Author: Brook Manville

Categories
Leadership

Network Leaders Connect The Dots To Innovate

PATRICK LIN/AFP/Getty Images

Have you ever been challenged for “not connecting the dots?”

It’s shorthand for leaders who fail to grasp a pattern of some looming risk. Not connecting the dots is how we explain human failure that could have been averted.

OK, how about a more positive use of the phrase? Like, “Hey, you connected the dots really well! And since you did, you created something new and wonderful.”

It’s not something people tend to say.

Which is too bad. Because it’s time to change our language and thinking: to stop focusing on non-connection (and all the problems that come from that) and start emulating leaders who are successfully linking people, knowledge, and markets, in new and creative ways.

Think about the iconography—nodes, links, relationships indicated here, other relationships connected there. Embrace the story being told right now by all those marker pens squeaking on conference room whiteboards. Everyone is looking for innovation. Connecting dots—finding and combining different networks—is how savvy executives are creating breakthrough products and other world-beating initiatives. Network leaders are the dot-connectors of the global economy.

Connections Gone Right

Consider Uber, the multi-billion dollar car-hailing company. Co-founders Travis Kalanick and Garrett Camp began to think about the concept on a snowy night in Paris in 2008, when they had trouble getting home to their hotel. They started a discussion about accessing taxis from their smart phones, moved into ideas about sharing a car and driver between them, and eventually built a prototype business to dispatch free-lancing limousine drivers to people needing rides, faster and cheaper than getting a taxi.

Uber CEO and co-founder Travis Kalanick (AP Photo/Paul Sakluma)

Uber’s founders happened upon a network of frustrated taxi customers that could be matched to a nascent network of underused chauffeured cars. The young entrepreneurs built a platform and business that connected the dots, forming two new communities, both now committed to a new model of on-demand rides. Uber later expanded the business to include networks of drivers selling rides in their own cars.  Its innovation continues apace.

Pioneering Predictive Genetic Research

Sage Bionetworks, an award-winning, open-source global research commons, was born when founder Dr. Steven Friend connected some different and unfamiliar dots—a growing wealth of available clinical data (for both sick and healthy people) with the world’s increasing knowledge about human gene sequences and composition. This dot connection is enabling development of pioneering predictive and causal models for a human diseases, and more targeted drug therapies based on the new models. (Friend developed the concept for Sage over time, building on insights from earlier work as a cancer researcher and  employee at Merck ).

Stephen Friend – Sage Bionetworks

Sage now bridges traditional silos and disciplinary boundaries of the medical research world, creating collaborative communities and open source challenges, bringing together global networks of academics, clinicians, biologists, industry specialists, computational engineers, and even patients themselves. An open platform and governance model supports ever-expanding connections among experts, stakeholders and data.

Faster More Clever Football

Tony Franklin is the offensive coordinator of the University of California (Berkeley) football team— off to its best start in years, and  a third season of improving win-loss performance. Franklin is known for distinctive coaching of the so-called up-tempo “spread” offense—a fast and flexible play-making strategy on the field.

Photo by Ezra Shaw/Getty Images

Franklin recently accelerated offensive innovation with a clever crowd-sourcing process. He collects experimental ideas and tips about new plays from 250 high school coaches, clients of a nationwide training program he also runs. The Cal offensive coordinator consults these client coaches in a weekly group phone call; he’s created a community that learns from and contributes to Cal’s action on the field. Franklin’s dot-connecting is building a successful capability unlike that of any other coach.

Beating Al Qaeda

General Stanley McChrystal led an innovative Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) in the early years of the Iraq War. McChrystal explains JSOC’s success (reducing American casualties and later killing the all-important terrorist al-Zarqawi) by the collaborative capability he developed in the strike force. Their winning performance emphasized cross-boundary problem-solving, and rapid front-line decision-making.

Stanley McChrystal, former commander of Joint Special Operations Command in Iraq: Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg

The road to this organizational innovation began with some unusual dot-connecting by the general. Soon after he started the command, he realized that to fight the agile network of Al Qaeda he would have to create a network too. To do that, McChrystal revolutionized the strategic approach of JSOC, building a new level of collective intelligence by combining historically siloed military units with in-theater operatives, analysts, and agency officers in Washington D.C.

The new combination  required new ways of working. The general had to bridge old boundaries and upend traditional assumptions about structures and reporting relationships; he built a high-trust, high-accountable culture focused on common purpose and community values. Newly-connected dots, run not as a hierarchy but instead as a networked “team of teams,” resulted in a wiser, deadly effective war effort.

Connecting Dots For Innovation

Why does connecting dots—finding and joining old and new networks, linking and combining existing and different resources or people—enable innovation? Why should that be part of any leader’s agenda today?

First, network leaders connect the dots because bringing together disparate domains and experts sets the stage for new possibilities. It’s why Steelcase works with anthropologists to design human-centric furniture and Steve Jobs forced consumer designers to work with hardware engineers. It’s why Lady Gaga and Tony Bennett  became unlikely and successful collaborators.

Tony Bennett and Lady Gaga perform at the Umbria Jazz Festival in Perugia, Italy. (Gian Matteo Crocchioni/ANSA via AP)

In the same spirit of “creative combination,” Sage’s Steven Friend saw the opportunity of linking statisticians, biologists, and genetic experts, and masses of clinical data, in a new mash-up of  disconnected intelligence about human body processes. In Iraq, McChrystal hoped for—and got–new actionable insights when CIA smarts were combined in real time with soldiers fighting Al Qaeda on the ground.

Second, network leaders connect dots because creating new networks supports the process of innovation. Breakthroughs are rarely “Eureka moments;” more often they emerge in fits and starts, through tinkering, experimentation and what Stephen Johnson calls “bricolage.” Connecting different networks and pieces of networks enables new discovery.

Uber has certainly evolved step by step, with founders Kalanick and Camp connecting and experimenting with different groups of drivers, and adapting the business to the taxi protocols of different cities. With Cal football, Tony Franklin’s crowd-sourcing idea slowly emerged when he realized that his top-down lectures were also becoming bottom-up brainstorming sessions. Sage Networks global commons joins multiple networks Friend developed in early phases of his career.

Connecting Creates More Connecting

Finally, network leaders connect dots because of “the ripple effect.”  Tinkering always leads to further insights and opportunities. Networks find other networks as smart people reach out to other smart people; experimentation keeps reaching for the next evolutionary milestone of (as Stuart Kauffman has called it) “the adjacent possible.”

Thus McChyrstal’s innovative JSOC network started small. With each success it had against Al Qaeda, it was able to expand a little more, adding units that had been holding back and operating on their own. Uber’s software and business model has been iterated now countless times. Tony Franklin is experimenting more and more with ideas from local high school coaches. Each advance of Sage leads to more sophisticated predictive models and opportunities to reach for other data. Dots lead to more dots.

Attendees at the Facebook F8 Developers Conference Photographer: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg

An Aspirational Metaphor

Connecting the dots may be only a metaphor, but it’s one whose time has come. Especially if you do it well and intentionally—and imagine it as an empowering concept to help you lead innovation.

So where are the dots, who are the people, what are the networks that you ought to be connecting now? Can you look beyond patterns of risk, and instead see big, new opportunities?

Originally published on Forbes.com

Categories
Democracy

How Open Should Open Be? Learning From The EU Migrant Crisis

Winston Churchill was the first to say “never let a good crisis go to waste.” If EU politicians can’t learn leadership lessons from thousands of migrants amassing on European borders, it will certainly be a crisis wasted.

Angela Merkel and Francois Hollande arrive at a European Union leaders summit on the refugee crisis. Wednesday, Sept. 23, 2015. Photographer: Jasper Juinen/Bloomberg

But other executives can also learn from this crisis, especially those trying to lead in a more democratic and open way. Lurking behind today’s heartbreaking turmoil are fundamental strategic questions: whether and how to open a community of “insiders” to “outsiders?” And more specifically, “how open should an open community be?”

Group of migrants walk to a train station near the village of Zakany, Hungary, Thursday, Sept. 24, 2015. (AP Photo/Petr David Josek)

The Challenges Of Openness

These are timely questions. In today’s networked global economy, leaders are increasingly experimenting with openness, mixing, in different ways, “insiders” and “outsiders.” New combinations of talent, ideas and relationships are being pursued as never before, to spur innovation, reach greater scale or otherwise increase performance.

Next-generation leaders are building organizations open to a larger and more diverse world. They are launching cross-silo idea mash-ups and redesigning work to access skills and ideas of volunteers, experts and other contributors beyond traditional boundaries. Crowdsourcing and open source development have become mainstream; Gig economy companies (Uber, Lyft, Task Rabbit, etc.) disrupt closed industries with platforms to mobilize entrepreneurial workers networked to customers and each another. Product managers co-create new offerings with customers; businesses and civic organizations join strategic ecosystems, extending the influence of their home organizations.

Learning From Big Questions

But pioneering leaders know that working open is neither simple nor quickly done. Open has costs as well as benefits. Consequences of integrating virtual and more diverse workforces are tough to predict. How to “lead in an open way” is still a work in progress (thus Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst, The Open Organization). So what might any leader learn from EU politicians wrestling with the historic crisis of openness now at their doors?

1. Get Clear About Why: European leaders clash about why recent migrants should be admitted to the EU or not. Stated goals are sometimes humanitarian; other times more self-interested economics drive the narrative (e.g. adding new skills and/or younger taxpayers to an aging population). Benefits and risks are hotly debated: diversity of talent for a more vibrant, innovative economy versus dangers of admitting terrorists or welfare abusers.

Overall, EU leaders are struggling with three fundamental “whys”: i) what would we accomplish by admitting new outsiders? ii) why do we believe those goals can be achieved? iii) why do we believe achieving them will benefit our community, beyond the risks and costs? All leaders must answer the same three questions if they want to “go open.” And more important, they must develop the answers—and a shared understanding—with members of their communities. Newcomers may promise various upsides, but incumbent members will have to support the intended integration—or open strategy fails.

2. Get Clear About Who: European leaders are now prioritizing asylum seekers (e.g. fleeing violence in Syria) over “economic migrants” (e.g. seeking better jobs and welfare). But categories about who will be encouraged and accepted, and who will not can be blurry and contentious.

Syrian migrants travelling from the Greek island of Lesbos to the Greek island of Khios, Monday, Sept. 7, 2015.(AP Photo/Selcuk Bulent)

The “classification issue” confronts all open leaders. Open strategies are rarely “come one, come all.” As a community develops goals, certain segments of newcomers will support a strategy better than others. Whom should the community accept as its own?

Successful leaders engage their communities to help decide. If we want more innovative products or services, what new skills should we favor? Is there particular experience to prioritize? Particular geographic or market relationships? And, then again, how open are we to serendipitous talent that we didn’t plan for?

Questions of “who” also raise issues about magnitude of social integration. As the EU crisis demonstrates, without some kind of quotas, absorptive capacity can be overwhelmed. Thus another lesson for any open leader—if you’re tapping new talent, outsiders, or non-traditional sources of ideas, how much “external” can your community take on?

3. Get Clear About How: One immediate lesson from Europe’s chaos is the importance of scalable processes for registration, decision-making, and integration of newcomers. Open leaders in any organization must similarly build scalable operations for “integrating the outside” (e.g. about intellectual property, inclusion in existing business structures, etc.) But open leaders must also scale some intangibles when external talent joins an enterprise.

One is trust—values and protocols that enable people in a community to work together, and hold one another accountable for performance, without fear or antagonism. In Europe today, tensions simmer among some that too many Muslims will undermine the community’s “European way of life.” Differing organizational cultures in business can collide with similar destructive anxiety.

Another intangible to be scaled is leadership itself. Successfully combining insiders and outsiders requires multiple leaders working together—vertically, and horizontally across the networks. Once again, learn from Europe. As a loose confederation, the EU lacks any collective leadership coherence right now. Active resistance of many EU politicians against Germany’s greater openness to asylum seekers hinders the development of common policy. Without more leaders developing a shared agenda, a unified open strategy remains elusive.

Leaders of other open organizations should beware. The complexity of integration always requires many leaders working together to effect productive transformation. Woe to the CEO who tries to go it alone when bringing outside ideas and talent into an existing community.

4. Get Clear About Learning and Adapting Along The Way: Outcomes of open strategies can harshly surprise a leader. Opposition to the growing hordes of migrants who answered Angela Merkel’s early September outsize welcome forced her to re-stiffen Germany’s borders later this month.

That said, open leaders must embrace learning from experience . Longer term consequences of open strategies often emerge slowly, but the impact can be big. Betting on open means betting on people who may or may not make a positive contribution over time; who may or may not fit with the values and protocols of a community after the initial welcome; whose contribution, in the end, may not produce enough benefits and competitive value to offset financial and social costs.

And yet well-integrated newcomers can also exceed all strategic hopes. Learning and adapting go both ways.

Savvy leaders will mitigate costs and risks by helping the community become more resilient as “open experiments” proceed. Open leadership is not just about adding new skills and talent from afar; it’s also about being open to being less open, when needed. Or sometimes more.

Refugees walk on the railway tracks after crossing from Serbia, in Roszke, Hungary (AP Photo/Darko Bandic)

Originally published on Forbes.com

Categories
Management and Organization

Labor Day 2025: Four Issues Shaping Tomorrow’s Workplace

The U.S. Department of Labor marks today’s holiday to honor “the contributions workers have made to the strength, prosperity, and well-being of our country.” It’s also a chance for us to look ahead—about the future challenges of workplaces and human capital. What are the labor-related issues that leaders will face in September 2025?

Of course, nobody knows. But it’s a reasonable guess that today’s debates, about the roles and meaning of human work in a networked, knowledge economy, will become even more significant in the next ten years. That’s because a blurring of boundaries—both physical and conceptual— is forcing a rethink for every leader about how people work together to create value.

Workers sew together footballs at the Wilson Sporting Goods Co. Wilson Football Factory Photographer: Ty Wright/Bloomberg

Here are four issues that might help shape your own leadership thinking about labor and work in the future:

1. Where Does The Organization End—Or Begin?

When work is outsourced, contracted, or developed through open innovation competition, can you—should you—treat the people who are making the contribution as part of the organization? What does ever-more distributed labor and production mean for leaders “taking charge” and “taking care” of workers?

Regulators are raising their hands with a few new answers: some distributed production may not absolve a company of labor responsibility. The recent “joint employer” ruling of the National Labor Relations Board, reinforced the right of unionized workers of contractors (e.g. of a cleaning service) and franchises (e.g. of a local MacDonald’s) to bargain with the contracting or “parent” company. Similarly, several “Gig Economy” and “platform” companies (Uber, Lyft, et al) are now involved in litigation about whether their independent contributors should be treated (and compensated, with comparable benefits) as legal employees. Their right to unionize is also in the courts.

Whether you believe all this is an overdue rebalancing of power between workers and management, or yet another economic burden on capitalist entrepreneurialism, it’s one more indication that enterprises are becoming extended, more fluid, and networked. Blurring organizational boundaries are challenging traditional assumptions about management control and responsibility for workers—especially beyond the periphery of a company.

Expect the debate about where “the organization ends” to become only more ferocious. Global competition and the flexibility desired by workers will drive more experimentation about how extra-mural talent is recruited, motivated and deployed. Leaders will become more creative. Labor will too. Lawyers will be busier.

2. Does Automation Replace—Or Extend—Human Work?

Since the Industrial Revolution, debates have raged about whether machines should replace human work (lower costs, destroy jobs?) or enhance it (increased productivity, shifting from brawn to brains?).  With new network-based communication and sophisticated robotics, the answer increasingly seems to be “both/and”: more work is being automated and interconnected, but, with that, human contribution is also reaching higher levels of performance.

Researchers are now studying how to further optimize the man/machine relationship, so-called  “augmentation strategies.” They are probing mechanical, economic and even social dimensions of how machines and people working together can achieve breakthrough productivity and innovation. As “tools become teammates”, and the human/machine boundary blurs, the old debates are transforming: now it’s how to ensure that both elements augment each other?

Photographer: Akio Kon/Bloomberg

3. Do People Work To Live–Or Live To Work?

In an era of wide-spread unemployment and slow wage growth, getting a paycheck remains a major motivation for people work. But workforce research increasingly shows that’s not enough to spur the enthusiasm that high performance requires. Most organizations face a steep climb here: Gallup’s annual workplace survey reports that 90% of workers are either “not engaged” or “actively disengaged” from their jobs.

Today’s leaders are partly to blame.  Many still structure work as if nobody really wants to be in a job—employees are monitored, reviewed, and nudged along with rewards and punishments like trained circus animals. The passion of human endeavor is not seen as an appropriate part of office life.

Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

But many other leaders are now thinking differently. Hastened by growing professionalism, mission focus, and broadening social consciousness in workplaces, leading organizations like Zappos, USAA, Whole Foods have been focusing on job satisfaction and sense of purpose as important sources of organizational motivation.  More generally, today’s younger generation of workers wants to blur work-life boundaries, and combine personal and professional goals. They want to work more freely, earning a wage but also fulfilling ambitions to contribute to the world.

The Gallup results are not necessarily at odds with these trends; the disengaged numbers may simply reflect that most of today’s work is still not designed to help people “bring their whole person” to deliver the best performance possible. But workplace innovation is underway. Experiments with cross-boundary strategic communities, social volunteer work and inter-organizational learning are now addressing many workers’ desires to grow and find more meaning in what they do. Expect more of this in coming years.   

Photo by Akos Stiller/Bloomberg

4. Is Every Worker An Employee—Or A Leader?

Thirty years ago, corporate leadership development programs were reserved for higher pay-grade managers: people with senior titles ready to become a next level up leader in the organization. As organizations have become flatter, and work more knowledge-oriented, the pay-grade requirements for leadership development are also blurring. Leadership programs are now being offered at multiple levels of organizations; and the language and culture of leadership more generally has become democratized. “Leadership” is no longer about title—it’s about initiative, identity, judgment, and values—personal qualities and skills that anyone can develop to create value for the organization. Open-style and collaborative organizations in fact expect people to be growing constantly and taking responsibility whenever required: “Everyone a leader.”

As boundaries between organizations also blur, and enterprises invest in crowd-sourcing, networked communities, and more open approaches to finding talent and innovation, leadership itself will become more situational and distributed. Meritocracy, not position or structure, will define authority; and leaders will increasingly rotate, sharing  responsibility with others, depending on task.

***

In September 2025, chances are we’ll all still celebrate Labor Day. But the labor we’ll be celebrating then may not be something we recognize today. Embrace the change!

[Note: minor updates were made to this post on September 8th–primarily URL links added in various places of the text.]

Originally published on Forbes.com

Categories
Management and Organization

Reframe Before You Blame: Managing Performance In The Networked Economy

Dad needs a coronary bypass operation—and you’re helping him choose between two local hospitals. You discover  both have about the same history of patient deaths per 100 procedures performed. You further learn that, at Hospital A, most recent bypass-related deaths were performed by a few apparently sub-par surgeons. You’re comforted they’ve been asked to leave the hospital.

Hospital B shows a different pattern of surgical outcomes. Patient deaths there were not concentrated among any group of  surgeons. Negative incidents were more widely distributed in the general rotation, with no discernible clustering of failure. Hospital B did not systematically dismiss “the few erring cardiologists,” but instead pursued a broader practice improvement program to enhance evidence-based protocols, training, and multi-disciplinary quality committees.

(PHILIPPE HUGUEN/AFP/Getty Images)

So Where Do You Send Dad For His Operation? 

First take, you might choose Hospital A: decisive leadership identified the physicians responsible and moved them out. And who knows about Hospital B?  Mistakes were more random there–how can you be sure that Dad won’t just be unlucky and be some doctor’s next operation mistake?

Oddly, Hospital B may be the better bet. Thus argues a new research study by Vinit Desai, an associate professor of management at the University of Colorado Denver (available in the current  Academy of Management Journal) .

Vinit Desai (Photo Permission of CU Denver)

Desai studied patient death rates and data for cardiac bypass surgery in some 115 California hospitals—and found that in most of the hospitals, the departure of physicians performing the failed operations did not significantly diminish the rate of future patient deaths. In contrast, hospitals that improved most in overall organizational performance (i.e. reduction of coronary patient deaths) were those where the failures were widely dispersed across all operating  surgeons.

Concentrated Failure, Clouded Judgment

Why would that be? It seems related to how hospital leadership tried to improve the patient survival rate. Desai’s research suggests that “concentrated failures prompt narrower attributions of responsibility which, whether accurate or not, ultimately lead to less thorough investigations and fewer of the system-wide changes that are typically required to address organizational performance problems.”

Stated simply, hospitals that most improved went beyond simply firing the sub-par performers. Instead of blame they reframed: analyzed and tackled the problem in broader, interconnected dimensions, focusing on structural solutions and coronary bypass procedures.  They made more efforts to understand and address systemic issues (e.g. operating room protocols, post-op care, inconsistent organizational practice, etc.) that, taken together, were more significant in causing performance to lag.

Desai hypothesized  that intensive focus on individual actors can actually obscure the deeper performance problems of any organization seeking to improve itself.

Fixing The Problem, Missing The Solution

Desai’s research rings true for anyone who’s ever been scapegoated. We all know how convenient—and often ineffectual—it is for the boss to simply blame “the poor performers.” Miss a number for Wall Street, bungle a new product rollout—the “bold leader” moves swiftly to find the guilty parties and then “solve the problem” by firing them. It’s the zero-sum game of hierarchical accountability, played the old fashioned way. Identify the cancer eating  performance, and cut it out.

But so often the real problem is not just a few malignant cells, but sub-surface, interrelated causes, or wider issues of culture—mindsets, behaviors, attitudes and processes. It’s harder for a leader to work on those, but that’s often what differentiates good from poor performance.

Now think about the networked world. The frequency and cost of  rush-to-judgment leadership action—blame instead of reframe—will  increase as traditional organizations become more interconnected and distributed. When products are co-created across crowds and networks of customers, when competitors thrive not on the basis of their own businesses but rather the strength and reinforcing strategies of broader ecosystems, when talent is being mobilized from beyond traditional boundaries and organizational units—what leader can easily and quickly identify “just a few guilty parties” when a problem arises?  What’s the right way to learn and improve from mistakes or shortfalls of performance, when results are the collective work and innovation of more and more hands?

Managing Performance In The Networked World

Welcome to the new world of networked and collaborative accountability. Tomorrow’s leaders cannot abandon focus on individual contributions, good or bad. But they also can’t just blame everyone when something goes wrong, nor celebrate “the entire crowd” when success is achieved. Leaders now have to  identify individual contributions and also understand the deeper and systemic attributes of performance—culture, processes, and habits of thought. And they have to be willing to invest the time and trouble to look across boundaries, beyond organizational units, and understand more informal communities of collaboration which produce today’s best products and services. Developing in tandem  individual practitioners but also the broader networks in which they operate is the new imperative. It’s yet another dimension of the “both/and” thinking that today’s network leaders must adopt.

Leadership Lessons

What broader lessons about managing performance might network leaders take—or extend– from Desai’s new research?

  1. Make Performance Transparent. Desai’s inquiry began with the availability of rich and comparable data about coronary bypass outcomes across a large sample of hospitals (required by California law). But you don’t have to be writing a research paper to “make data matter.” Avoid the pitfalls of “judgment by the gut” by clarifying—and making clear for all to see—what success looks like for any product/service/process you are seeking to improve. Be consistent in using that data for evaluating and managing performance.
  2. Build Performance Metrics Collaboratively. Measurement of excellence must not only be clear to all, it must also be agreed by all. In evaluating hospital performance and medical procedure success, patient survivability rates are relatively unambiguous. The best way to ensure metrics that are transparent  and owned by a community is to create them collaboratively—not imposing upon but rather engaging the members of the community who are delivering a product or service to define the desired outcomes.
  3. Don’t Rush To Judge, Even If Problems Crop Up In One Place. Beware the misleading signals of “concentrated failure.” Even if one unit or a small group of contributors seems to be where performance goes bad, look for deeper, more systemic problems that could be critical factors—or even the most important source—of trouble. Engage the community to understand  those, as part of the problem-solving process.
  4. Build A Culture Of Continuous Improvement, Governed By The Community.  Desai argues that “top-down punctuated remediation”—simply removing poor performers—is often less effective than making broader cultural changes to support the best practice and quality of  a service delivery. A culture of continuous improvement does not ignore individual accountability; it combines it with contextual and organizational factors, to strengthen “whole system” performance. Such a culture typically embraces open organizational values such as meritocracy, open dissent and debate, and learning from failure. In the best cases such values are co-developed with members of the performance community itself.

Originally published on Forbes.com

Categories
Featured Leadership

Unlearning Command And Control

3 a.m., somewhere in Iraq, 2005. Two soldiers knock at Stanley McChrystal’s door, seeking permission to launch a risky attack, hundreds of miles away. The four-star commander of the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) sits up, and gives his OK. The next day he has a sudden realization:

Being woken to make a life-or-death decision confirmed my role as a leader, and made me feel important and needed—something most managers yearn for. But… I began to question my value … I had no illusions that my judgment was superior to that of the other people with whom I worked … My inclusion in the [decision] was a rubber stamp that slowed the process, and sometimes caused us to miss fleeting opportunities.

General Stanley McChrystal (Photo by Brendan Smialowski/Getty Images)

In 2008, Jim Whitehurst, new CEO of Red Hat, had similar doubts. Some staff  he had ordered to prepare a report had simply ignored him: “[It] was a bad idea. So we scrapped it.” Whitehurst recalls talking about it with some other corporate leaders:

[They all] gasped, “What do you mean they didn’t do what you asked them?”  You should have fired them.” At first I felt that way too.  But … my team was right to turn down the job—it either wasn’t a great idea … or I hadn’t done a good enough job selling it to them …  A leader’s job is no longer measured by his or her ability to simply issue orders.

Jim Whitehurst, CEO of Red Hat (photo by permission of Red Hat)

Learning A New Way, Unlearning The Old

These and other stories about “taking charge” in network style organizations are told in two terrific new books: Stan McChrystal’s Team of Teams (an educational memoir of his command in Iraq), and Whitehurst’s  The Open Organization (reflections on leading Red Hat). Taken together these accounts sketch a vision for leading in the more complex, flat and interconnected operating environment of today.

Anyone can benefit from their vision. We’re all working more networked now, in structures that are flexible and cross boundary. Innovation and agility are the prizes—but at a price. For all the freedom of networks, it’s hard to deliver results without the accountability of hierarchy. How do you work free and fast with loosely linked pools of people– but also get performance?  How do you lead people who don’t want to be led? Or don’t even report to you?

That’s the central dilemma that McChrystal and Whitehurst confront; and both stories demonstrate that the leadership journey to find a different way begins with unlearning the old.

 McChrystal Lets Go

The general recounts lessons of transforming a traditional command of military units into an unprecedented, extended network—his ah-ha solution “to fight with fire”—against the deadly network of Al Qaeda in Iraq. Stanley McChrystal’s daring strategy was to create a “team of teams”– informally connected but mission-committed cells of Allied operatives and fighting squads, across the Middle East, linked also to intelligence agencies in the U.S. The eventual success of this networked JSOC was its ability to aggregate knowledge and take action more quickly than a traditional military organization.

McChrystal patiently developed what he called “shared consciousness,” a culture of open information, supporting initiative and cross-network collaboration rather than central planning. The hardest part, as he admits, was allowing the network to make most decisions. He struggled with “letting go,” finally accepting that empowered local action, even if sometimes wrong, would beat deliberate but slower command. As McChrystal changed his style, the network raised its game: JSOC dramatically reduced Allied losses, and eventually killed Al Qaeda’s notorious commander, al Zarqawi.

Meanwhile, More Unlearning At Red Hat

Although Jim Whitehurst did not create a multi-unit network like McChrystal, he had his own unlearning at Red Hat. He became CEO of an organization dependent on–and connected to–the networked ecosystem of open source hackers who build Linux. Red Hat, though a corporation, held many of the values and cultural assumptions of that movement—and low tolerance for command and control.

Just as McChrystal had learned the performance value of leading a network, Whitehurst realized Red Hat’s success would depend on leveraging the knowledge and relationships of the broader Linux community. He saw if he could support open source values at Red Hat, the company would be more likely to deliver leading edge solutions for Linux customers.

So, putting aside impulses “to recoil at what felt like chaos,” Whitehurst slowly and sometimes painfully embraced the network-like culture of his new company. Confessing the need for “thick skin”, Whitehurst embraced debate and dissent—including regular objections to his own ideas. He got used to acting more transparently. Abandoning many of his own decisions, he reached out for the best ideas of company members. Swallowing his pride, he honored the internal and external communities of experts who knew more about Linux engineering than he could ever pretend.

Over time he summarized his job as less about directing people and more about “igniting passion” and “acting as a catalyst” for the best ideas coming out of Red Hat and its networks. The key to the company’s good operating results in recent years has also been his steady development of a self-governing performance culture: “everyone is accountable to everyone.”

Common Lessons From General And CEO

So if you want to start your own unlearning program, what advice to draw from these leaders?

1. You Don’t Manage The Network; It Manages You. Both leaders’ transformation began when they realized the network was bigger than they were. Putting aside the perks and ego of former roles, they embraced the more important value of the network itself.  Without its knowledge and relationships among the people, they had no power to wield. So accept the strategic reality—cultivate your own thick skin, and then set course to help the network win.

2. Trust, Transparency And Passion Are Not Signs Of Weakness. McChrystal and Whitehurst did lots of left-brain thinking, but weren’t afraid to call on emotions or let their guards down in front of network members. So inspire your people with purpose, open up your own ideas and feelings, and put trust in others. It’s much more motivational than old-fashioned fear.

3. Don’t Hold People Accountable; Help People Be Accountable To Each Other. Every leaders wants to deliver results, but in a network organization, you can’t micro-manage performance. Both McChrystal and Whitehurst created public forums for network members to discuss and evaluate each other’s actions; and they also showcased members as examples to encourage higher performance among others too.

4. Don’t Demand The Final Say—Except Sometimes. You undermine the collective will of a network if you signal member decisions don’t matter. McChrystal and Whitehurst both recount deliberately stepping back from decisions they would have been inclined to make themselves. So honor the judgment of the people, whenever you can.

But sometimes you do have to “make the call.” Both McChrystal and Whitehurst occasionally pulled rank—because of external constraints or significant risk of failure. But they didn’t do it often, or lightly. Before you slip into traditional leadership, just remember that “less is more.”

Originally published on Forbes.com

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Leadership

Network Lessons From The Leader Who Brought You ‘Downton Abbey’

Platform strategies, open source, internet of things: we’re all looking for new business models of  the networked world. What about leadership in today’s hyperconnected environment? What are the new models for that?

We can vision for the future but we can also learn from what’s in front of us right now. Think about the original network business that we all take for granted–television. Leaders have been grappling with making that distributed, interconnected business work long before anyone breathed “platform strategy.”

What can we learn about network leadership from someone running a system of television stations?

Paula Kerger (photo by permission PBS)

That question started my recent conversation with Paula Kerger, president and CEO of PBS–and she had plenty to offer.

For nine years, Kerger’s been leading a network of 350 independent local stations. “Leading” at PBS has challenges common to other  kinds of networks today, particularly finding the right balance between setting direction for shared strategy and benefiting from the autonomy and innovation of different network members. In the PBS system, public television licensees have their own boards, offer local services tailored to their communities and carefully maintain their independence.

Over time Kerger has learned how to be an effective network leader. With her own style and approach, she’s taken PBS to new heights: delivering blockbuster programming like Downton Abbey, broad audience growth, expanded educational offerings, and an innovative digital strategy.

As she reflected on her leadership approach–what’s worked, not worked, and what she’s learned (sometimes the hard way) –three insights emerged:

1. Connect Network Value to Membership Values

Kerger early on embraced the dual identity of PBS: as a media company (distributor of sponsored content to millions of viewers) and as a member organization (community-based stations with mission to “educate, inform, and inspire”). From the get-go, she’s stressed how the network supports its members and their mission–and vice versa.

In fact, she’s made community membership a strategic differentiator, emphasizing to all stakeholders how local stations improve the welfare of America’s cities and towns (e.g. developing content for classrooms, broadcasting citizen town halls, covering regional arts festivals, etc.). Sometimes members contribute local content to the national network; sometimes national offerings become tools for local mission, like Ken Burns’ documentaries for teaching history in schools.

As a network leader, Kerger succeeds by connecting the value of the network to the values binding the members together. “Membership and mission are the North Star we navigate by,” she says.

2. Build Trust Up, Down, Sideways

Kerger knows that networks thrive on trust. She works to build it all around.

Her style sets the tone. Kerger became PBS President after years in tell-it-like-it-is New York. She speaks with an all-business candor that invites others to be open too, and to feel comfortable about dissenting. She also knows how to listen. “People in a network need to be heard. They’ll accept someone else’s decision if the reasons are good, and support the mission. You also have to be willing to back down if there are valid concerns.”

Transparency is another Kerger trust-builder. “People hate hidden agendas,” she avers. “I share the annual PBS budget draft across the network. I want to hear member feedback about priorities. And then I share that around too.” Empathy matters. “You have to care about other people’s success as much as your own.”

Kerger also builds trust the old fashioned way: by visiting member stations regularly. “You don’t ‘direct’ a network from ‘the Mother Ship’,” she said smiling. “You have to go out, big cities, small cities, little towns in Minnesota, Texas. Listen and walk in their shoes.” She also makes a habit of checking in with “networks in the network,” informal affinity groups of members with similar market profiles.

She keeps the North Star front and center: “What can we do better to advance mission in your community?”

3. Sometimes You Follow, Sometimes You Lead, Sometimes You Fall Back

A leader’s job is often simply promoting good ideas that emerge from the diversity of a network. Kerger continuously works with member stations to identify and bring great local programming to wider PBS audiences.

She combines that with taking her own initiative on behalf of the system— for example, securing national funding and relationships to add a Downton Abbey or Ken Burns series to the schedule. Kerger’s focus on quality and educational values have earned broad member support.

But membership enthusiasm is not always guaranteed. “In a network,” Kerger reflected, “you sometimes have to make yourself unpopular. I’ve pushed for a few things I felt were valuable for the system, even when members don’t see the same future the same way.”

Local stations were wary about the launch of  PBS Digital Studios, which Kerger promoted to pull in younger YouTube viewers abandoning traditional television. Stations worried that digital would cannibalize their local franchises. Kerger held firm, drawing on general good will and also outside funding. She ultimately won over skeptics, demonstrating how the new programming would enhance members’ own audiences and strengthen their community outreach. Digital offerings now drive 20 million views per month. Members are reaping benefits of expanded content, audiences and branding.

But Paula Kerger has also had her defeats. She’s wiser for it: “You have to know when to back off and shelve a project, even when you’ve made an initial investment. The network should always aspire, but it also has to survive.”

Learning From Paula Kerger

If you are leading your own network, borrow from Paula’s lessons at PBS. Ask yourself:

  • Do I understand how my network creates value? Do the values of the culture I’m building support that? And vice-versa?
  • Do members in the network trust me? Trust each other? How can I strengthen trust all around?
  • Am I clear when members of the network should lead, and when I should lead?
  • Can I learn and change direction when I get it wrong?

Originally published on Forbes.com

Categories
Leadership

How To Get The Smartest People In The World To Work For You

“No matter who you are, most of the smartest people work for someone else.” In the 1990s, Sun co-founder Bill Joy thus challenged leaders to face the Knowledge Revolution. His quip later became “Joy’s Law.” Joy was not talking about the old “war for talent”—hiring better employees–but a newer one: tapping networks of smart non-employees for innovation and problem-solving horsepower.

Today network-savvy companies are doing just that. They’re co-creating products with customers, building virtual communities of enthusiasts to burnish their brands, running open competitions for new ideas from anywhere on the planet. They’re building smart-people networks to create whole new businesses, like TopCoder,  Gerson Lehrman Group, LiveOps and so many others.

What’s the new leadership blueprint for all this? When a network opportunity arises, and you want to call on talent that in no way reports to you, how should you lead?

Think Different

FORBES’ Rich Karlgaard, blogging a few years ago, signaled what Joy intended: “Create an ecology that gets all the world’s smartest people toiling in the garden for your goals.” Think about the metaphors: the organization is not a bounded and structured talent machine but a porous living system; not to be commanded and controlled, but instead cultivated organically. So how on earth do you do that?

It starts with a mindset that’s not your father’s version of “taking charge” or “supervising employees.” You’ll have to step back from absolute authority, and accept that all answers won’t come from you—they’ll be found in the network. You’ll have to change your thinking about people whom you want to engage–they’re not employees, they’re volunteers. You don’t fire them; they fire you.  You’ll have to be more transparent about your ideas and desires. Hidden agendas thrive in hierarchies but kill the trust on which a network thrives.

As a network leader, you will still need to be clear about strategic goals and getting results—but you’ll have to guide patiently. Cultivation takes time, learning and flexibility.

Transform A Network To A Community

Adopting the right mindset gets you into the game.  But as a leader you also have to take action. Stated simply, your task is first to assemble a network, and then turn it into a community. Members of a community have more commitment and accountability for collective work than loosely linked contributors.

Here’s a starter playbook to get the network-community transition going:

1. Make Belonging Meaningful. Though volunteers join networks for many reasons—recognition, learning, fun and more tangible benefits—building a community of world class contributors speeds along when a higher purpose is at stake. They give heart and mind if they’re not just “doing a job.” Apple’s envied ecosystem of developers, evangelists and licensees was built on economic returns– but also by Steve Jobs’ mythmaking about technology for social revolution. Best Buy VP Julie Gilbert stoked a pioneering innovation community of women employees and customers with members’ enthusiasm for developing more female leadership at work. Wikipedia’s legions of volunteers are animated by a purpose that knowledge should be free and shared with the world.

2. Make Belonging Cool. Talented people want to be part of setting trends. So take a lesson from Bill Taylor and Alan Webber’s explosive launch of Fast Company in the 1990s. They pioneered a network business built on an “in-the-know” cohort of “Friends.” “It’s not a magazine,” they said, “it’s a movement”—of business radicals and futurists who wanted to change corporate workplaces. Cool was another part of Steve Jobs’ success. Apple blew by once dominant Nokia in building the smart phone business when the sexy new iPhone attracted a much bigger community of app developers.

3. Make Belonging Productive.  A lot of network strategy emphasizes technology—creating the all-important “platform.” But to build a community, you need to create a culture of more than just electronic exchange. Would-be members need personal benefits too. Yes, money moves people—but strong communities provide tools and data to help members work better, forge relationships with other smart colleagues, find opportunities to grow. Rating systems in on-demand and sharing networks (Task Rabbit, Airbnb, Uber, et al) help members increase their value in the community and markets they serve. Viki’s open video business thrives thanks to the global community of users who create foreign language subtitles for their products. The members are rewarded with access to the newest shows, and the chance to improve their linguistic skills.  Red Hat funds Opensource.com to create knowledge and opportunities for the community on which its business depends: Linux developers and users, Red Hat employees and other sector entrepreneurs.

4. Make Belonging A Shared Responsibility. If you want to build a community of members they have to care about their own and each other’s performance. Networks that become communities begin by adopting membership standards; and they employ member and customer rating systems to make everyone’s performance more transparent. That in turn spurs members to compete for excellence—but also to help one another get better. You can do that by setting up forums and internal exchanges to enable contributors to share techniques and answer each other’s questions (thus Uber, Task Rabbit, et al).

Other network businesses invest the community with direct responsibility for the quality of its products: the open publisher Medium stewards content contributions through self-governing user-editors who select and promote the best stories. Red Hat’s CEO Jim Whitehurst gives wide latitude to his engineers and experts who collaborate with the Linux community in creating (and evaluating) software products and programs.

Members of particularly strong communities continuously hold each other accountable for results. General Stanley McChrystal created a networked community of intelligence units and operatives to fight Al Qaeda in the early years of the Iraq War. For the sake of speed, he empowered every member to decide when to strike against the terrorists, without normal approvals. But McChrystal also insisted that: major operational decisions (including his own) were discussed afterwards in a daily community video briefing. His leadership approach enabled the community to develop its own decision-making guidelines, and members supported each other in making the best judgments.

Who Will All The Smart People Really Work For?

So, once more Joy’s Law into the future: if all the smart people will never work for you, your new leadership agenda is to create a network of as many great contributors as you can–and transform it into a community. But, remember, if you’re successful, they won’t only be working for you. As a community, they will also be working for themselves. And each other. All at the same time.

Originally published on Forbes.com

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Uncategorized

A New Yorker Best Book of 2024

Princeton University Press, 2023

Brook’s most recent book provides a powerful case for democracy and how it can survive, based on historical analysis of civilization’s best known, long-enduring democracies (ancient Athens & Rome, modern Britain & America). Democracy flourishes only if citizens are willing to adapt and keep relevant the agreement—“the civic bargain”–that they make with one another to govern themselves, free of a boss. It is a lesson modern democracies must confront to survive the continuing challenges of today’s world.

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Books

Origins of Citizenship in Ancient Athens

A pioneering synthesis of political and socio-economic history that uncovers the complex concept of membership in the ancient Athenian democratic polis—and with it the origins of the classical state.

The book is widely cited in historical scholarship and has remained in print ever since its original publication in 1990.

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Books

A Company of Citizens

A case study of the classical Athenian democracy, but framed for its implications for any leader of today’s knowledge-based and networked organizations.

“[Historical] comparisons that provide an intriguing reflection on the modern company.” — Richard Donkin, The Financial Times