We have a problem in Division A. Leaders are not doing their job. Leaders are not living the values. Some people don’t get it. I’ve seen cases of X. I am afraid that Y is spreading. Z is a problem. Division B has become bureaucratic. Group C is a nightmare, nobody talks to each other. There is a lot of frustration in Section D. I’ve seen gross failure of leadership in that management team.

I’m sure you get the picture, because you’ve seen this many times. Unqualified, sweeping generalisations, launched in some sort of assumed fertile territory where they will be listened to. Usually negative, of course.

In fact, we are so used to these that they are hardly challenged: whom are you talking about? Everybody? Everyday? How widespread is the spread? Who is frustrated? Who is not living the values? Does ‘failure of leadership’ have names and surnames? Who says?

The default position is to ignore or produce some strange sound in return, or magic nodding, or be too ready to agree, prolonging the sweeping generalisation.

It’s hard to call out, to challenge. But it is the only serious thing to do. Throwing orphan grenades into the field will only create holes and little, or not so little, destruction of the organizational fabric.

It is a sign of a healthy culture to call out people making these statements. And this would be a behaviour that is as spreadable as it’s opposite. All it takes is that some people start the visible challenge (explain, please; who? this is not how I see it) for others to copy as well.

Caught in friendly fire within your own culture is the worst form of casualty. And sweeping generalisations seem to be a strong brand of grenades.

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Managing the Covid-19 pandemic using Viral Change™ principles. 12 Rules you can apply.

 

Read Dr Leandro Herrero’s in-depth, thought provoking article which addresses the non-medical management of the pandemic through the lenses of large scale behavioural and cultural change principles, as practised by the Viral Change™ Mobilizing Platform for the last 20 years, in the area of organizational change.

 

12 Rules For A Behavioural Counter-Epidemic To Deal With Covid-19   ^[1]

 

A viral epidemic for which there is no immediate cure, only ways of managing it, can only be controlled by a counter behavioural epidemic.

_______________________________________________________________________________________________

Dr Leandro Herrero is the CEO and Chief Organization Architect of The Chalfont Project ^[2], an international firm of organizational architects. He is the pioneer of Viral Change^TM, a people Mobilizing Platform, a methodology that delivers large scale behavioural and cultural change in organizations, which creates lasting capacity for changeability.

Dr Herrero is also an Executive Fellow at the Centre for the Future of Organization, Drucker School of Management. An international speaker, Dr Herrero is available for virtual speaking engagements ^[3] and can be reached at: The Chalfont Project ^[4].

His latest book, The Flipping point – Deprogramming Management ^[5], is available at all major online bookstores.

 

For CEOs, CFOs, CHROs, and other Cs, and Divisional Ds’, survey after survey try to identify their focus, their concerns, their attention, their worries, the 10 things they see as critical success factors. There is a whole industry of C-suite level surveys that run interviews and then package the answers under glorious headings such as ‘Global Trends’. In those surveys (also called ‘research’) leadership goes up and down, so does talent management, vision, culture and the rest of the management supermarket. These surveys are an interesting read.

Here is my Alternative Survey (sorry, Research). The major issue is fear, which is no more and no less than a legitimate human emotion, but one of imperialistic power. These are the top 20 fears that I see from my work with clients as an organizational consultant. Not exclusively of C and D suites by the way, also people below, but with focus on top leadership teams.

1. The unknown. Strategic Linear Planning does not do the trick anymore
2. Fear of pronouncing the word ‘unknown’ as if it was a sin to accept that the unknown does exist and it’s not their fault
3. The untried. We want innovation, but you go first. (Can we have examples of where this has been done? Although, when you give us the examples we will tell you that they come from the wrong industry and the wrong size of company)
4. The unconventional. We’d better bring McKinsey, the Board will like that. Predictable, safe and expensive
5. Fear of challenging, but not fear of saying that we should not be afraid of challenging
6. Fear of failure, although we say that mistakes are OK
7. Fear of not knowing what could go wrong, because if we knew we may not have the skills, or guts, to address it
8. Fear of disappointing others. The definition of others depends on your GPS position in the organization chart
9. Fear of losing control. That’s it
10. Fear of not being recognised
11. Fear of being disrupted (also referred as Uber-ized)
12. Fear of being redundant, which is not exactly the same as becoming redundant
13. Fear of becoming irrelevant: C-people, D-people, the products, the company, the vision
14. Fear of losing the plot, expressed in more circumvented ways
15. Fear of being second
16. Fear of being late (in the thinking, in the action)
17. Fear of being embarrassed by decisions not leading to total, unequivocal success
18. Fear of spending too much money, although they know that the concept of ‘much’ is both relative and strategic
19. Fear of being seen too brave, in a culture where being seen as brave is good. (I suppose, this is fear of the borders)
20. Fear of being seen as having fear

What differentiates leaders is the order, or the combinations, or the relative weight of these 20 fears.

When addressing challenges and when helping these executives, in whatever capacity you may act (boss, colleague, consultant, coach, service provider, friend), the trick and the wise move, is to get into fear-hunting mode. The key question is: what fear(s) are behind the said and the unsaid?

This is always, always, the most productive way to understand what is going on.

________________________________________________________________________________________________

Continue the conversation…

Old traditional management thinking will be unsuitable to win in the post Covid-19 scenario. Maybe it’s time to run the organization ‘under new management’.

Watch our webinar on The Myths of Management ^[6].

 

Maybe it’s time to run the organization ‘under new management’. We have been running enterprises with very tired concepts of empowerment, ownership, accountability and other little challenged pillars.  The truth is that there is mythology embedded in all those concepts. Old traditional management thinking will be unsuitable to win in the post Covid-19 scenario. So, what will the ‘new management’ look like? Which elephants do we need to see in the management room?

 

 

What attendees said:

‘Thank you for the opportunity to participate in this fantastic webinar. Both the depth of the discussion between Leandro and Carlos and the very intensive exchange in the chat inspired me.’

 

‘It was a great pleasure to participate in today’s webinar…. If you would have been sitting next to me, you would have seen a lot of ‘head nodding’ and heard a couple of loud ‘yes’es’ from the bottom of my heart.’ 

 

WATCH NOW ^[6]

________________________________________________________________________________________________

Dr Leandro Herrero is the CEO and Chief Organization Architect of The Chalfont Project ^[2], an international firm of organizational architects. He is the pioneer of Viral Change^TM, a people Mobilizing Platform, a methodology that delivers large scale behavioural and cultural change in organizations, which creates lasting capacity for changeability.

Dr Herrero is also an Executive Fellow at the Centre for the Future of Organization, Drucker School of Management. An international speaker, Dr Herrero is available for virtual speaking engagements ^[3] and can be reached at: The Chalfont Project ^[4].

His latest book, The Flipping point – Deprogramming Management ^[5], is available at all major online bookstores.

 

My ideal modern organization has different characters on the payroll. If there is a payroll. These are three of them:

1. The craftsman

Perhaps nobody better than Richard Sennett  ^[7] (Sociology, LSE, Humanities New York) has described  it. Himself a good craftsman of ideas, he explains the traits: skills and care to make things well, not necessarily for its immediate utilitarian reasons, with focus on detail, perhaps on beauty, or perfection, whether in a pottery workshop or a lab. What distinguishes them most is their motivation for life time learning. I imagine strategy making as a craft, more pottery than spreadsheets. I have been using the term ‘crafting’ for many moons. I hope that the use of the language makes me become one.

2. The entrepreneur

They create things, not necessarily from zero, but look for alternatives, try, experiment and above all take risks. The term is associated  with taking initiative. A passive entrepreneur checking in from 9 to 5 is an oxymoron. I want entrepreneurs on the payroll. I imagine a company of entrepreneurs and its leadership with the sole goal of creating space for them. I imagine the question ‘how many employees do you have?’ changed into ‘how many entrepreneurs do you have?’

3. The activist

Which includes the word ‘act’. Therefore not ‘Wait-ivists’, ‘Later-ivists’ or ‘once-we-have-aligned-all-stakeholders-ivists’. They understand the imperative of action; the concept of ‘agency’: take control, be in charge of destiny, express themselves. For the activist, permission was never granted, it was always taken.

OK, three more tomorrow.

________________________________________________________________________________________________

Dr Leandro Herrero is the CEO and Chief Organization Architect of The Chalfont Project ^[2], an international firm of organizational architects. He is the pioneer of Viral Change^TM, a people Mobilizing Platform, a methodology that delivers large scale behavioural and cultural change in organizations, which creates lasting capacity for changeability.

Dr Herrero is also an Executive Fellow at the Centre for the Future of Organization, Drucker School of Management. An international speaker, Dr Herrero is available for virtual speaking engagements ^[3] on topics covered in his Daily Thoughts and his books ^[8], and can be reached at: The Chalfont Project ^[4].

 

There are three major sources of trust generation. Everything else is commentary:

1. The ‘keep promises’. I can rely on you, You said you would, you did. You did not let me down. You walked the talk. Some people may call it reliable, consistent, and predictable. I call it trust, trustworthy. I trust you. You’ll trust me. We will keep our promises. (Keeping promises, or lack of it, still one of the greatest sources of disengagement in organizations and reasons for leaving).
2. The ‘I can be vulnerable’. I made myself vulnerable by disclosing too much, by telling you about my weaknesses, my fault lines, my unfinished thoughts, my doubts, my hesitations, my half decisions my half truths, my insecurity. You did not take advantage. You did understand. Or not. But you did not exploit it, or gained from that, or made a killing out of my inferiority. Thanks. I am not worse off, not humiliated, actually, I am a bit of a more confident grown up.
3. The ‘diamonds in an envelope’. New York Jewish communities trading in diamonds see the backwards and forwards of them in envelopes. That’s it. Not certified, not FEDEX, not signature. If you reach the envelope practice level, you’ve done very well on trust.

The three are connected, of course.

There is a fourth one. It’s blind and emotional and halo effect. I trust this guy, not sure why, speaks well, seems authentic, is a family guy, and religious, and speaks with authority, and is credible, and intelligent, and…

This is a package of trust, for better or for worse. But it works.

Trust is the greatest organizational oil. No trust? Slow or stuck machinery.

Keep promises, allow yourself to be vulnerable and send diamonds in envelops; that is the formula. Easy.

 

These are us, you and me. OK, apologies for calling you ordinary. But it’s not disrespectful. Believe me. It’s like mortal, like me. Peter Drucker called the company a group of ordinary people doing extraordinary things together.

One of the characteristics of us, the Ordinary Irrationals is that we think we are Extraordinarily Rational People.  But we make irrational decisions all the time.  The whole world moves on irrationality principles that traditional, neoclassical economics don’t understand. In fact traditional economics is almost a branch of Newtonian physics. Somebody put it like this (apologies I can’t remember the source of my clip):

‘(We are) believers in a largely discredited set of assumptions, who have invented a parallel universe with well-defined mechanical relationships between different moving parts, connected by metaphorical pipes, cogs and levers: interest rates go down, bank lending goes up; taxes go down, investment goes up.’

This input-output machine model is so ingrained that it is hard to see any alternative, more organic or messy thinking models. We apply ‘metaphorical pipes, cogs and levers’ everywhere in the organization: employee engagement/happiness up, productivity up. This type of thing.

New management sciences need to embrace the irrational world, the one that may defeat logic, the one that has another kind of logic, harder to capture in spreadsheets.

In this world, for example, some HR competence systems are a straitjacket at best, and a kidding-yourself-world-of pipes-cogs-and-lever’ at worse. Do we really need these pseudo-quantic-physics systems that specify competencies for grade 5 people, in terms of a delta increase by a word from 4 grade people: ‘grade 4 manages change; grade 5 leads change’. Seriously, extraordinary rational consultants in talent development?

When can we pay attention to irrationality?

Behavioural Economics has.

When can HR/OD/L&T/Communications and any other corporate functional tribe jump in?

The human capital corporate functions becoming the Ordinary Irrationals support system. How about that?

________________________________________________________________________________________________

Thought leader, keynote speaker and author, Dr Leandro Herrero is available for virtual speaking engagements. Find out more ^[3].

Leandro Herrero is frequently voted ‘Best Speaker’ at conferences worldwide. He also speaks to Boards and Leadership Teams, participates in other internal company conferences as a keynote speaker, and is available to run short seminars and longer workshops.

The topics of Leandro Herrero’s presentations and workshops relate to his work as an organizational architect.

Each organization has specific needs to be addressed.  Contact us ^[9] to discuss your needs and to create the most appropriate virtual session for you.

1. Passion is an emotion, or set of emotions. You may want, indeed, that your people are passionate, but you can’t simply command it, train for it (have workshops about how to be passionate) or order ‘we will be passionate’.
2. You can model it, yes. You, yourself can be passionate and then perhaps others will be passionate or behave passionately. If you as leader don’t know how to model it, don’t ask others. I’ve seen in my life many non passionate Leadership Teams declare passion as a value.
3. Passion is always portrayed as an input. Insert passion, get good work. But in (my behavioural) view, passion is in fact an output. Do satisfying work, you’ll be passionate (I can hear the ‘It’s both brigade’ already). I repeat, do you want passion around? Do stuff people can feel passionate about.
4. Passion as a value in a value system is lazy thinking. Who is against it? So that’s easy. It assumes that declaring it, stating it and putting it on the wall, it will happen. It does not take much to write it down in the mission and vision statement or the values. And then what?
5. You can’t intellectually force passion on others. You can’t force or expect an emotional presence, say, in the same way as saying to employees ‘be happy’. If you want happy employees, give them the environment and wait, don’t declare the requirement for happiness first and expect people will create an environment for you.
6. If you insist with the word, tell me what you want to see in people that, when seen, at a scale, you can say ‘that’s passion’. Then we could perhaps start a conversation about the behavioural translation of passion. No behavioural translation, don’t carry on. Leave it. Incidentally, be careful with the transcultural essence of passion. The potential for ridicule is enormous.
7. If you think that given the above I am dismissing or ridiculing passion, nothing is further from the truth. Also, if so, I am doing a bad job. I love to work with people who exhibit passion for something, versus the alternative. But ‘the exhibition of passion’ does not equal a loud voice, high tone or clapping in the corridor. The quiet writer shaping characters on a piece of paper every morning with a cup of coffee, may be truly passionate about what is coming out, yet we may just see a gentle smile.
8. The mistake I am talking about is the commoditising of passion in corporate life, the acquisition of the language of passion as an alibi for lack of critical thinking ((a) who could be against it? and (b) what is it?); the appropriation of an emotional space as input, when the effort should be driven to produce an output.
9. Passion as emotion (see above) is energy, drive, adrenaline. These things are not good or bad intrinsically. High octane passion in the wrong direction will need a few dispassionate leaders to come to the rescue. Naive change management systems look for passionate people (whilst we in Viral Change™ we look for highly connected) expecting that they will ‘change things’. Yes, this is right, but in what direction?
10. ‘Passion for technology’, ‘passion for customers’, ‘passion for X’ is (1) meaningless and (2) egocentric. The customer says, good for you, let’s see it. If you are a technology company and you tell me that you are passionate about technology, I will say congratulations, you seem to be in the right place. Now, tell me who the hell you are? I have another 25 saying the same.

________________________________________________________________________________________________

Continue the conversation…..

Thought leader, keynote speaker and author, Dr Leandro Herrero is available for virtual speaking engagements. Find out more ^[3].

 

Leandro Herrero is frequently voted ‘Best Speaker’ at conferences worldwide. He also speaks to Boards and Leadership Teams, participates in other internal company conferences as a keynote speaker, and is available to run short seminars and longer workshops.

The topics of Leandro Herrero’s presentations and workshops relate to his work as an organizational architect.

Each organization has specific needs to be addressed.  Contact us ^[9] to discuss your needs and to create the most appropriate virtual session for you.

At a conference I attended, the very sharp mind of Marten Mickos ^[10], CEO of HackerOne, ex HP, ex Nokia, reminded the audience that ‘the new generations are not worried about the future, but about what the older generations are leaving behind’. I thought it was a great insight in the context of discussions about what Millennials want from life, which took place in a panel of speakers where no visible Millennial had been invited to speak.

Another ‘expert in Millennials’ would assure us that ‘they’ have three distinctive characteristics: (1) They love relationships; (2) They need and follow a cause; (3) They don’t want a job.

These may be true. As caricatures go, this may be a good one. But I’m always puzzled by how these are always portrayed as almost innate and genetic of an entire generation. Are Millennials born with a relationship gene, a purpose and good cause gene, and a no job gene? Or did they all get together in a Global Millennial Alignment Convention and decide on these three features?

The truth about ‘the Millennials characteristics’ maybe more about how the non-Millennials, previous generations have shaped their world, so that the world in front, handed to them, is the only one they know.

They love relationships. Sure, they are ‘there’, in front, at a click and a like. Hyper connectivity is a global phenomenon (but not hyper-collaboration and hyper-proximity) so, they take it because they live it. What nobody really says is that their relationships may be very different from other relationships. The question is what type of relationship, if any at all, is a differentiation between us.

They want and follow a cause. Maybe the previous generations have created more and more causes to follow, so, no shortage, the supply is high. Maybe previous generations are looking at a serious purpose for the organization, having avoided full domestication under ‘the maximisation of shareholder value’, which reached a climax of Robotic Goals and proportions, until legions of people started shouting my favourite slogan: ‘surely, there must be a better way’.

They don’t want a job. Perhaps they don’t want your kind of job, or mine. Perhaps they are redefining ‘job’.

I think that, very often, we have a set of stereotypes and mental frames that we apply easily as a way to comprehend the world. That makes us (feel) more  in control. It’s easy to apply a frame of wishes, desires and predictable behaviours to an entire generation. Some of these behaviours may tell us more about our own ones, and the world that we have prepared and cooked for that generation, than something ‘intrinsic to them’.

The question about Millennials is not whether, or why, they love relationships, a cause, and ‘no jobs’, but whether, or why, we have a world that is craving for better relationships, has organizations that may have forgotten a ‘high purpose’, and jobs not worth having.

Perhaps what Millenials want is the same as we non-Millennials want, but one of us is too shy to say. I think that they are having the meal that we have cooked for them.

________________________________________________________________________________________________

There is only one strategy test: what will you tell the children?

 

Try this: Son, I got up every day and went to the office to maximise shareholder value. I also participated in lots of Lean Teams. Ah, and I was an agile employee. In my time, our employee engagement scores went up from 4.5 to 7. Just try. Rehearse this by saying it to yourself in the mirror. Yes, what will we tell the children? That’s probably the only question that matters.

There is only one strategy test: what will you tell the children? My children, your children, their children, the children. Apply wisely and broadly. Once you look them in the eyes, you’ll know straight away if the grandiose strategy you are proclaiming has any legs. What we will tell the children is ‘the red face test’ of leadership.

 

 

Extract from my book: The Flipping point – Deprogramming Management. ^[5]

Our real and present danger is not a future of robots and AI, but of current established BS. Management needs deprogramming. In this book, you are invited to the Mother of All Call Outs!

 

I know it will happen. I’m certain. It’s nothing to do with trust.

 

Trust requires uncertainty. I trust that you will help me, because you have always done so, but I’m not absolutely sure that you will next time. I hope. I’m a bit uncertain, maybe. But I trust you.

 

Trust is one of these acquired management concepts we mess about with. Here we have a few things that I suggest we need to know about trust:

 

1. Trust is not linear. It’s one of the least linear things we have in organizations. It may take extraordinary efforts to reach a level of trust with an individual, group, a system, a company and, then, a relatively minor breach could get the whole thing down. It’s unfair. Non-linearity is always unfair. Small things create big things. Big things create small things. It’s messy, like life itself, the mother of all non-linear realities.

 

2. Trust is inevitably linked to promises. You keep your promises, my trust will grow almost inevitably. You said you would do something for me, or for everybody, and you do, all the time, or most of the time, trust will grow. ‘Keeping promises’ is a very recurrent theme in our Viral Change™ programmes as a behavioural currency that needs to scale up. ‘Keeping promises’ touches so many other things that, as a behavioural unit, is a little bit of a magic bullet.

 

3. Trust and vulnerability are sisters. If I made myself vulnerable by acknowledging a mistake, by saying that I don’t know, by declaring my lack of control, trust grows. I’m making myself more human, more accessible. But also I’m inviting you to do the same, I’m telling you that you can also tell me that you made a mistake, that you don’t know, or that you are in a messy type of thinking, and I will not hold it against you. You will not be penalised; you will not be labelled as weak or a muddled thinker. That is an intrinsic problem with performance management systems in organizations. We proclaim that it’s safe to make mistakes, but usually we don’t reward this. Despite the wonderful music coming from leadership, who has perhaps learned to say the right thing but not necessarily practise it.

 

The trouble with the latter is that we have mistaken that kind of vulnerability with exposure of our entire self for external consumption. The industry of expressing, sharing, venting, putting it on the table, feelings and emotions, very often done for the sake of it because it’s the politically correct thing to do, has not created more trust. It has created massive exhibitionism.

 

Instagramming our soul does not necessarily make us better human beings, inducers of trust or promoters of freedom. Most soul exhibitionism, which has gathered pandemic proportions with the selfie culture, depletes our inner self on behalf of flawed ideas of openness, honesty or transparency. We have become so transparent that anything can get through us like a penetrating sunbeam. The solidity of our soul has melted it in the air.  The late John O’Donohue expressed it beautifully when pairing ‘the sacred and the secret’. There is not much sacred left these days.

 

It always surprises me that people who are very proud of ‘controlling their boundaries’, seem to be the most prone to Instagramming about the quality of their cereals over breakfast, and Facebooking to the world with party pictures that regrettably they never delete.

 

I am digressing here, but when people tweet pictures of themselves on their own, with a beautiful sunset, holding a glass of wine, with the assertion ‘here I am with my solitude, enjoying beauty on my own, look at me, how profound and spiritual my being is’, I always wonder who takes those shots . Angels? But this is a conversation for another day.

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Don’t Miss Our Free Webinar This Thursday!

The Myths of Management

 

Join myself and Anett Helling ^[11] for our free webinar with Q&A this Thursday.  Leadership traits, employee engagement, empowerment and more – old traditional management thinking will not win in the post Covid-19 scenario. So, what will the ‘new management’ look like? Which elephants do we need to see in the management room? Register Now! ^[6]  Thursday, 30th July – 18:00 BST/19:00 CET.

 

Bring your critical thinking brain switched on. It’s a serious business. It may also be fun!

 

Attendees eligible for a FREE copy of my new book: The Flipping Point – Deprogramming Management ^[5].

 

 

There is something only you can live: your life. Socrates said that ‘the unexamined life is not worth living’. Being oneself, living your life and examining it, all these things need reflection time. Call it how you want, but it’s ‘stop and think’.

Reflection is for me the key ingredient of leadership. A super-doer, super-achiever, super-energetic leader with little reflection attached is not a good leader. An energy-sucking machine is not the same as a strong leadership.

So, what’s reflection time? You can have it in many forms and shapes. The universal way is a myth. Some people need to disappear to a remote and exotic land to do that. Great! Well, great for them if it works. Other people, more prosaic ways of life, need ‘time outs’. But not all time out is reflective. It may be restful, or energising, but not necessarily reflective. Long journeys or short ones, you need to find your way.

There is a tradition in many spiritual writings (and, as such, attributed to many authors) that says that the true spiritual journey is one inch long. That is, look inside your head.  My geometrical version of this is that instead of a 360-degree feedback system, so overused and abused in management; people need to learn the 45-degree feedback first:  look yourself in the eye, in the mirror. Small angle, short journey, you see? All manageable!

To be reflective is to ask questions. It sounds simple but, since we have been educated to produce answers (look at the state of current education systems) more than in the art of questioning, it may be harder than we think. It’s inevitable that some psychological conditions such as lack of distractions are required. Again, spiritual traditions of many sorts practice the 3S: silence, stillness and solitude. These are the hardest things you can ask many leaders to do. Trust me, I try. I run a leadership retreat based on them. In the absence of perfect conditions, I ask leaders to practice very small tricks as ‘initiation’ (!): drive with the radio off is a very popular one.

There is no obvious substitute for reflection in leadership. Perhaps the first steps are about reflecting on all these topics!  The best books on leadership are books of questions. The best leadership development programmes are programmes full of questions. One of the greatest investments we can make in personal and professional development is the art of questioning.

Reflection and questioning are brothers.  Again, non-outsource-able. Nobody can reflect or question for you.

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For questioning content that challenges the corporate norms – take a dip into Leandro’s new book The Flipping Point – Deprogramming Management. ^[5]

Business is working in tunnel vision mode through the lenses of a limited worldview. Prestigious business schools, academics and Big Management Consulting firms produce daily pieces of ‘research’ that are mere journalistic accounts of what 100 or 300 CEOs say. These CEOs repeat what they have read in the publications of the same business schools, academic institutions and Big Management Consulting firms. The circle of that colossal groupthink is alive and well. Organizations are now fully prepared for the past.

A flipping point in the trend for adopting absurd management ideas needs to be reached. Management needs to be deprogrammed.

This book of 200 tweet-sized vignettes, twitter-on-paper, which can be read in no particular order, looks at the other side of things – flipping the coin.  It asks us to apply more rigour and critical thinking in the way we use assumptions and management practices that were created many years ago.

Our real and present danger is not a future of robots and AI, but of current established BS. In this book, you are invited to the Mother of All Call Outs!

Read recent reviews on LinkedIn ^[12] and Amazon ^[13].  Or ‘Look Inside ^[14]‘ for a preview.

________________________________________________________________________________________________

Continue the conversation, by joining Leandro and his team for the next free webinar with Q&A, in the Feed Forward Series, ^[6] on 30th July, as they debunk The Myths of Management. ^[6]

Old traditional management thinking will be unsuitable to win in the post Covid19 scenario. Maybe it’s time to run the organization ‘under new management’. Register now! ^[6]   30th July, 18:00 BST/19:00 CET – for my free, live webinar with Q&A.

We have been running enterprises with very tired concepts of empowerment, ownership, accountability and other little challenged pillars.  The truth is that there is mythology embedded in all those concepts. Old traditional management thinking will be unsuitable to win in the post Covid-19 scenario. So, what will the ‘new management’ look like? Which elephants do we need to see in the management room?

All attendees will be eligible to receive one complimentary copy of Leandro’s new book, The Flipping Point ^[5].

 

 

 

 

We have made character, virtue or goodness uncomfortable terms in the organization. They seem to provoke some sort of red face. We see them as aliens to the clinical, sanitized, uncontaminated management thinking and language. We need to bring them back, welcome them to a home they should never have left. Imagine this: hiring a leader of high moral character. How many people will laugh? Why have we sterilized management?

We have made character, virtue or goodness uncomfortable terms in the organization. Management sanitised itself a long time ago from humanistic contaminations. Ok, the real, confident alfa management. Bring character back! If you want something more ‘modern’, try David Brooks ^[15]’ The Road to Character (2016) or his latest ‘The Second Mountain’ (2019). Brooks is a conservative writer and columnist in The New York Times, who most liberals read. It tends to disappoint both sides. Passionate about the ‘fabric of society’ he leads an initiative within The Aspen Institute called ‘Weave: The Social Fabric Project’ ^[16]. Worth a read on their website.

 

Who needs field experience with Amazonian tribes, when all the surviving exotics are on the payroll?

I have met a big boss who wrote memos, long hand, for his secretary to type and send by normal mail. Another one who had his secretary printing his emails and sending them by FedEx to him. A client who did not know the password for his computer since he had never ‘been’ in the corner of his large office, where the never-used computer screen lived. Another who played golf in his office and moved the furniture around each time. Another who gave her direct report clear advice for her team: let them fail. Who needs field experience with Amazonian tribes to gain an anthropological degree, when all the surviving exotics are on the payroll?

I have met a big boss who wrote memos, long hand, for his secretary to type and send by normal mail. I used to collect oddities until I discovered that they were normalities. Today we have normalised being untruthful and people with severe personality disorders hold high offices so, frankly, this is a flipping world.

Extracts taken from my new book The Flipping Point. ^[5] A flipping point in the trend for adopting absurd management ideas needs to be reached. The Flipping Point ^[5] contains 200 short vignettes exploring what ’deprogramming management’ may look like.  Read a recent review ^[12].

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Feed Forward webinar series ^[17] – the organization now, under new management

Machines work on feed-back. Minds work on feed-forward. We don’t need thermostats; we need new compasses. There is no ‘back to normal’. Normal has not been waiting for us.   Leandro Herrero

To change to ‘the new normal’ we must think and act differently in the management of our organizations. Join Leandro Herrero and his team of organizational architects for these 4, free webinars as they debunk uncontested assumptions and uncover the alternatives, whilst considering why this is even more relevant today in the current exceptional environment. Join them and bring your critical thinking brain, switched on. It’s a serious business. It may also be fun. Register Now! ^[17]

Each participant who attends any of the live webinars of the Feed Forward series will be eligible for one copy of The Flipping Point ^[5].

Nassim Taleb ^[18] has written about ‘antifragile’ as the quality of ‘growing from disorder’. He says that the opposite to fragile is not robust, but antifragile.

Translation: in a non-antifragile mode you address a crisis by adapting, surviving or coping.  You praise flexibility. Flexibility is getting yourself hit and bouncing back. More or less ready for a new hit. Think one of those punchbags or sandbags used in boxing training. Always back. But still the same punchbag, just a little bruised.

In antifragile mode you will try to come out of whatever critical situation stronger than before. You are not back to baseline. You are transformed. You are beyond predictions. And you surprise yourself.

What if we did that? What if we treated the coronavirus pandemic as a chance in a lifetime to surprise ourselves, surprise our colleagues, surprise our clients, surprise the market with our new ‘us’. Not survived, and tired, and happy to still be running, but unpredicted and unexpectedly better, fantastic, enhanced by a serious multiple.

It’s doable.

It is said that in any organization, 20% of the people do 80% of the work. I often think that this is conservative and strictly Pareto, but, in some places I know it may just be only 5 %.

These, lets call them twentypercenters, are an heterogeneous group, but it contains real, real gems. If you discount the workaholics who grab work and spaces as part of their daily dose, and the ones that don’t want to do it but are forced to, the rest is Rough Corporate Diamond.

These are people who jump in, you hear them saying ‘I’ll do that’ or ‘can I help you’ or ‘I’ll take this one’. Other tribal expressions of this luxury species are ‘leave it with me’, and ‘count on me’.

These people deserve the status of Protected Species and a double bonus, the order is not important.

You see them in meetings taking notes and sharing them with all, when nobody has asked them to do so, and when the risk is that nobody will. They feel duties that nobody else does. They have levels of commitment several standard deviations from the norm. They are pretty silent about that. They tend to be humble, but not fools; unassuming but not invisible; incredibly helpful without necessarily stepping into well known other’s shoes. Employee Engagement Questionnaires have no questions to identify them.

They are particularly sensitive to the organization’s Structural (Accountability) Holes: those grey areas full of orphan topics and actions. They take accountability. They are the Twentypercenters.

If you don’t know them, you need to improve your social skills and buy a pair of spectacles. If, as leader, you know them, say big thanks, tell them that they are not taken for granted, tell them how proud and privileged you are to have them.

As organizational architect for many years, I see them from a distance. If I have to create a client project team working with me, I want them in. I’ll be honest, the main reason is because I know we’ll get things done. But the second reason is because I know, it will be a joy to work with them.

Organizational anthropology sounds like a grandiose academic affair. You may imagine the anthropologists armed with notebooks and cameras capturing the company tribes. Perhaps the corporate indigenous are not naked, they are all on their smartphones, and the tribes occupy offices with glass doors. Still, anthropology.

This is the forgotten discipline that could have spared us superficial ‘management science’ by getting to the bottom of individuals, groups and relationships. Why it did not make it, or, why or how I would argue this with many people who think it did, is a conversation for another day.

Let me share a very simple and unsophisticated anthropological insight that just by simply considering it, could help direct some of the things we do or don’t do in organizations. The French anthropologist Claude Levy Strauss (1908-2009) amongst others, told us how games are basically disjunctive and rituals conjunctive. Translations: Games are by nature divisive, they lead to winners and losers (ok, even if we say that ‘participating is all that matters’). Games are disjunctive. Rituals are by nature uniting, they lead to being together, to nurturing an identity of belonging. They are conjunctive.

On that frame, having a cookout or bbq with the division, or an evening together to the theatre, would count as ritual, whilst racing each other in go-Karts in the same divisional off-site would be, well, a game where winners will get a cup and losers will clap. If you wanted team building, you would not do games.

This is of course a complete caricature and will irritate many. Starting with the ones who use games and sports as experiential analogies for leadership. And I know many people who do this very well (not me). Also, God knows that sales organizations worship games, competitions and winners and losers. They do that all the time. And gamification of life is becoming an industry on its own merits.

But before dismissing the anthropological distinction as irrelevant, I would suggest a pause, at least as a curiosity. Maybe there is something there that we don’t hear. Maybe we should have games (if this is what you want) that are more like rituals. Dare I say the best ritual-game is the one where everybody wins. Wow! What a bore and a contradiction I hear. Where will all this competitive spirit go?

Again, the anthropo-clever people would tell us of examples (remote islands perhaps with scantily clad people, maybe) where games are games, but never have winners and losers as a way to avoid any division in the community.

Rubbish? Curious? I believe we don’t pay enough attention to the insights coming from all those ‘humanity’ disciplines.

Let’s say you have a multi-country gathering within your company, and that the countries represented are a bit heterogeneous in terms of performance. Some come with a reputation for delivery, others with one of struggling, or underperforming. In real life, there are already elements of winners or losers. They arrive with differences. The anthropologist would say, the last thing you need is to use win/lose games as a way of boosting some sort of ‘team building’, no matter who would lose or win. Use the ritual, not the game.

Suspend judgement and try to see the logic. One can always dismiss it but, I, for one, would follow the anthropologist recommendation.

Arriving at the clean and clinical Stockholm airport, my pre-booked taxi is failing me. I have some time to spare until this is sorted.

Next to me in arrivals there is a family of three or four young Swedish girls, a young boy and their mother. OK, I don’t know if it was their mother, but she looked like their mother. So I declared her their mother.

The oldest (apparently) sister comes up from immigration with a huge backpack and very tanned. It seems like it was a long journey back home. What followed were scenes of tears, tsunami intensity style, and long, very long hugs, one by one. Highly emotional.

But the mother had remained detached, four or five meters away, capturing it all on video on her iPhone. This was very visible. She would move one meter here, one meter there to make sure she had it all captured, like an experienced reporter. Finally, it is her turn for the hugs and tears, and the iPhone is passed onto the son for the continuous capturing.

And I thought, how sad! How sad the she was not the one jumping towards the exit gates and getting and giving the first hugs, and wetting the floor with the first flood of tears. Instead, she was capturing the reality, grabbing those moments, encapsulating the emotions, recording the experience, reporting for a possible future. And the present went. It slipped through. She can’t re-take it, re-live it, rescue it, reclaim it for a ‘take two’.

This was my first chain of thoughts. My second was, who am I to make a judgement and decide what is good or bad. Is my moral ground related to my frustration with the unseen taxi driver? What do I gain with my unexpected socio-anthropological observation? Do I feel better?

There is a case however, a broader case, of all of us capturing a reality that is already gone. The odd photograph is now substituted by the epidemic of selfies, in this Era of Narcissus. We grab space and time digitally and Instagram it, or Snapchat it obsessively. There is a case for reflection here. It’s obsessive and it’s done, mainly, because we can. We are in love with the duplication of us.

I still feel a bit sad. No matter how much my inner self tells me to get a life and wait for the taxi, that it’s not my business what that Swedish family does, somewhere inside still feels that the video is not the reality, the selfie is not the self and that we are missing the point. I feel for a second or two, perhaps more, that I am missing something myself jut by seeing others missing it.

The point being, grab the real stuff, not its memory.

The point being, what are we going to do when the entire world has got its selfie looking more ridiculous, with overgrown lips and sending virtual kisses?

The point being, I need a digital sabbatical.

The point being, forget that taxi, it’s not turning up. Let’s go to the rank.

Surprise is a powerful strategy in its own right. Surprise means being ahead of the game, being further ahead than others thought you would be, being able to pull out an organizational solution, disclose the next new idea when nobody was expecting one, take a rabbit out of the hat, bring to the market something that nobody has asked for.

Surprise the market, surprise your boss, surprise yourself, surprise your followers, surprise your teams, surprise the guys in corporate. All of them.

I know what you are thinking. Your boss does not like surprises. In fact, there are two types of bosses who don’t want surprises. Type one is the one who does not want bad surprises. Type two, the one who does not want any surprise at all, good or bad. Type one is understood; nobody wants bad news. You would not set out to surprise with bad news. Not on purpose!  The latter is a tricky one, because there are many people who, in fact, hate unpredictability. For them ‘meeting the budget’ is better than being surprised with savings. In other words, predictable numbers are better than unpredictable ones, even if these are better numbers. If you head a cost centre, such as R&D, spending every penny or cent may be ‘better’ than producing ‘an under-spend’. I’ve seen people labelled as bad managers by not spending what they said they would. If you don’t understand this, you may not have run one of these. Markets also like predictability. Investors like your accuracy. The whole industry of ‘fixed mortgages’ is based on the beauty and comfort of predictability. Surprising needs guts.

I hear all that. Yet, I will repeat myself. Surprise the market, surprise your boss, surprise yourself, surprise your followers, surprise your teams, surprise the guys in corporate. I am confident that you know what I mean.

The trade offs are: predictability and safe journey, or surprise and leadership. Nobody can argue against safe journeys, so you will be forgiven for ‘meeting expectations’. I personally dislike the ‘exceeding expectations’ expression. It sounds like heavy rain.  I prefer surprise, regardless of expectations.

The hour has come. Radical is the word. From the Latin, radix, it means root.

We need to get to the root of things, to the root of practice, to the root of managing organizations.

Radical is a fantastic word, unfortunately contaminated by its cousin radicalization, which has a connotation of extremism, which, in turn has a connotation of violence. Both, extremism and radicalization have been taken hostage. Neither of them is intrinsically negative.

So, back to radical management. From the dozens of synonymous or conceptual triggers of this word, imagine these as applied to management:

uncompromising, profound, rigorous, essential, affecting the fundamental nature of something, far-reaching or thorough, departing from tradition, innovative or progressive.

Radical management, radical people, radical leadership. Do we need these?

Interesting, the Chemistry version of a radical, also applies: ‘group of atoms behaving as a unit in a number of compounds’. So radical management seems to induce alignment, one team, union of hearts and minds.

Radical management thinking would mean a rigorous clean up of false assumptions and pseudo-scientific management pontificating. Radical Leadership would be uncompromising leadership rooted in integrity, authenticity and the ability to create (chemistry type) ‘radicals’ of commitment.

The radicals as employees would also be uncompromising travellers in search of the truth, with high levels of antibodies to bullshit, and determined to make a difference.

The hour of Radical Management and the management of radicals has come. Since we can’t simply carry on applying 20^th Century exhausted management to 21^st Century vibrant enterprises.

“The history of mankind might be described by a cynic as a series of splendid expeditions towards the wrong goal or towards no goal at all, led by men who have all the gifts of leadership except a sense of direction, and every endowment  for achieving their ends except a knowledge of ends worth achieving”

These words by Sir Richard Livingstone ^[19] (1880 – 1960) still resonate today. His focus was education, which is where he spent his life (Oxford and Queen’s in Belfast), but this paragraph should be kept as one of these perennial quotes and pieces on leadership.

The ‘splendid expeditions towards the wrong goal or towards no goal at all’, reminds us that not everything that looks like an expedition may be worth it. We may make leadership complex and even well-orchestrated but this needs also ‘a sense of direction’. It seems so trivial to simply state this. I particularly like ‘sense of direction’ as opposed to a fixed destination. The second part of the statement talks about ‘ends worth achieving’. Again, leadership may look like an expedition towards ends, but the little qualification’, ‘worth achieving’ hits the nail on the head.

I have treasured this piece for many years and still it comes back to my mind again and again. I use it with my clients within leadership work, individual or collective, as a piece for reflection, even digestion of all of its parts.

The long quote continues with a second part on education:

“We must not forget in our education this element, a sense of direction. We do forget it, if we are content that our schools should merely impart knowledge, develop and discipline the intelligence, train character in the narrow sense. They must also be places where the mind is enriched by the right visions and where the ends of life are learned.”

Education systems in the Western world are struggling. ‘Places where the mind is enriched’ is still a goal that is not well achieved. Perhaps leadership starts in school. Perhaps this is why true leadership is still not well entrenched in many people in organizations.  However, it’s true to say as well, that many people are genuine in its quest, sometimes intuitive, sometimes guided. In the true sense of Livingstone’s view of the world, I regard leadership development as ‘education’. In the etymological sense of the word: to get, from inside, that which is already there in the person.

I guess many of us, you and me, are in some kind of splendid leadership expedition. Worth checking for the right maps.

This quote is from an unknown author. He or she must have known a thing or two about the futility of engaging in every single discussion that comes your way. The quote is also a proxy for ‘pick your battles’. There are battles worth fighting and battles that are not. It may also serve as a reflection on what leaders choose to do.

In organizational life, people are often pulled in too many directions, where ‘signal’ and ‘noise’ get confused all the time. Big things get mixed up with small things. The important gets confused with the urgent. The strategic and the tactical become mixed up. All things become equally important, equally relevant, equally necessitating a response, to have a say, to send an  ‘I agree’ message.

I am not fond of the word ‘prioritization’. Not that I don’t believe in the need to prioritize, but I have little faith in our standard ways of doing this. For leaders, a better angle is ‘What will make the difference?’ Or better, ‘What can I personally do that will make the difference, and perhaps only I can do?’

We need to switch from spending our time on ‘managing the inevitable’, to leading what will not happen unless we lead it. In this quest, you, as leader, don’t have to attend to every argument to which you are invited, you don’t have to get involved in everything, and certainly, you don not have to spend your time fighting every battle.

The magic word is choice. Choices are always in front of you.

There was a time when the logic of things started with a ‘why’, followed with a ‘what’ and ended in a ‘how’. The logic has now been inverted. The colossal availability of the ‘how’ invites you to bypass the original sequence. The new sequence is ‘how’, ‘what’, and sometimes ‘why’. The ‘how-to takeover’ ^[20] has created a culture of solutionism. It’s embedded in education: how to answer an academic question is a click away in Google, you don’t need to know why the question is there in the first place.

For every problem, there is a how-to-YouTube-answer (my teenagers seem to imply). In fact, there is a whole industry of how-to-do-things, from getting fit to fixing a boiler.

Management is not immune. The doer culture is a premium. We recruit solutionists in greater numbers than thinkers, let alone critical thinkers. But, who can blame anybody for wishing to have people who provide solutions? After all, if I have a problem with the boiler, I’ll try to get hold of a professional fixer, not somebody who thinks about the physics of water and electricity, let alone asking me why I want to have hot water (and send me a bill for the question).

But when it comes to management and leadership, if we reduce everything to problem solving, and reward this above everything else, we will create a culture of problems, crisis and proficiency in dealing with them. I have expressed this before in these Daily Thoughts.

Management needs to protect itself against the epidemic of the inverted logic of the ‘how-what-why’. It needs to resist temptation for a culture of solutionism, and put a premium on the ‘why-what-how’. Obvious as it may seem, the silent takeover of the new logic clouds our mind and gives us an illusion of control because we have become proficient on the ‘how’.

Not resisting this, will end up suppressing the primacy of the ‘why’.  Achieving this milestone will trigger the terminal illness of the lack of critical thinking. In that disease, anything goes as long as we know how to do many things, as many as possible, as busy as possible, and as irrelevant as they may be. Logic will be deleted from the corporate DNA.

There is a period in child development when children start asking the question ’why?’. They usually seem unsatisfied with one answer only and keep asking, ‘but, why?’. Education is supposed to take those ‘whys’ and amplify them, use that early explosion of curiosity in the mind, make sure that it’s welcomed and nurtured, and guarantee that this curiosity stays for ever, beyond the initial big bang.

Bad education, however, misses this opportunity completely and, instead of pushing for a permanent ‘why?’, rushes to offer a great quantity of ready-made answers that seem to progressively decrease the need for more ‘why?’. The mind says: ‘There seems to be answers everywhere, particularly from that long, rectangular space on the screen called Google search, so perhaps I should not worry so much’… Neil Postman (1931-2003) ^[21], a US educator, put it as sharply and as unkindly as: ‘Children come to school as a question mark and leave school as a full stop!’.

There is a point in the child’s education when the ‘why?’ loses the battle and the ‘how to’ becomes king: this is how you answer the question, this is how you do it, this is how you solve the problem, the riddle, the challenge. At some tragic point, the ‘I know how to answer this’, in the child’s homework, becomes totally independent of the question.

I call this the point of inflection, when the ‘why?’ enters into prolonged agony, even exile, and the ‘how to’ takes over, The Big ‘How To’ takeover.

Education, from the Latin educere, means to extract from within, to take out, to come to light, to set the ‘why?’ free. I call the opposite of this de-education: to give all the answers beforehand and promote ‘the how-to’ over the ‘why?’. De-education teaches how to produce beautiful answers, regardless of whether they are answers to the wrong questions.

Given our education system, it should not surprise us that there is a whole industry of ‘ how to’ products and services, from publications to consulting and life coaching: how to be happy, how to be successful, how to be a good parent, how to bake a cake, how to deal with rejection and a myriad more.

In that context, it should not surprise us either that, in organizational life (a reflection of society, after all), we are working mostly with the ‘how to’ currency. Skills, competences, entire HR systems of performance management, are designed to deal with people who know ‘how to’ do things.  The ‘Why are we doing this?’ is in flagrant short supply. The reasons why we do what we do are assumed: there is a strategy, a dictation, goals, a process.  The focus is on how to deliver. Some people told me: ‘I am paid for doing stuff; nobody has ever suggested to me that I am paid, or will be paid, for asking why.’

The problem accumulated is certainly not the richness of the ‘how to’ but the poverty of the ‘why’. Asking ‘why are we doing this?’, even if it requires the courage to confront dozens of pairs of eyes looking at you in disbelief, is a disruptive idea, a provocative, healthy intervention for which one should get a good bonus.