Category: Leadership

In olden days, when you started a career, nobody told you to “follow your passion.” You joined the family business or found another job. If you liked it, you did what your boss asked, and maybe more, to earn a raise and get promoted. If you didn’t like it, you did the minimum the boss expected, so you could collect the wage, and look for ways to spend less time at the office. Passion wasn’t part of the story (except winking about someone’s romance off in the stockroom). Your job was following instructions of the person you reported to; the career advice was “just make your boss look good.”

Causes That Make The Heart Grow Fonder

Today, the new career wisdom is finding work you love. Whatever you do, go after a job or organization that emotionally grips you, where you can “find personal meaning;” “join a cause you care about;” “make a difference.” Above all, when building your career, to thine own self be true.

There’s nothing wrong with crafting a career that engages you with all you like and believe. Plenty of research supports “employee passion and engagement” leads to higher morale and performance. If you’re lucky to be in a job that pays you fairly to work on something you absolutely love—well, step on the accelerator. Such gigs are rare, and don’t last forever.

They also have the added benefit of making bosses, supervisors, or “accountable team leaders” less important to your satisfaction. You can deal with annoying management if you’re over the moon with the work. If you’re really lucky, Mr. or Ms. Higher Paygrade actually helps you be more successful. Here, by all means, stay-and-play and count your blessings every day. You’re probably in the top 10% of working stiffs out there.

Quandary In The Middle

At the bottom of the distribution is perhaps another 20%–people who have just awful jobs, grinding, boring, poor pay, stupid co-workers, abusive bosses. If you’re one of these poor souls, you’re trying to find something better, every day. Godspeed.

Harder is when you’re in a job like 70% of the world actually has. The job is sort-of OK but the program is not something you really love. Or something changes to cool the passion you first had. Maybe you’ve discovered the dream project you were promised was just cleverly labelled drudgery. Maybe the company that so intrigued you when you applied takes a new direction, abandoning the mission once so engaging to you. Maybe the boss who was first cheering you is succeeded by a total jerk. Who wants to follow him or her? Or stay in a company when your passion goes cold?

Here’s some grey-haired wisdom: don’t pull the rip-cord too fast. Bailing out prematurely might cost you career enhancing opportunities.

Put aside obvious considerations about risk, compensation, and “grass is always greener” mirages in today’s volatile economy. If you’re in search of more passion at work, sometimes staying put—and following the boss for a while longer—can be the wisest course.

The Bank Shot Strategy

Here’s why. Smart and ambitious people always do some job-hopping. It’s how you find what you like and what likes you; it’s how you raise your experience and salary. But the cleverest people play the game like billiards: they don’t always knock the ball in the pocket straight-on. They use a bank shot. Sometimes you have to zig before you zag to work that thrills you.

You might feel faint enthusiasm—or even hate—your job and your boss right now. But before you rush after some new opportunity, consider some critical assets you could be building by staying put, at least a little longer. Right there in River City there’s a potential platform of skills, knowledge, and networks that might accelerate your access to—and faster success in—a job you really want.

Before You Bail

Before you discard your current situation, take stock of three questions:

1. Does today’s boss/company/project build my skills for a future passion?

Enthusiasm and excitement will not be enough to succeed in your dream job. You’ll have to be good at lots of different things, many not part of your wheelhouse today.

A young professional I knew had a passion to work in a “food revolution start-up.” He had plenty of experience in biology and agriculture, but needed more operational chops. He took a job at an online retailer, and weathered through long and mind-numbing hours, and a decent enough if not necessarily inspiring boss, managing warehouse logistics. He left a year later for a bigger, better position, overseeing all operations for an urban farm start-up.

“No question, the former warehouse experience was major in landing the new position,” he reports.

2. Does today’s boss/company/project build knowledge for a future passion?

Excelling at a job—and landing one you dream about—requires not just skills but more general understanding too: of an industry, trends and changes affecting its businesses, and even the lingo of its practitioners. You can learn a lot of that just by coming into a sector that interests you, even in a lowly or boring job: get familiar with the problems leaders in that world wrestle with, how the winners within it talk and think, how its business models are changing.

If you open your eyes, and talk to your boss about those things, you can make yourself a much more strategic candidate for the dream job later. If you want to join an educational technology disrupter, work first in a public school, and absorb the dynamics of classroom teaching and administrative budgets; if you crave a cool job in publishing, benefit from peripheral lessons about customers and merchandising in your menial job at Barnes and Noble . Ralph Lauren began his journey as a global fashion magnate by first selling ties at Brooks Brothers.

3. Does today’s boss/company/project build networks and relationships for a future passion?

You’ll always need strong networks and connections to people who can supply money, knowledge, and innovation for the work that you love. How can you use today’s situation, including relationships offered by your boss, to extend your own networks?  You may be sitting on more golden people capital today than you realize.

Earlier in my own career, I ran an intern program at United Way Worldwide. The organization was, in the eyes of the young professionals we recruited, an old-fashioned, staid charity. But the ambitious interns figured (rightly) they could use their UWW experience not just to build meat-and-potatoes skills in fundraising and donor management, but also to cultivate relationships with other mission-driven organizations in the United Way ecosystem. The stars of the program tapped networks to land future positions in social innovation start-ups, urban community organizations, non-profit consultancies, and international development NGOs.

Timing the Leap

Stated simply, sometimes following a current boss, even if less than inspiring, can let you extract a lot of professional development value for a passion to come later. When you’re on your way up, and are eager to make a change, rethink the old saying. Don’t just look, but learn before you leap.

Originally published on Forbes.com

Steve Jobs is a flawed movie about a flawed leader. But go see it. The price of admission is well worth the two hour exploration of the moral ambiguity of leadership.

Director Danny Boyle and screenwriter Aaron Sorkin have created an engaging but uneven production. Visually vivid and fast-paced, Steve Jobs lacks the storytelling brilliance of The Social Network: interwoven tales of Mark Zuckerberg’s ambitions, insights, relationships and blessed luck that alchemically launched the multi-billion dollar Facebook. In this film, Sorkin expects us to take Jobs’ vision and abilities for granted, relegated as footnotes to the melodrama of parent-child abandonment, and redemption. OK, Jobs’ lost father and denial about daughter Lisa are part of the great Apple mythology. But the story of this guy’s leadership is so much richer.

Questions Unexplored

Throughout the film, I was longing for deeper understanding: how did Steve Jobs’ market-moving insights about the new digital future arise? What allowed him to attract brilliant acolytes and then extract every drop of their creative blood? How did he learn from failures at NEXT and Apple? Isaacson’s biography fills in some of those gaps—but the film was never intended as just the TED talk for the book. Missed opportunity.

But the film does excel in one important way: its heart-wrenching dramatizations of Jobs (played with cruel insouciance by Michael Fassbender) coolly manipulating those who served him so well. This biopic tells us too little about why Apple soldiers like Andy Hertzfeld, Steve Wozniak, and Joanna Hoffman were willing to go so deep into their personal wells for the boss. But the slavish experience of it all does shine brightly through. It reminds you why Jobs is a leader you hate to love and love to hate.

Performances of supporting actors (Michael Stuhlbarg, Seth Rogen, Kate Winslet) grab your gut: the pain of unrequited sacrifices; pleadings for even a small gesture from Jobs to ennoble one’s humanity; in-your-face emotions of well-intentioned people struggling for dignity when abused and challenged so unreasonably. You’ll wince knowingly watching the personal wreckage forced by “Steve’s reality distortion field.”

The clash of emotions pulls you in. You keep asking yourself, why has this guy risen to the status of secular god when he seems like about the worst boss anyone could ever have?

But You Know The Answer

Because people everywhere overlook bad behavior and HR prescriptions when a leader-perpetrator creates products and financial success that “dent the universe.” And despite objections to the film by Tim Cook and widow Lauren Powell, Jobs’ demeaning (if also messianic) leadership style is well established.

So should we be proud, embarrassed, or simply resigned to the lionization of leaders like Steve Jobs? Is he a “model leader” or just an exception to what the model is? Or should be?

Ambivalence About Heroic Leaders

Hard to say, given the cognitive dissonance lurking in the questions. Try this experiment at home: when you get back from the movie, pick up any recent leadership book—and compare its advice to what you just took in with Steve Jobs.

Chances are you’ll see major disconnect between the film and the book in your hand. Most leadership lore today (including some of my own)—advocates behaviors we would admire in a personal relationship. The great leaders, you read, are trusting and authentic. They’re fundamentally honest. They’re good at listening. They care about you and not just themselves.

Now Steve Jobs, in the film and beyond: a visionary and genius but also an anti-Christ of today’s best practice canons for leadership development. The guru of Apple could be deceitful, secretive, and dismissive of employee concerns. Narcissistic on and off stage, and self-absorbed with strange personal habits that he forced others to cater to. He rode his people hard, often refusing to even acknowledge their contributions. He knew the value of a talented team, but only rarely let subordinates change his mind. Jobs scorned corporate philanthropy and social responsibility.

He was tolerated for all this because he created dazzling products and a sense of elite and “techno-change-the-world-cool” around him. Chosen followers were granted membership in a special club. Part of what made the club so valuable was that anyone could be thrown out without warning.

In Praise Of Bruising Self-Interest

Of course leadership founded simply on taking advantage of others does not automatically result in “denting the universe.”  But looking out for yourself, sometimes manipulating the truth or other people’s trust, and playing inauthentic roles to achieve a goal can all be helpful to your success—because that’s the real world of power and leadership.

Such in any case is the challenge of  a new book by Stanford’s Jeffrey Pfeffer, who  argues vigorously, almost defiantly, for this world view. In Leadership BS, as the title suggests, Pfeffer dismisses the ideology of the current “leadership industry” and its “romantic and lay preaching” of feel-good, authentic behaviors for would-be leaders. Pfeffer remind us that so many otherwise esteemed leaders—Abraham Lincoln, Henry Kissinger, Jack Welch, Bill Gates—can all be cited in their careers for manipulative behavior, trust-destroying lies, and look-out-for-me moments. Steve Jobs is a frequent case example in the book.

Leadership BS makes a detailed, compelling argument for why modesty, authenticity, truthfulness, and caring for subordinates can actually undermine leader success. And therefore that such behaviors shouldn’t always be put on a pedestal. For Pfeffer, the  most certain shrine belongs to the real and big leaders whom we  admire for accomplishment and power, with all their warts, quirks, and HR-incorrect behavior.

Yes But…

Pfeffer’s perspective is a valuable antidote to the wishful thinking in many leadership narratives today. But let’s not push our moral pendulums all the way back to Hobbes and Machiavelli. Brutish and manipulative leadership will always have its place. But there’s plenty of evidence that helping others and building trust across an organization also drives individual success. Should we really dismiss the many leadership memoirs that avow trading early career cunning for the wisdom of reciprocity and people development later in life? Great leaders do grow and change along the way. Even Steve Jobs, as his cancer closed in, conceded how much he had learned from others in his earlier life.

But Are The Times A-Changing?

Finally, acknowledging the value of a more selfish, power-centric leadership model may simply reflect the high water mark of a paradigm superbly adapted to the still  current world of hierarchical organizations. What about future organizational models for future kinds of work? When the creation of value depends more and more on cross-boundary networks and problem-solving, trust-building and collaborative governance will become more imperative. Forward thinking, many successful leaders are already embracing open-style, democratic and people-honoring principles—and behaviors to nurture performance communities among people who in no way “report up” to an ego-serving, high-handed master. Today’s emphasis on leaders who emphasize higher purpose and authenticity may be less wishful thinking than next-horizon adaptation.If so, consider how another film might portray Steve Jobs in some imaginary, future reincarnation, say  in the year 2025—what leadership values and approach would be needed to reinvent Apple then?

Originally published on Forbes.com

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’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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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?

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