives because virtual conversations are untethered from policy consequences. “Yes of course,” Fuller acknowledged, “we need safeguards against cyber-bullying and moneyed and foreign influence shaping opinion. But Facebook diatribes, Twitter wars, and cable shout-fests keep growing because people can’t turn their own strongly held opinions into action. Give citizens a real say in policy-making, and the cyber negativity will decline.”

3. Reforming democracy with technology-scaled participation requires practical citizen education. Everyone agrees that improving our political system calls for better “civic knowledge” across the population. But that can’t just be more high-school courses on “how a bill becomes a law.” Dr. Fuller argues from another lesson of ancient Athenians: “Education has to be learn-by-doing for all the citizens, all the time: participating in public debate, developing your own opinions by hearing and joining arguments, and observing the consequences of decisions—which are often painful.”

Pericles (c. 495 to 429 BC), the most prominent and influential Greek statesman, orator and general of Athens during the Golden Age GETTY

“A lot of American and European cities are successfully experimenting with this form of practical civic education with ‘participatory (or open) budgeting’—allowing citizens to debate and decide how to allocate the public money of their community. The process creates vivid civic lessons about the prioritizing and compromising necessary in a democratic society.”

4. Mass engagement could rebuild fractured communities. Fuller also argues for second-order effects of mass engagement. If millions of citizens participate in political decisions—with appropriate facilitation, rules and encouragement (including some offsetting compensation)— the process can help temper partisan divisions, and build new civic relationships. “When the outcomes of debates concretely effect people’s future, citizens learn to listen to one another, and work for solutions that everyone has to live with. They see that, instead of always pushing for ‘the scientifically perfect answer,’ sometimes accepting compromise can bring other people in, and unify support. Joining together for action strengthens community bonds.”

5. Transformation will depend on leaders with a vision for challenge and excellence. “We need a new generation of politicians who can create a positive vision of what democracy can do. A citizenry responds to challenge—like that posed by John Kennedy’s legendary speech in 1962 to America: ‘We choose to go the moon in this decade, and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.’”

President John F. Kennedy gives his ‘Race for Space’ speech at Houston’s Rice University. Texas, September 12, 1962. CORBIS VIA GETTY IMAGES

“And we also have to get away from today’s victim mentality. The ancient Greeks and Romans accomplished a lot with very little—their politicians made the higher call for excellence. Likewise, tomorrow’s leaders cannot just think about themselves. They have to inspire us with what a better democratic future means for all the citizens—and get us all involved to share the task: building a more prosperous society, with a renewed middle class, and where every individual can flourish and reach his or her full potential.”

Iowa Caucuses in the 2016 Presidential Election GETTY

Originally published on Forbes.com

Categories
Featured Leadership

Why Leadership Can’t Be All About You

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Who are your bosses from Hell? Maybe the supervisors so full of themselves you just want to scream—leaders who live large in their own egos, who demand credit for everything, proud and arrogant because, as long as they’re winning, leadership is all about them. Why do they have to be that way?

That question started my recent conversation with Stanley McChrystal, the distinguished former military general and now business consultant. We were discussing his new book, Leaders: Myth and Reality, and the impersonal forces and silent biases that perpetuate the concept of heroic leadership—and also breed the arrogance of so many bosses from Hell.

BY PERMISSION, THE MCCHRYSTAL GROUP

McChrystal suggested that historical concepts of individual causality, coupled with media exultation of celebrity leaders has obscured the more complex nature of leadership. And that’s undermined what organizations in the network age must do to perform.

The general ticked off personal and societal cues that keep elevating full-of-themselves leaders. With each new success, they feel more the super hero. When the stock price rises, the commercial press touts their brilliance. Business schools celebrate their industry disruption. Boards grant compensation a hundred-fold above those who actually deliver the star-studded results. “The accolades, HR systems, and pay scales make them think they’re like Superman. It kills the culture of learning and collaboration vital today.”

General Stanley A. McChrystal outside of Kandahar, Afghanistan, 2009. (Photo by Paula Bronstein/Getty Images) GETTY IMAGES

OK, now look in the mirror. You manage people too. What do they think of you? Are you guilty of too much amour-propre? Do you define your own leadership by what you think you alone bring to the job? 

President Donald Trump in Montoursville, PA, May 2019 (Photo by Bastiaan Slabbers) NURPHOTO VIA GETTY IMAGES

Do you imagine your skills match those of great leaders of history?  Do you believe the impact your company achieves has little to do with other people or the accident of occasional good luck? Have you ever boasted—or silently muttered to yourself, “I alone can fix this!”

Leadership Myths

For McChrystal, heroic self-love is one of the deepest mistakes any leader makes today. He’s seen it again and again on the field of battle and in his consulting work, and confesses candidly how his own varied experience has led him to challenge leadership worship: solo titans make less of a difference than most people realize. His book is a lively exploration (with a touch of Augustinian confession) about why that’s true. Through a series of engaging case studies, McChrystal and his co-authors (Jeff Eggers, Jason Mangone) articulate three great misconceptions of leadership: i) The Formulaic Myth—that leadership can be reduced to an eternal checklist of “great leader” attributes; ii) The Attribution Myth—that leaders alone create performance, with little agency exercised by followers, partners, or other collaborators; iii) The Results Myth—the leadership is solely about driving subordinates to specific outcomes.

Emergent Leadership

McChrystal and company argue for a more nuanced understanding of “taking charge.” Thus, for every checklist of leadership qualities, there are paradigm-destroying exceptions: “Leadership is situation dependent. Leaders sometimes make a real difference with certain skills. But it depends on the moment. Churchill’s style and thinking were utterly critical to rallying the British war effort in 1940. But during peacetime, he fell out of popularity. Same man and qualities, but now out of step with his former public.”

McChrystal likewise reframes heroic attribution: “Leadership is really an emergent property of complex systems, arising from the learning and collaboration among leaders and followers.” He similarly sketches a more textured picture of driving results. “Leaders can be vital to mobilizing an organization but that’s often less about producing outcomes, and more about inspiring people for the future, and affirming some deeper purpose to animate their culture.”

From Theory To Practice

I pressed McChrystal: what should today’s leaders actually do—to develop and learn, and be more effective for a world of networks, greater egalitarianism, and diminishing faith in all-powerful heroes? How to develop the emergent, multi-directional sense of leadership he describes? I took away five insights:

1. Understand why “all-about-you-leadership” holds you back. McChrystal warned how self-absorbed leaders undermine organizational effort at scale. When it’s all about you, other people are demotivated, have less interest in innovating and learning to adapt, and don’t execute collaboratively against strategy. “One CEO we worked with,” he recalled, “finally had the game-changing epiphany: he couldn’t always be the ultimate rainmaker. When he started sharing more information about opportunities, and encouraging others to do the same, other leaders started to see there was now a chance not just to win deals, but also grow the whole pie for everyone.”

2. Reframe your leadership as building an ecosystem, shaping its culture, and operating like a node in a larger network of followers, collaborators, and other leaders. If leadership is emergent, you need to keep developing relationships among people that learn and create value, and a culture that supports that. “We worked with another CEO that couldn’t understand why people didn’t just follow his orders. We helped him see that the other executives were intensely competitive, always maneuvering against one another—with the same disastrous results of a pilot and co-pilot fighting while flying a plane. When the CEO shifted from giving commands to building processes and accountabilities for more collaboration, and modeling that behavior himself, performance rapidly improved.”

3. Learn how to let go of power. All-about-you leadership stems from insecurity—you think if you don’t give the orders, and make all the decisions, you can’t be “a real leader.” Sometime you do need to set direction and make decisions—but operating in an emergent ecosystem depends on developing a sense when that’s needed, and when it gets in the way of “other nodes.”

McChrystal recalled one of his own ah-ha moments. “When I became a Ranger Company commander, I had a lot of leadership experience—but I wasn’t appreciating the leadership abilities of others now in my charge. In one Alaskan mission, when I was handing out assignments, one of the ablest platoon lieutenants suddenly told me off: ‘This is bull****.’ I was floored—but I swallowed my pride and listened. It became clear the lieutenants knew how to do their jobs, and just wanted the space to do them. So I let them do the work their way. You have to develop a sense when to hand off to subordinates, and when to push for yourself. Working in dialogue with followers is a crucial role for any leader.”

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4. Your most critical tools are building others’ capability, encouraging them, and expressing disappointment when they screw up. In an ecosystem approach, every leader must continuously improve the skills and learning of others. But motivation sometimes depends on correcting behavior that goes off-course. McChrystal again remembered some of his own learning. “When I was head of Joint Special Operations, building a huge collaborative network of different units across the Middle East, the culture of accountability and respect I was trying to instill was at odds with top-down punishment by me, the named commander. Much more effective, when someone failed in a critical task, was to talk to them privately—and explain how they had let both me and the broader mission down. My personal disappointment helped them do better next time.”

5. Be proud in your leadership but accept the influence of situation and luck in what you can accomplish. McChrystal does not plead for self-defeating humility. “Leaders can make a major positive difference, but they have to understand that the impact they want to have is never guaranteed, even with all the right skills and plans. We’ve all known bad leaders — abusive, autocratic, dishonest—who can still succeed. But in the end, it all comes out. You have to keep learning to be better for the long term.”

Rethinking Leadership For Democracy

I closed by asking Stanley McChrystal about political leadership—and the future of our democracy. He offered a practical adaptation of his concepts to today’s troubled environment.“The U.S. presidency more than ever requires a team effort.  Future presidents cannot know everything or do everything alone. The best presidents— in retrospect, Ronald Reagan was one—are hands-off.

White House Chief of Staff Howard Baker, Secretary of Transportation Elizabeth Dole, President Ronald Reagan , and Senate Republican Leader in the White House, March 23, 1987. (Photo by Terry Arthur) GETTY IMAGES

But they create a culture with other leaders so as a team they can develop and implement big ideas.”

“We should be more overt with that model. What if future presidential candidates position themselves as not knowing all the answers—and instead, before the election, identify some 50 other leaders—experts or experienced people in Congress, or business, or the military, etc.—who would publicly commit to working with the future president as a team, and follow certain shared principles about policy? Why not bring the best working model of networks and modern organizations to running our country, giving citizens a chance to choose a team of teams to serve them?”

Originally published on Forbes.com

Categories
Management and Organization

Healthcare Reform: Where’s The Push For More Innovation?

Healthcare demonstrator outside the Republican Party’s annual policy retreat in Philadelphia, U.S., Jan. 26, 2017. (Photographer: Charles Mostoller/Bloomberg © 2017 Bloomberg Finance LP) © 2017 BLOOMBERG FINANCE LP

A recent NBC/Wall Street Journal poll again demonstrated that health care is the top government priority among voters. So how are our political leaders tackling the question? For Democratic presidential candidates, the debate is mostly about a new “Medicare for All”—somehow expanding government coverage for every American (alas, with little discussion about how to fund it). Republican leaders have focused primarily on dismantling Obamacare, though President Trump last week called for bi-partisan legislation to reform provider billing practices. Yet such issues are only a fraction of the tangle of healthcare challenges that, as Mr. Trump once noted, “nobody knew could be so complicated.”

A Bigger Strategic Monster

That complexity, besides being mind-numbing, has also blocked more serious strategic thinking in our public debate. Expanding access and reducing costs are important for many voters—but nobody’s talking about a bigger strategic monster: our need to ramp up healthcare innovation. How will we accelerate growth of new knowledge so our overall system can actually perform better long term—to achieve higher quality and financially sustainable patient care? What are the breakthroughs to turn around today’s losing battle: we’re spending on healthcare faster than we can afford, even as positive outcomes per dollar keep sinking versus those of other developed nations?

Finding more innovation for better results and sustainable performance is not unique to healthcare. It’s the imperative that any organizational leader wrestles with every day. You know what keeps you up at night: how to keep experimenting, learning, and growing your longer-term strategy, so you can meet future challenges–even as you’re executing for results today?

Tapping The Experience Of Dr. Laurie Glimcher

Dr. Laurie Glimcher is no stranger to such issues as President and CEO of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, consistently ranked among top U.S. cancer centers. A distinguished immunology scientist, she also heads an enterprise that delivers globally-renowned cancer care even as it pushes the boundaries of new knowledge that are shaping future horizons of treatment.

Dr. Glimcher and I recently spoke about reforming—and ultimately transforming—American healthcare. She began by ticking off several familiar problems-to-be-solved (fragmented insurance models, overall system complexity, care that differs by zip code, over-reliance on expensive emergency rooms) — but soon shifted more broadly towards accelerating innovation-sparking knowledge and industry-wide learning. Five themes about that emerged from our discussion.

Dana-Farber President & CEO Laurie Glimcher, with members of her lab. The Glimcher Lab studies molecular pathways that regulate the immune system, critical for treatment strategies for autoimmune, infectious, and malignant diseases. (Photo credit: Sam Ogden) SAM OGDEN

1. Beware the rising tsunami of chronic diseases. Glimcher peppered our conversation with heart-stopping data about illness fast multiplying by aging demographics, environmental changes, and other population risk factors, e.g. increasing obesity. “When you look at healthcare costs today, multiple chronic diseases take a significant proportion of our national spending: diabetes, cancer, osteoarthritis, Parkinson’s, etc. Thanks to recent research, cancer mortality is now dropping– but cancer incidence is actually rising, particularly among younger people: half of all men and one-third of all women will experience it in their lives. Meanwhile the biggest cost in our system has become mental health, especially dementias like Alzheimer’s disease. One out of every 2-3 people over the age of 85 will develop dementia. By 2050 they will consume over $1 trillion of our national healthcare budget of $3.6. That’s just not sustainable.”

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2. Dealing with the tsunami critically depends on basic research. The lay public—and many policy makers—often lack the scientific background to understand why basic research is needed to revolutionize the treatment of diseases, and also “bend the curve of costs” that are undermining our healthcare’s financial sustainability. As Glimcher commented, “If we don’t figure out, for example, how to cure Alzheimer’s or at least delay its onset—it will break our system. We have to analyze why some people’s neurons get destroyed while other people stay mentally sharp into their nineties. It’s basic research that will allow us to understand why this happens, and the causes and mechanisms in the brain.”

“For cancer, more basic research is needed about why the incidence of that disease is increasing. How is the epidemic of obesity adding to that? Why are some cancers, (e.g., breast and prostate) now highly treatable, while others, like pancreatic, still not? In the last fifteen years, research has delivered two major revolutions for many cancer patients’ survivability and quality of life—the development of precision medicine, i.e., highly-targeted, personalized therapies, and immunotherapy, using the body’s own defenses to battle the disease. But these are only the tip of the iceberg, and we’re still a long way from understanding the mechanisms of many cancers.”

3. Transforming the structure of the overall healthcare system will enhance allocation of skills and resources for research while also improving primary care. Glimcher highlighted how today’s patchwork of different providers sub-optimizes both front-line care and higher-skilled tertiary treatment and research: “Family doctors and internists are experiencing ‘burnout’ because of the complexity of paperwork, defensive practice against litigation, and pay scales. Meanwhile, though people come from all over the world for specialized treatment in our academic medical centers, these centers—the crown jewels of American medicine– are too often used for more routine problems, at higher cost. This hinders strategic focus on state-of-the-art research whose excellence we need to expand. A vision for a future approach might be a ‘hybrid system’ that distributes everyday medical care of different kinds more widely and fairly in communities while also enabling specialized academic medicine to deploy more talent and funding for best-in-class therapy and research. A future system should also benefit from the increasing use of ‘big data’ and the emerging application of machine learning and AI.”  

Illustration of CAR (chimeric antigen receptor) T cell immunotherapy, a process being developed to treat cancer. T cells (blue), part of the body’s immune system, are taken from the patient and have their DNA modified by viruses (spiky spheres) so that they produce chimeric antigen receptor proteins, specific to the patient’s cancer. (Photocredit: Getty)

4. Research capability system-wide can be boosted by widening the culture of collaboration and learning. Throughout our interview, Dr. Glimcher alluded to several principles and practices she’s seen accelerate development of innovative medical knowledge. Some of these were pioneered at Dana-Farber, others have been “best practice” for some time—but are unevenly applied throughout today’s medical ecosystem.

  • A patient-centric mindset: “Research has to stay focused on always improving the patient’s health, and understanding the full journey of every patient’s disease, including across family generations.”
  • Strive for big breakthroughs: “Though research always builds on what’s come before, we mustn’t over-invest in ‘me-too’ drugs or simply incremental solutions. We need to keep reaching for large leaps.”
  • From bed to bench and bench to bed: “We make faster progress when researchers and clinicians work closely together, and when researchers stay close to actual patient cases. Treatment of disease is increasingly about bringing all the different dimensions of research, data, and practice together for every individual patient.”
  • The power of cross-functional teams: “Problem-solving and discovery today cannot be siloed. At Dana-Farber, for example, we’ve seen huge progress with special teams combining the knowledge of oncologists, biologists, chemists, statisticians, immunologists and other professionals collaborating. Researchers have to embrace industry knowledge too. If a pharma company knows something we don’t, we have to take advantage of that.”
  • Share knowledge for the greater good. “We all need to be open about what we’re learning, and share both data and insights as widely as we can—to help everyone else make progress faster. We have to worry less about personal glory and authored publications, and more about putting patients first.”

5. Now, more than ever, U.S. leadership in medical innovation must be strengthened. Glimcher finished with a blend of optimism and concern. “When I look at all the revolutions in cancer treatment, and the promise of big data and AI, it’s a tremendously exciting time. American medical research more broadly is pushing lots of new horizons. But funding for the sector is shrinking in real terms, even as research costs, with all the new technology, are rising. The NIH (National Institute of Health) budget is now $39 billion. China, in contrast, has committed spending $60 billion a year, for the next five years. Medical research here is becoming an ever-thinner sliver of the overall Federal pie. Now is not the time to give up the leadership we’ve built over so many years in our history.”

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Originally published on Forbes.com

Categories
Management and Organization

Why Reinventing Systems Beats Just Solving Problems

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Imagine if you were suddenly in charge of rebuilding America’s infrastructure. Or overhauling our society’s healthcare. Or restructuring the tuition economics of higher education. How would you answer such a call?

Twenty years ago, you might have led the effort as a problem-solver-in-chief, creating a plan by breaking the big challenge into smaller pieces, hiring analysts to crunch some options, and then forging a compromise solution among competing stakeholders.

A Different Approach

OK for then, but not today. Or so argues Bill Matassoni, who capped his recent rollicking memoir of a forty-year marketing career with the bold claim that society’s big complicated challenges  now require some fresh thinking and leading. The book’s title sums up the proposition: Marketing Saves the World.

Bill Matassoni (Photo credit: Kristina Safarova)

“Marketing?” I asked, as we started discussing the book. “That’s going to save the world?” (Disclosure: in 1987, Bill Matassoni hired me into McKinsey & Co., where we worked together for a couple of years—long before either of us worried about rescuing civilization.)

“Well, it’s not just marketeers I’m talking about. All leaders have to reorient their thinking for big challenges ahead. They have to adopt a new sensibility and skills, which I’ve seen revolutionizing marketing over the last ten years.”

As we talked further, it became clear the skills and sensibilities he envisions are not about “fixing problems” but rather reinventing systems: the complex, interrelated processes, information flows and incentives that surround any domain of human society or business operating in today’s global economy. Matassoni argues that reinventing systems creates more and widely distributed value; and if done right, allows all stakeholders to share in the rewards and enjoy better lives as the system grows and adapts into the future.

“Two principles ground this approach,” Matassoni explained. “First, replacing traditional, linear marketing strategies (e.g. creating specific value, communicating it, then capturing it) with more dynamic systems thinking, and guiding the interrelationships among system elements, to create broader, ongoing growth. Second, relentlessly pursuing ‘win-win’ strategies so every stakeholder gets an outcome they desire—which Nobel-prize-winning economist John Nash has shown drives the best results. “

Matassoni wasn’t promoting so much a specific methodology, but rather suggesting a conceptual shift for all leaders today: rethinking how to solve big problems with a new marketing-inspired mindset.

Five propositions emerged from our conversation. Ask yourself if any of these are now shaping—or should be shaping—your leadership too.

1.System change begins with system thinking. Many leaders today opine about “fixing the healthcare system” or “transforming the energy conservation system,” or building strategies for this or that business across “the entire ecosystem of an industry.” But how many, as Matassoni pointed out, do the homework to really understand what “system thinking” means? Or actually utilize its well-established tools and practices? What’s your own level of understanding about how to change a complex system, and redesign it so it continues to evolve and adapt?

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“If you’re going to move beyond incrementally fixing narrow problems— for example, not just lowering drug prices but rather transforming healthcare overall (e.g. simultaneously improving access, innovation, affordability, health outcomes)—you have to understand at least some system dynamics. Get familiar with basics of information stocks and flows, feedback loops, intervention points, etc. The work of Donella Meadows is a good place to start. You need enough background to work with systems specialists who will be on your team.”

2. Humanize your systems thinking with intangible values too. That said, if you bury yourself too deeply in systems thinking, with its often bloodless diagrams, you can lose track of real people. Matassoni commented further:“With everything dynamically connected now, you can’t just map information flows and feedback loops. You also have to pay attention to human emotions and purpose. Old marketing often missed that. Reinventing win-win systems goes beyond money and market share—you also have to consider things like different stakeholders’ sense of identity. In a healthcare system, how does the work doctors do define who they are, and what they aspire to be? Or nurses? Hospital administrators? What meaning do pharma researchers bring to their clinical trials? How do patients expect to be treated?”

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3. Harness action with superordinate goals. To get at the intangible values of a system—and also prioritize the right information flows and feedback loops, Matassoni stressed that that leaders must define success ultimately with “superordinate goals”—communicating higher-level hopes and desires that can inspire people to pursue change together. Tomorrow’s leaders will bring marketing-style savvy to explain why overcoming this or that big challenge really matters to people. They reach for higher aspirations than the narrower objectives of classical problem-solving.

“Rebuilding America’s infrastructure is not just filling potholes or shoring up bridges. A great leader will engage partners and followers about transformational system change, for better transportation to all help people access better food, get education, improve their skills, connect more regularly with their families.”

(Photo credit: Getty)

4. Run experiments, and keep learning. Matassoni insists that system reinvention must be an ongoing process of learn-by-doing. “Why aren’t our leaders running more experiments to redesign the systems of healthcare or higher education? Why aren’t we learning more from norm-breaking pilot programs in every major social domain? For example, restructuring the astronomical costs of attending college by learning from so-called income-share agreements, pioneered by Ashoka entrepreneurs and Purdue University –making loans to students, secured and paid off to ‘investors’ with slices of their later career earnings?”

5. Embrace the energy of capitalism. Traditional approaches to complex and dynamic issues without a known solution—be they societal or commercial dilemmas—often employ the multi-stakeholder discipline of “wicked problem-solving.” Matassoni’s prescriptions echo some of that methodology—getting all the stakeholders around the table, understanding their different goals, engaging in adaptive learning—but he also criticized potential pitfalls. First, too much collaboration for collaboration’s sake: “In search of building trust, you can devolve into self-defeating incremental and ‘play nice’ compromises. You need stakeholders around the table to fight each other, to get better solutions. And you have to keep sorting for winners, and then fire people who can’t deliver or just want to obstruct things. Who’s ‘around the table’ has to keep evolving.”

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Second, avoid the feel-good corporate social responsibility: “When businesses participate—as they must—you want them pushing for everything they can get to help their bottom line—supported by the redesigned system. At the same time, though profit is important so is supporting the dignity and self-worth of everyone in the redesigned system. Healthcare reform that punishes drug companies, humiliates doctors or treats patients as stupid will fail.”

Third, beware a zero-sum game: “The key is rethinking systems for more growth, constantly making the overall pie bigger, so everybody gains more from the reinvention. The clever leader knows how to keep selfishness and even greed in the center of things, while at the same time finding ways so everyone wins what they’re due—both tangible and intangible rewards.”

Final Thoughts

Matassoni closed our conversation with a brief inspirational summary.

“The marketers of tomorrow are the best people to communicate why ‘problem-solving’ has to shift towards redesigning systems that can become self-sustaining. If you seek out other people who break the rules, look beyond older frameworks of just products and markets, and have some brains and guts to call out the deeper needs of our fellow human beings, the sky will be the limit.”

(Photo credit: Getty)

Originally published on Forbes.com

Categories
Democracy

If Robert Mueller Won’t Save Our Democracy, Who Will?

Special Counsel Robert Mueller walks past the White House, soon after submitting his report on possible Trump collision with Russia in the 2016 election. (AP Photo/Cliff Owen)

With Robert Mueller’s report now released to Congress, cries about justice versus betrayal are echoing everywhere. President Trump and his supporters boast of the report’s “total exoneration” from Russian collusion. Democrats emphasize still lurking possibilities of the president’s obstruction of justice. La lutte continue.

But let’s widen the aperture. Waging ceaseless trench warfare about Mueller’s report, and brandishing narratives about Trump the Savior versus Trump the Demon can obscure bigger questions. Our democracy is not one president. It’s a broad system of interconnected, tangible and intangible pieces. So how safe and how healthy is that system, looking ahead? How worried or optimistic should we be about our democracy’s future?

Summoning The Lamplight of History

For that,  Andrew Porwancher, associate professor at the University of Oklahoma’s Institute for the American Constitutional Heritage  provided some helpful insights in a recent interview. Porwancher is one of the star lecturers of The One Day University which showcases highly-rated college professors to lay audiences in day-long events across 61 North American cities. Our conversation–about the successes and travails of our constitution’s history—produced some encouraging answers to the bigger-than-Mueller questions. Summary take: American democracy is not about to die–but if it’s going to keep evolving and adapting, we are all going to have to step up our game as citizens.

Andrew Porwancher, lecturing at the One Day University. (By permission, One Day University) WILHELM KUHN

Five themes from our discussion tell the tale:

1.Two hundred plus years of debate and conflict in American democracy has delivered plenty of progress.

“Our divisions today are not exceptional,” Porwancher began optimistically. “Our system of governance has been extraordinarily resilient through history. We endured a protracted war of independence against a global superpower. We survived a civil war where 600,000 Americans died, and then later two world wars. And we’ve wrestled with incredible internal dissent all the while, tolerating it and then adapting. Meanwhile we’ve steadily expanded the country’s freedoms to those previously disenfranchised—slaves, women, gay Americans, etc. If you look at the arc of our history—and our relative success (not total—we don’t always get it right, especially as a big and complex society)—there’s every reason to be hopeful. But we also can’t let ourselves become complacent. Some things do need fixing now.”

2. History won’t “settle our arguments once and for all” but it should help us appreciate our heritage of political debate and compromise.

Porwancher attacked the myth that continued search for the Founding Fathers’ original intent is a solution to end today’s acrimony. “The Framers shared many basic principles which still inform today’s democracy—the central importance of liberty, and a realistic view that power corrupts and must therefore be moderated by a system of checks and balances. But the Founders often disagreed, even changing their own minds sometimes, for example, about how much power the central government should have (e.g. Jefferson’s early opposition to a powerful central bank but later embrace of Federal prerogative to seize the opportunity of the Louisiana Purchase); or the actual role of religion in civic life (separation of church and state wasn’t as hard-edged in the 18th century as we see it today).”

Porwancher also noted that the drafters of the Constitution were sometimes either accidentally ambiguous or intentionally sparse with their language, to encourage context-sensitive interpretation in the future. “The best example is probably the ‘necessary and proper’ clause, which empowers Congress to pass legislation necessary and proper for fulfillment of its enumerated powers, endowing the federal government with a measure of latitude to meet unanticipated exigencies.”

Enduring Fault Lines

“Our Constitution emerged out of fundamental fault lines which the Framers never fully resolved—the issue of slavery a chief example—but also others which still vex us today: agrarian and rural interests versus urban and mercantile; northern versus southern states. And because the Founders so prioritized individual freedom, it was inevitable that protecting it encouraged a culture of political dissent: As Madison famously wrote ‘liberty is to faction what air is to fire.’ Politics in his day were every bit as divisive as ours, which is why the Founders worked hard to design safeguards and checks and balances, so that disagreements wouldn’t erupt into war, but instead be channeled into courts, public hearings, and legislative solutions.”

James Madison ( 1751-1836), fourth president of United States. GETTY

Porwancher went on to emphasize how the Constitution was itself built on compromise, affirming an approach to cut through democratic disagreements and harsh ideologies. “For example, in one early debate about slavery, Virginia sided with abolitionists to oppose more importation of slaves—not because they suddenly loathed human bondage, but because at the time they had too many slaves and wanted to increase their value by reducing supply.”

3. To continue our progress, today’s democracy now requires urgent changes

Porwancher counterpointed his optimism by acknowledging serious reform is now required to continue positive evolution. Beyond a few familiar operational changes (tightening up voting processes; rationalizing gerrymandering), he highlighted one critical institutional shift:“Congress needs to reassert itself. James Madison was explicit in the Federalist Papers that Congress should be the most powerful branch of government. The relative power of the legislature vs the executive has indeed waxed and waned over time—consider Congressional strength under Andrew Johnson, through the Gilded Age of the late nineteenth century, and during Watergate against Nixon. It’s time to rebalance legislative authority against today’s executive power.”

President Trump debates with House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., left, as Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and Vice President Mike Pence listen. Dec. 11, 2018 (Photo by Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post via Getty Images) GETTY

Invoking Alexander Hamilton, Porwancher underscored what is most paramount to the survival of democracy: “A robust Department of Justice must ensure the rule of law.” But as the historian further reflected, it’s also time for the rule of law to be extended to some currently soft democratic norms. “Things we used to take for granted—e.g. Presidential candidates releasing tax returns, putting personal assets in a blind trust—now need more statutory force. And Congress must offer greater legal specificity about the scope of the emoluments clause. Also, the barriers between leaders and administrative justice need rethinking—ensuring no public servant is allowed to be ‘above the law’, and also preventing them from using the law as a political weapon against opponents.”

Rebuilding Civic Culture

4. No less important than institutional change is rebuilding civic culture.

“You can’t sustain democracy by imposing institutions on a society not committed to democratic values. A constitution succeeds only if it channels a democratic culture.”

“How we debate and how we talk about our opponents matter. Our coarsening public discourse ought to be a great concern. The First Amendment says we have to tolerate free speech but not necessarily promote its harshest forms. If personal attacks, and all the trolling and anonymous vitriol of social media lessen our commitment to follow democratic norms, we can’t operate the institutions on which the constitution depends.”

“But at the same time, today’s situation is fostering demand for leaders who can speak for all of us. We don’t have to accept the extreme differences between us that the media projects in its ‘Blue State vs Red State’ narratives. Excesses of character and style among our presidents tend to regress to the mean—Carter’s honesty after Nixon, Bush the family man after Clinton, Trump the anti-Obama. I think our nation is now ready for a unifier. We can self-correct again.”

5. That said, don’t look to any single leader to fix our current problems.

Porwancher finished with a last historical reflection: “The Founders lived in their own toxic political times, and knew that when reasoned debate ends violence begins. It’s still true today. We have to believe that renewing our institutions, culture and discourse is what will sustain our democracy. If we do the hard work of self-governance—engaging, listening and respecting our opponents, problem-solving and compromising as needed—a better future awaits us.”

So if  Robert Mueller isn’t going to save our democracy, who will do the job? The answer lies in the first three words of our Constitution.

Constitution of the United States of America GETTY

Originally published on Forbes.com

Categories
Leadership

What If Xenophon Were Your Executive Coach?

As an emerging leader, you’re growing your skills and behaviors through learn-by-doing—seizing opportunities for more responsibility, and then using the crucible of experience to keep honing your performance. But you also know that active practice benefits from reflection. With some quiet study, you can assess your own performance, think about what you can learn from other leaders, and continuously better your capabilities.

Executive coaches can help you with that study and reflection. They can hold the mirror up to you, to guide your self-awareness about skills and deficits, and compare/contrast best practice leadership behavior. Coaching can also sharpen your understanding of specific leadership challenges, and teach you how to wrestle with the decision-making trade-offs when you exercise more responsibility. So when the gray-haired sage sent over by HR shows up at your office, don’t be afraid to open the door.

Appealing to Ancient Wisdom

But also, don’t be afraid to engage a more virtual and indeed different kind of coach for your study. So how about the Hellenic philosopher and essayist, Xenophon? Or the ancient Greek poet Homer? Or the second century CE biographer Plutarch? You might just find that reading and thinking about the works of such ancient writers will also sharpen your leadership practice today.

Portrait of Greek philosopher Xenophon GETTY

Norman Sandridge, an associate professor of classics at Howard University, wants to refer you to these and other virtual coaches from the liberal arts canon. He’s on a mission to reinvent classical literature and history as another vehicle for your leadership development—whatever your professional field. His enthusiasm jumped out during a recent conversation.

“If you read them in the right way, ancient authors can help any rising leader better anticipate their own experiences, navigate moral dilemmas, and articulate an inspiring vision for their organization,” he says. “For example, in Homer’s Odyssey, you find a detailed and complex depiction of how to mentor someone into a leadership role. Plutarch’s essay on The Virtues of Women challenges us to think about the differences, if any,  between the virtues that women bring to a leadership role versus men. Xenophon’s Education of Cyrus offers a meditation on what it truly means for a leader to care about the needs of others.”

Beyond “Flatter-ature”

Sandridge emphasized, however, such “coaching” only works if you make the proper ancient-modern connection. “To make meaning out of these ancient texts you have to bring them into dialogue with contemporary issues of leadership,” he continued. “For example, if we believe that we want everyone to have access to the most important and influential leadership roles, we have to ask ourselves how narratives about ancient leaders might exclude others who have not traditionally been seen as a ‘great leader.’ Ideally, you’ll pursue these kinds of reflections in conversation with others, to get more perspective and see the implications of adapting ancient examples to contemporary problems.

“Unfortunately, many people today have reduced study of ancient leadership to an overly-simplified set of rules or superficial analogies between ‘great’ ancient leaders and the modern CEO. Rather than challenge aspiring leaders to engage in more creative and self-critical processes, they reassure them of their own status as titans in a modern world. It’s an approach I call ‘flatter-ature.'”

Sandridge has brought his vision of leadership development through the liberal arts beyond his Howard classroom. He helped found a humanities-based leadership institute (Kallion.org), with a network of like-minded academics, providing both online resources and courses for the general public. As a fellow at Harvard’s Center for Hellenic Studies he also helps organize practice-oriented study events for students and diverse leaders in the Washington, D.C. metro area.

Norman Sandridge, Howard University (photo: Anastasia Jackson)

Become Your Own Leadership Artist

“My approach begins with leadership as an art and the leader as artist, fashioning themselves to better serve the people in the organization. Just as a serious painter doesn’t ask Leonardo da Vinci for the five basic lessons of portraiture, so, too, the modern executive shouldn’t look to ancient leaders for simple lessons. Instead, she tries to analyze and understand the storied leader in context, and from there initiates a creative and evaluative process, turning herself into something that fits who she is and whom she is trying to serve.”

Sandridge added that the appeal of ancient study is its combination of modern familiarity and remote strangeness—offering students a vital process of compare but contrast.

“Ancient leaders felt emotions recognizable to any contemporary leader: self-doubt, envy for a rival, anxiety over the weight of responsibility, over-confidence, love for fellow human beings,” he says. “They faced familiar moral dilemmas about self-interest versus the good of others. Or using persuasion versus force to get a job done. Or wrestling with self-confidence versus doubt and uncertainty. But these ancient leaders also lived in a world full of superstition and constant mediation with the gods. In ancient times, wealth inequality was extensive, human slavery was central to most economies, and science was a mode of thinking for only a limited few. Ancient leaders sometimes faced challenges hard for us to imagine today.”

Five Steps To Shape Your Leadership From Humanistic Study

Sandridge’s approach to humanistic learning follows a five-step diagnostic for reading and discussing a text:

1. Identify: The first step is simply to identify instances of leadership, “just as an entomologist might collect different kinds of butterflies,” he explains, adding that as you read, you should collect examples of someone “exercising authority, delivering a persuasive speech, articulating a problem, making a decision on behalf of a group. And look beyond roles and titles that are the traditional markers of leadership.”

2. Analyze: Next, break the examples into constituent parts and explore the implications. “Say you come across an ancient leader who will do anything to win, no matter what—the Greek concept of philonikia,” Sandridge notes. “What are the situations where such a tendency would help a community and when might it involve so much risk-taking, self-aggrandizement, squandering of resources, and counter-productive negotiation that it actually destroys a community?”

3. Translate: In this step, Sandridge asks readers to make the connection with meaningful leadership issues today: “The key is to translate your analysis to how you see yourself and what problems you see facing your organization. Do you find the examples of ancient leadership analogous to contemporary ones? If not, what do the differences tell you about your issues today?”

4. Evaluate: In this next step, readers judge leaders’ morality and/or effectiveness in the story. “Once you have an idea about how an ancient example could apply you,” Sandridge says, “ask yourself, ‘Would this be a good or ethical thing to do?’ Would it work for me and my organization?'”

5. Practice: The final step shifts your learning into action for yourself. “Once you’ve developed some ideas of good leadership behavior from ancient examples, practice them in your role as leader—as soon as you can find an opportunity to do so. If you make practice your ultimate goal, you will continue to reap the benefits of your study for self-improvement.”

A  Universal Concept For Any Leader?

And is there was one overarching concept of leadership found in ancient literature that is applicable to leaders today?

“Well, if we’re looking for something universal,” Sandridge responds, “I think it’s best captured in Book One of Xenophon’s Education of Cyrus. It’s when Cambyses, the Persian King, extols the glory of ruling as a good leader to his son Cyrus, but also explains why it fundamentally depends on duty and caring for one’s followers: ‘Don’t you see that the most amazing thing is to be able to provide for others so that they have all that they need and become what they need to be?’”

Originally published on Forbes.com

Categories
Leadership

A Novel New Year’s Resolution: Stop Chasing Novelty In Your Leadership Development

photo credit: GETTY

It’s almost midnight, the band plays, and the waiter pours. The bubbling foam atop your fluted glass previews what lies below—lovely champagne to cheer your heart and soul.

But what if your friendly waiter simply served you the froth on top? No way to toast the New Year, is it?

Beyond Frothy Fads

Don’t make the same mistake with your  leadership development in 2019. Look past the foamy bubbles of today’s fads, to the essence hiding below: the timeless core of what leadership is, and what you must always do to build it throughout your career.

But it’s easy to get distracted. The leadership development industry has exploded in recent years, and, alas, there’s more than enough froth to confuse any aspiring professional. Too much shallow or gimmicky advice: about quick digital solutions, magical time management, secret leadership sauces, metaphors from history or Shakespeare, breathless predictions about the “completely new future.”

photo credit: GETTY

Abandon the ephemera. Build your capability on five fundamental principles:

1. Aim at what “leadership” really is. “Leader” has come to mean too many things—someone with an imposing title, or upper box on the org chart; or someone who simply challenges authority to stand apart from the crowd; or your eager-beaver colleagues who keep raising their hands for  extra assignments. Cut to the core! If you want to build leadership, keep your aim on what leaders achieve: they create significant impact by building an organization of people working together on big common goals.

2. Leaders worry about motivating and aligning  people, not specific structures of organization. Leaders achieve impact by mobilizing followers to get something done. The context for that can take many  forms: a corporation (e.g. a big or small for-profit business); an extended enterprise (e.g. Amazon and its ecosystem of suppliers and sellers); a network (e.g. communities of open software developers or affiliated non-profit agencies); or a movement (e.g. armies of volunteers who followed Martin Luther King’s civil rights initiatives). Leaders also create impact in smaller-scale ways, e.g. with a team, a partnership or some other unit within a larger organization. What ultimately matters is not the form or structure, but how leaders assemble the necessary talent, and coordinate and inspire people so they can achieve major goals together.

3. “Management” is not a dirty word. The collective work of the team, corporation, network or enterprise doesn’t have to flow only from a leader’s hands-on direction; great leaders also drive results through indirect or intangible means with followers—appealing to purpose, building cultures of commitment and performance, encouraging others to take leadership on their own accord.

But achieving impact with any kind of organization always requires some management too. For decades, business academics have argued that leaders are different from managers, prompting too many would-be leaders to shirk from overseeing (or even engaging in) operational activity. Don’t get hung up on the labels, and be willing to step into some everyday real work. If you’re going to have impact with an organization, you have to develop enough experience to sometimes manage others. And doing so, by the way, also builds better judgment for you to hire and guide others who sometimes provide management for you. Leadership must be more than just having big thoughts or making motivational speeches at all-company meetings.

photo credit: GETTY

4. Build your leadership by on-the-job experience with critical organizational practices. You have to get good at a lot of things to be a successful leader—but start by prioritizing your development around a short list of must-do’s. Here are five fundamental practices that are always part of driving impact through organization. (“Practices” because you build  knowledge and skills hands-on, reflecting and improving over time.)

  • Building a unifying vision: setting out goals and a picture of success to provide purpose, motivation and ownership for the people of the organization
  • Translating vision into strategy: working through choices about where and how to move the organization towards shared goals, and create distinctive value; and then planning and coordinating action
  • Getting great people on board: recruiting, engaging and developing great talent through a “social contract” that promises growth, reward and relationships in exchange for people’s achievement
  •  Delivering results: establishing disciplines to ensure continual high performance by all members of the organization
  • Innovating for the future: maintaining a dual focus on present performance and future opportunities, to keep the organization sustainable amidst changing trends and new challenges of competitors

5. Practice also “leading yourself.” Many leadership books emphasize what might be a sixth practice—focusing on what you do for yourself “to be a leader,” e.g. building your character, understanding what’s important to you, developing certain “leadership behaviors,” etc.  Those aren’t wrong—but don’t get too buried in yourself. Keep your leadership focused on energizing the broader organization that will lead to major impact.

So, structure your self-care around four themes, to make it most effective for both you and your enterprise:

  • Understand yourself—engage in regular, reflective diagnosis, so people following you know who you are, can better work with you at your best, and adapt to where you most need help
  • Grow yourself— keep building specific knowledge and skills, so as you get better at your job, you are also improving the broader organization
  •  Share yourself—always develop other leaders, expanding your own growth through the give and take of teaching others, while also expanding the distributed capacity of the enterprise
  • Take care of yourself—avoid burnout, cynicism and your own lesser performance, by harmonizing your work and personal life; keep yourself healthy, and ensure that the most meaningful things to you are always part of your everyday work.
photo credit: Getty

Come January 1, make your leadership development resolution on the simple metaphor of that glass of New Year’s champagne: “Yes, I will enjoy some occasional froth, but only as a complement to the real wine below. I’ll keep my focus on the enduring fundamentals of  impact, practicing the practices that have always moved organizations and leaders towards their common goals.”

Originally published on Forbes.com

Categories
Democracy

Why A Crumbling World Order Urgently Needs U.S. Leadership

American troops in a landing craft approaching Omaha Beach on D-Day, June 6, 1944 (Digitally restored vector photo: Getty, by permission)

Still angry about Justice Kavanaugh? Or are you anxious about the latest UN climate report, warning of faster-rising oceans? Or do you fret about wrong-headed immigration laws? Or can’t we just talk about the Red Sox getting to the World Series?

No, we can’t. Read Robert Kagan’s new book, The Jungle Grows Back: America and Our Imperiled World (Knopf, 2018), and you’ll find a full-throated case for drop-everything-emergency aid for something more existential, the colorless oxygen of today’s civilization we dangerously take for granted: the liberal world order. This plain-spoken senior fellow of Brookings wants to grab you by the lapels and scream urgency in your face—because if we lose the American-guaranteed collection of laws, democratic values, economic and defense treaties that have produced seven unprecedented decades of peace and prosperity, you’ll wonder why you ever worried about anything else.

Senior Brookings Fellow, Robert Kagan. Photo by Paul Morigi, and cover photo of The Jungle Grows Back, by permission of Alfred A. Knopf. (COURTESY OF BROOKINGS)

If U.S. global leadership slides, Kagan asserts, the invisible protective bubble we’ve enjoyed since 1945 won’t just deflate. It will explode. Good-bye rules-based trade, hello shortages of food and essential products. Dictators not just threatening but using nuclear weapons. More innocents repressed or killed in civilized countries. Cross-border migrations magnitudes beyond the crises of today’s detention centers and Mediterranean rescues.

Dark Forces Re-emerging

The botanical metaphor in Kagan’s book title began our recent conversation. “We’ve been living in a tranquil garden of largely peaceful practices and liberal expectations across much of the world, ignoring the dark forces of jungle multiplying under the rocks. If we don’t defend civilization’s cultivation—especially American’s guarantee of peace and economic integration across the world—the toxic creatures and weeds will roar back.” Thus China’s determined military rise, Russia’s continuing aggressions, fiery authoritarians on the march in so many once democratic countries.

Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping selecting food at an exhibition during the Eastern Economic Forum in Vladivostok, Russia, Tuesday, Sept. 11, 2018. (Sergei Bobylev/TASS News Agency Pool Photo via AP)

As Kagan continued, “Trump has been damaging the system—he too seems to have forgotten what good it has delivered—but actually America’s desire for maintaining the global order has been diminishing for years. After the dissolution of the Soviet empire in the 1990s, people talked about ‘the end of history”—that America didn’t have to worry anymore about war or aggression. History doesn’t end, it simply paused. The ugliest aspects of human nature are surging again.”

Vanishing Leadership, Vanishing Peace

Kagan’s apocalyptic message, repeated in other recent writings, is lucid and terrifying, all the more devastating for its relentless use of history. It’s a footnoted plea that “we’ve seen this movie before.” He reminds us that Americans have frequently turned away from defending world order, with regrettably familiar outcomes: to be dragged in later at greater cost (e.g. helping to stop Hitler earlier might have prevented World War II); or, simply hoping that “the problem would go away,” to watch it get ten times worse (e.g. Obama’s policy in Syria). Kagan acknowledges that America has sometimes misstepped (e.g. Viet Nam, Iraq), but he still argues that overall our foreign engagement has produced more peace and prosperity than not. “History shows,” he summarized, “that world order has never been achieved without some constructive force to keep the peace. The relative harmony and fair play we’ve created in the modern world will vanish if the U.S. forsakes international leadership.”

Overlooking Omaha Beach in Normandy today, site of the historic Allied invasion that turned the tide of World War II (photo: Getty, by permission)

Can Today’s Peaceful Garden Be Saved?

“The odds are against our preserving today’s world order,” Kagan flatly commented. “But the game isn’t over, and demise isn’t inevitable. But any rescue will require lots of new thinking and bucking current political tides.”

I turned our discussion to leadership, probing about the skills and mindsets of the people who built the postwar liberal order. So what would take to rebuild it now?

His replies led to several interesting insights beyond the book per se. Four have implications for all of us who should care about keeping the garden safe–as leaders in our own right, citizens of this country, and future voters in important elections forthcoming.

1. Today’s global liberal order was built piecemeal, evolving more through continuous improvement than “grand design.”

Kagan quickly listed the post-WWII building blocks of the order, led by the U.S—“first undoing the military capability of Japan and Germany, and then fostering their financial success; economic integration for them and others based on open trade and fair competition with America; creating a democratic and liberal culture among allies, guaranteed by America’s power, and our willingness to punish those who threatened it.” Yet he resisted the idea of any detailed vision. “The system emerged step by step as different American statesmen took on this or that immediate problem. How to keep Germany and Japan from causing war again? OK, next how to make it worthwhile for them and other nations to invest in trade and business, not more armies? And then, later, how to push back on Russia and Communism when they started to threaten the order?”

“It wasn’t a vision but a process. As broader benefits started to accrue, allies saw the value, and with that we built further on what had been achieved. When we made mistakes—like Viet Nam—we had the strength to learn and course-correct, as Reagan led us to do.”

So perhaps, I reflect, thinking of our discussion, we need to stop worrying about big theoretical frameworks, and start tackling specific problems to protect the garden we have—and just keep learning from mistakes and building on progress.

2. Today’s order emerged from “generational leadership.”Though Kagan acknowledges contributions of well-known policy makers—Dean Acheson, George Kennan, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry Trumanet al— he de-emphasized any “great man theory.”  “The legacy was created by a whole generation, people born in the 1890s, who lived through the optimism of the early 20th C., and then watched it collapse in forty years of conflict. They had a shared experience, animated by fear and memory of war, so they worked together to prevent reemergence of the same horror. American Presidents have implicitly accepted that challenge and reliably invested in the order—until recently.”

Hiroshima after Atomic Bomb strike in 1945 (Photo by: Prisma Bildagentur/UIG via Getty Images)

And as we all join political debates and go to the polls in coming weeks, we might thus ask: has the current generation of American leaders lost touch with the risk of abandoning our global role?

3. The best leaders refuse the “either/or” choice between domestic and foreign policy investment.

Kagan railed about prioritizing domestic welfare over keeping the peace abroad. “Americans have periodically shied away from foreign affairs, claiming ‘we can’t afford to maintain military bases and also take care of our own people.’ Or that our own ‘social justice’ is more important than ‘freedom in the world.’ When we turn inwards we threaten our own prosperity and even survival. The greatest advances in racial justice in this country happened while we were building the liberal world order. Our guarantees of world commerce is what allows our own economy and people to flourish. Our military leadership is what protects us from the evil actors gunning for us today.”

As we spoke further, I came to appreciate the complex leadership needed to build and maintain the liberal world order that we still enjoy—engagement and capabilities on three levels at the same time: first, leaders with strength and courage against foes; second, leaders that also have empathy and ability to collaboratively guide fractious allies; third, also leadership skills for teaching and inspiring the citizens of our country. This third element in fact sparked Kagan’s final thoughts and the insight below.

4. We desperately need leaders who can explain and mobilize the rebuilding of this most precious asset.

Kagan had a ready list to save the flagging liberal order (indeed reversing Trump’s current approach)—“rebuild our allies’ solidarity; strengthen our global security guarantees; re-assert the practices of free trade; and pressure countries like Hungary, Poland, and Turkey to stop backsliding on democratic values.”  But most important, he called for new American leadership that can rally tomorrow’s citizens around what our fathers’ generation collectively and intuitively knew—that the world is fundamentally dangerous; that peace and prosperity are not natural; that preserving an international liberal community depends critically on America’s political will to invest money and lives to keep open markets, and prevent violence against our allies and values.

Kagan closed with a blend of pessimism and aspiration. “It’s very difficult to explain all this to the American people. Even the gifted FDR struggled with the challenge. But we need a president now who can convince Americans that preserving our global liberal system is absolutely worth doing. That the cost of letting it come undone will be so much more than saving it. We have to find leaders who can motivate tomorrow’s generation to join this cause, and do whatever it takes, so our nation can reassert our fundamentally benign—even if self-interested—hegemony in the world.”

A boy walks past a statue of former US president Franklin Delano Roosevelt at the FDR Memorial in Washington, DC, July 2, 2018. (Photo: MANDEL NGAN/AFP/Getty Images)

Originally published on Forbes.com

Categories
Uncategorized

A Different Set Of Questions For Judge Kavanaugh

Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh (AP Photo/Cliff Owen)

Should Brett Kavanaugh be confirmed as the next U.S. Supreme Court justice? Depends who you ask. Democrats (mostly “nay”) and Republicans (mostly “yay”) are assembling their polemical narratives. Whether a man of “impeccable credentials” who “interprets the law as it is written” (thus the White House) or “your worst nightmare” about gun control (Senator Richard Blumenthal), who will “forever change your life if you are a young woman” (Senator Kamala Harris), Judge Kavanaugh is now another installment in the raging debate about what our democracy is becoming–or not. The partisan fight over Donald Trump’s latest nominee will rumble along until it reaches some kind of climax in the forthcoming Senate confirmation hearings.

Protesters gather in front of the Supreme Court in Washington, Monday, July 9, 2018, after President Donald Trump announced Judge Brett Kavanaugh as his Supreme Court nominee. (AP Photo/Cliff Owen)

Predictive Hermeneutics?

As is now the norm, Kavanaugh is being vetted for his legal history. Partisan warriors are preparing arguments based on hermeneutically-extracted fragments of the candidate’s former decisions and writings. The implicit assumption is that anything Kavanaugh once ruled about contemporary wedge issues (abortion, immigration, presidential authority, etc.) will determine his future stance on the Supreme Court (either a specific decision or the “legal philosophy” he will consistently apply).

Projecting people’s actions for years that lie ahead from what they thought a decade ago has its place–but it’s hardly a fool-proof algorithm. Think about your own career: do you want your boss to predict how you’ll make a decision in a complex situation tomorrow based on something you wrote years ago in a college freshman essay? If you’re striving to be a leader, shouldn’t people expect you to learn, develop, and grow in your judgment over time?

And isn’t that fundamental to what democracy is about–for people, and especially democratic leaders, not to follow mindlessly a given ideological line, but rather to listen and learn from one another, to grow more sophisticated about making decisions, and even sometimes change their minds? Doesn’t that make for a more unbiased and thoughtful Supreme Court? Isn’t that what we’re supposed to have?

A Thinking Leader Or A Partisan Robot?

So let’s suspend partisan fervor for a moment–and look upon candidate Kavanaugh as a potential leader joining the highest court in the land. Senators, please go beyond the predictive analytics of his past policy opinions. Don’t just ask Brett Kavanaugh whether he will, robot-like, judge just as he did in this or that case in the 1990s. Or eternally affirm a paragraph he once wrote for a now dusty law journal. Why not also ask questions about his capacity to become a wiser decision-maker in coming years? About how he expects to evolve his previous views as circumstances change? About his approach to learning on the job and developing as a leader over time?

Here are five different kinds of questions for probing this nominee, not as a partisan team player or lurking enemy–but as a would-be leader in one of our foremost democratic institutions:

1. “Mr. Kavanaugh, tell us about some bad decisions you’ve made in your previous work—and what you learned from those.” Everyone makes bad decisions sometimes—but the best leaders see mistakes as opportunities to improve, and learn from those setbacks. Reflecting on their errors, they gain perspective about how things go wrong, and how misunderstandings and prejudice get in the way of success. So, let us into your head, Mr. Kavanaugh, and relive for us some of your past bad calls—and how you grew better from them. And then explain what you’ll bring to your practice of decision-making as a Supreme Court justice, and reach for even higher excellence in coming years.

(Photo: Shutterstock)

2. “What are some of the most common ‘cognitive traps’ that you struggle with in your decision-making?” New behavioral and brain science now explains why people often make bad decisions: why we tend to overemphasize bad outcomes over good as we draw on experience; why we often prioritize evidence to confirm what we already think; why it’s so hard to accurately estimate risk; how we misread social cues during a negotiation.

Everyone is caught, at least occasionally, by these and hundreds of other cognitive traps–but the best leaders become aware of when and how that happens to them. They are constantly reflecting about the  biases and faulty estimations that could be affecting their own decision-making. The framers of the U.S. constitution didn’t have the advantage of this new science—so let’s update our vetting process. Why not ask, “Mr. Kavanaugh, what cognitive traps tend to bias your judgment? What do you do to compensate for those?”

3. “How well do you learn from—and shape—others in group decision-making?” On the Supreme Court you’ll be part of a collective effort to decide difficult cases—with eight other experienced judges. You’ve done group decision-making in your previous work–served on other judicial panels, worked in the Bush 43 Office of the President, and were part of  the team supporting Ken Starr’s investigation of Bill Clinton.

Decision-making within a group has its own particular dynamics: every member in some way influences, and is also influenced by, other members, and helps mold the final collective decision. The best leaders know how to do that, and also appreciate the nuances of good collective decision-making—embracing diverse and inclusionary perspectives among members. They help others frame and synthesize problems to be tackled. They strive for a constructive balance between generalist pragmatism and deeper expertise of specialists.

Justices of the U.S. Supreme Court, June 1, 2017 (Photo: Alex Wong/Getty Images)

So:  “Judge, please reflect on your abilities for decision-making within a group. And then discuss the current justices of the Supreme Court—how do you expect to relate to these individuals, what will you learn from each of them? And what skills and experiences will bring to your new colleagues, to help improve the Court’s decision-making?”

4. “What critical future issues might make you reconsider your current beliefs about the law of our land?” Decisions of the Supreme Court will continuously influence the society and economy of America–and vice versa. Though “originalists” may strive to interpret the law per the intent of the Founders, even that intent must be contextualized within a continuing stream of innovation and change within our culture, and beyond: biomedical advances improving the span and quality of life; information technologies that enhance understanding but also threaten personal privacy and the integrity of democracy; global climate and demographic shifts that are altering the meaning of natural and man-made boundaries. So: “What, Judge Kavanaugh, do you see to be the greatest forces at work that will require  new or different interpretations of our laws? How will those alter the way you make decisions as a judge in the future?”

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5. “In summary, how will you grow in your job as Supreme Court Justice?” Will you get smarter, wiser and better in your decision-making over the next decade? In what particular ways? If you are confirmed, who will Justice Kavanaugh be in the year 2030? Will you be thinking or seeing the world any differently than you do today?  How specifically will your growth as a leader bring more progress to tomorrow’s American people?

People outside the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington D.C. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)

Originally published on Forbes.com

Categories
Leadership Management and Organization

How To Get Ready For Big System Failure Headed Your Way

Protests after the meltdown at Three Mile Island Nuclear Generating Station 1979, near Harrisburg, PA. (Photo: Keystone/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

Look back upon the Three Mile Island accident that flooded suburban Pennsylvania with toxic nuclear waste—and then imagine the panic of the  generating plant managers that March morning in 1979. Some routine maintenance in the facility suddenly mushroomed into a runaway thermodynamic crisis; controllers watched in helpless horror as small mishaps and misunderstandings cascaded into progressively bigger problems which took days to finally resolve. The “meltdown” of the reactor’s core spawned a billion dollars of clean-up, years of health-related legal action, and ongoing political conflict about nuclear energy.

Alas, Three Mile Island now stands as one more example of a “crisis of system complexity” that you too may face someday. Maybe not near-nuclear catastrophe–but still some big, unpredictable mess of interconnected failures that will test every bit of agility and problem solving of your leadership. So argues a thought-provoking new book, Meltdown: Why Our Systems Fail and What We Can Do About It (Penguin Press, 2018). Authors Chris Clearfield and Andras Tilcsik colorfully explain why your job, like everyone else’s in today’s global economy, is becoming part of bigger networks of co-dependent systems, laden with unforeseeable risks and unimaginable outcomes. Whether you’re a banker, manufacturer, consultant, or coffee shop owner, somewhere, somehow, the linked complexity of how you work today is  boiling up some nasty surprises for you. Those are probably not on your radar screen, and woe is you.

Happily, after painting the scary scenarios that await, the authors also offer some calming practical advice you can pack as a parachute. Read their pages and maybe, just maybe, you can avoid—or at least minimize–your own forthcoming descent into chaos.

Talking recently to Chris Clearfield about his book, five must-do ideas emerged that can improve the winning odds for any leader.

Chris Clearfield (photo: Elizabeth Leitzell)

1. Understand why some system meltdown is probably in your future too. Today’s global economy has pushed us all to higher planes of risk. Thus Clearfield: “Everyone now has to deal with the dark side of competitive differentiation, and ‘faster, better, cheaper.’ Yes,  for big companies, large extended networks—but it also happened, for example, to a small chain of bakeries which we studied. The company almost went under from complexity and co-dependent failures when, to revitalize their market, management added too many new products from too many new suppliers.”

Because we all keep pushing for higher performance, more scale and greater efficiency, innovation is proliferating, and so is the like-it-or-not imperative of interconnected technology—a witch’s brew of higher reward but also higher risk operations. Offer more consumer choice across bigger and bigger markets, and you’re spinning longer and more intricate spider web value chains, and devising speedier fulfillment processes. Look in the mirror: are you silently building more complex systems around you? And how much are you becoming part of someone else’s too? Remember the Alamo that was once Lehman Brothers.

Lehman Brothers, New York, September 2008: an institutional collapse that sent the global economy into a tailspin. (AP Photo/Mary Altaffer, file)

Channeling work of sociologist Charles Perrow, Meltdown emphasizes that the increasing risk is not just complexity per se, but complexity that is now “tightly coupled”—you aren’t only dealing with more moving parts, you’re also winding them tighter and tighter. The slack time and margin of error of olden days is now lost luxury. So when one little piece goes wrong, the ripple effect of all the tight coupling can be explosively punishing—creating wave after wave of oh-my-god failures. No-slack complexity is just part of everyone’s job now.

2. Understand your vulnerability and trade-offs. “You need to start measuring things you’re probably not measuring now,” warns Clearfield. For example, you should sketch an overall picture of: the inter-linked systems that create your value; the bottlenecks across the systems; and how tightly coupled different pieces are. “Stated simply,” he elaborated, “how many things across all your ‘systems’ have to go exactly right to achieve the performance you need—and what can go wrong if they don’t? Where are the leverage points? Do you really understand all the dependencies driving the success or failure of your efforts?”

Of course, you probably don’t—not just because of the layered networked complexity you can’t see, but also because you’re always pushing harder to win– and then  lose track of all the daisy-chains of risk. “Most managers willingly take on at least some complexity,” Clearfield pointed out, “to acquire a special capability—for example, a dramatically cheaper process based on a more extended supply chain, or providing greater customer transparency by being more open to stakeholders. You need to better understand the tradeoffs between capabilities and complexity that you make, consciously and unconsciously.”

3. Redesign and simplify your systems—when you can. There’s already plenty of smart thinking about simplifying organizations through process redesign, shifting mindsets, and reframing critical elements, (e.g. Ashkenas, Simply Effective; Donella Meadows, Leverage Points, etc.). The early chapters of Meltdown offer comparable advice. But Clearfield notes the limits of such strategies. “Leaders today have to go further, because we’ve reached levels of system complexity so large that no one can know or predict all the interconnections; and increasingly there’s no real opportunity to do complete redesign.” He pointed to the recent political challenge of reforming the U.S. healthcare system: “There was no way Obama could have re-architected all of our now interconnected systems of doctors, hospitals, insurance, payments, technology, etc. Even more now, fixing all the former problems that still exist and new ones that have arisen since can’t be some clean-sheet-of-paper exercise.”

4. No matter what, invest in building cultures of better decision-making and continuous learning. The real upshot of Meltdown is that the greatest strategy for leaders in today’s unpredictable connected chaos is to build more agile and intelligent organizations. That is, don’t expect to stop the rising tide of coupled complexity or simplify it away; instead, invest to keep staying ahead of it, by learning faster, watching more wisely, and making better decisions when disasters loom.

Such prescriptions are laid out persuasively by the authors, referencing both research and vivid anecdotes, which together will convince you why the best meltdown insurance ultimately comes from the people you lead and how you lead them.

(Photo: Shutterstock)

To help you build a savvier culture, the authors detail several organizational practices, e.g. using more accurate (but still simple) risk-forecasting tools; learning better from the early warning signs of small  failures; eliminating groupthink by fostering dissent in decision-making; developing diverse workforces (emphasizing differential cognition more than ethnic background), to create richer perspectives for managing operations and strategy.

Meltdown also offers some counter-intuitive lessons about  the right blend of “insiders and outsiders,” and experts and  generalists; and why a bias for action counterpointed by institutional patience creates an organization more durable for system shocks. Three-minute managers may regret the lack of one simple blueprint for all of this; but if there’s a dominant message of Meltdown, it’s that winning (or even just surviving) in the new age of hyper-complexity is not just about simplification.

5. Preparing for the next meltdown is not just about you. Chris Clearfield concluded with a poignant reflection: “There’s a humanitarian aspect to every large-scale failure and its ripple effects. In our zeal to problem solve, we can lose sight of that. The collapse of the Flint, Michigan water system, or the Deepwater Horizon oil spill catastrophe cost real lives, and affected directly or indirectly tens of thousands of people: health, employment, quality of life, for generations to come. There will be other meltdowns, for sure. We’re all operating in systems now. Leaders today have to get better in anticipating and preparing for the unseen dangers that can ultimately impact all of us.”

Fishing charter business owner Raymond Griffin hugs his wife Belinda in Lafitte, La. in June, 2010, facing major losses to his income because of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig explosion (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky)

Originally published on Forbes.com