The Self-Proclaimed Saviours will never save you since their only intent is their personal success. It happens in society and politics, and it happens in organizations.

Self-Proclaimed Saviours love problems. Without them, how could they save anybody. They love them so  much, and they need them so much,  that they create them if they don’t exist.

In my previous corporate life, one of my senior colleagues who was a Self-Proclaimed Saviour, was very explicit about this: ‘let them fail’, he used to say, referring to some obvious wrong path taken or decisions of  project teams charged with attaining goals worth millions.

Self-Proclaimed Saviours are also very good at withholding information or being economic with the truth. They excel at making themselves indispensable in the system  by being the ones who have all the pieces of the puzzle.

Self-Proclaimed Saviours are at home at the Mar-A-Lago School of Deconstruction of the Institutional Fabric. In that school, you learn how to show, painstakingly, that the fabric is rotten so that a substitute  must be created by the Saviour, on behalf of ‘the people’, or to save ‘the people’, that is.  If that entails the fabrication of ‘alternative facts’ and old fashion propaganda, without even the need for a Ministry of that, well, so be it, that is what is needed.

I have come to believe that many Self-Proclaimed Saviours don’t lie, despite the fact that they can express and defend the most outrageous things. The definition of a lie includes ‘intentional untruth’, ‘deliberate intent to deceive’. But Self-Proclaimed Saviours often believe what they want and need to believe. Truth or lie for them is neither here nor there.

We are not different in organizational life. Our own Mar-A-Lago approach to life hosts a fair number of gratuitous reorganizations which sole purpose is to show that A was bad and B solves the problem. A, needed to be saved, and a new leader does that. That is leadership. OK?

Self-Proclaimed Saviours have a hard time when shown the precarious nature of their supposed  indispensability. That even the best  Self-Proclaimed Saviours end up in the cemetery, a place according to General Charles De Gaulle ‘full of indispensable people’.

I think that Self-Proclaimed Saviours deserve a Day in the calendar, a dedicated Feast. I propose that to be Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent in the Christian tradition, before all the fasting and ‘moderation’ starts. On that day, particularly in the Catholic Church, there is an old ritual which involves rubbing ashes on one’s forehead, whilst the priest says ‘Memento, homo  quia pulvis es, et in pulverem reverteris. That is, ‘remember, man, you are dust and to dust you will return’.

But, for the Self-Proclaimed Saviours, I would definitely say it in Latin.

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For more thoughts on Leadership, you can purchase my latest book…..

 

Camino Leadership Notes on the Road

This is a collection of notes on leadership, initially written as Daily Thoughts, which started years ago as a way of talking to himself. Camino, the Spanish for road, or way, reflects on leadership as a praxis that continuously evolves. Nobody is ever a leader. Becoming one is the real quest. But we never reach the destination. Our character is constantly shaped by places and journeys, encounters and experiences. The only real theory of leadership is travelling. The only footprints, our actions. The only test, what we leave behind.

Watch the Camino ^[1] webinar, where I discuss this book and my thoughts on Leadership.

Visit BOOKS ^[2]  to get your copy from Amazon now!

or

You can now read extracts from Chapter 1 ^[3].

 

 

1. I trust you because I can say ‘I haven’t got a clue’ and you don’t think I am an idiot
2. I can be vulnerable and won’t be penalised
3. I can be emotional and you won’t think I am weak
4. I made a mistake and you said you did as well
5. I opened my heart and I did not regret it
6. I told you something in confidence and you kept it like this
7. I shared my doubts and I did not go down the rankings
8. I showed you my tiredness and you didn’t think I wasn’t able
9. I am not as strong as you think but you could see my strengths when I didn’t
10. You said that you’ll help me and you did
11. You said I could call you and you meant it
12. I felt overwhelmed and you did not broadcast it
13. When I screwed up, you could have avoided me, but you gave me your public hand
14. You knew how much I depended on that piece of work and you delivered it to me earlier
15. I got mad and you didn’t
16. You always keep your promises
17. You represent me and I can sleep
18. You protected me and did not send the bill
19. You always tell me the truth even when I don’t want to hear it
20. You never grow at the expense of my shrinking

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For a selection of my Daily Thoughts on leadership, you can buy my latest book, Camino – Leadership Notes On The Road ^[2], available from all major online bookstores ^[4].

 

Downloadable extracts: Extract Camino Chapter 1 ^[5],  Camino – Extract Chapter 2 part 1 ^[6]

 

A collection of notes on leadership, initially written as Daily Thoughts. Camino, the Spanish for road, or way, reflects on leadership as a praxis that continuously evolves. Nobody is ever a leader. Becoming one is the real quest. But we never reach the destination. Our character is constantly shaped by places and journeys, encounters and experiences. The only real theory of leadership is travelling. The only footprints, our actions. The only test, what we leave behind.

Taken from my soon to be released book, Camino – Leadership Notes On The Road 

 

Invited to present at TEDx East London ^[7] some years ago, I had lots of conversations with its wonderful Curator, Maryam Pasha.  The theme of the TEDx was ‘Society Beyond Borders’. I had a flow of ideas about how the digital world has forced a redefinition of borders and the consequent paradoxes: the end of space and time that does not increase our proximity; hyper-connectivity that does not make us hyper-collaborative, etc.

I had a clear idea of the first part of the flow of the talk. What was less clear to me was ‘Part 2’ or the ‘So what?’ Like those TV contests, some movies and some video games, I had two possible endings for the script.  I could go for the logical ‘commercial’ side easily. After all, my consulting work has to do with large scale behavioural change and we use the power of peer-to-peer influence as a currency. We know about networks and human connectivity. This is natural territory for me. Or I could perhaps go for a more personal side: the liabilities of a lack of borders for the Self and the Soul in the digital world. In praising ‘no borders’ (‘Anything without Borders’ has a head start), we have forgotten the dangers of full disclosure of the self that many people seem so comfortable with.

Option A’s end was clear, but Option B’s ending was fuzzy, more of a nagging problem in my head: adolescents living in that world of full disclosure, the relinquishing of privacy, the cult of transparency, identity in cyberspace, etc. My old psychiatric hat was nagging me too much to let me avoid these themes…

I did offer Maryam both Option A and Option B, quite convinced that A (the logical, commercial, well-crafted version) would win. I was wrong. In her gentle and firm curatorship, I was directed towards the corridor of my unfinished thoughts. ‘Make it personal’, she said. The same week I had a chat with a business partner and I shared with him my dilemma. He asked me straight: ‘Where is your heart?’ I confessed, B. ‘Well, no brainer then, that would be You talking!’.

Yes, personal wins.  Personal won on the day. It was good advice for when in doubt. I should have known … but I needed a good curator and a good business partner to take me to the more difficult and less obvious option.

View my presentation, delivered a few years ago, but still relevant today, In Praise of Borders ^[8].

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New for 2021!

 

MY NEW BOOK: Camino – Leadership Notes On The Road

 

A collection of notes on leadership, initially written as Daily Thoughts as a way of talking to myself. Camino, the Spanish for road, or way, reflects on leadership as a praxis that continuously evolves. Nobody is ever a leader. Becoming one is the real quest. But we never reach the destination. Our character is constantly shaped by places and journeys, encounters and experiences. The only real theory of leadership is travelling. The only footprints, our actions. The only test, what we leave behind.

 

Pre-orders going live this month – more information coming soon!

 

________________________________________________________________________________________________

Dr Leandro Herrero is the CEO and Chief Organization Architect of The Chalfont Project ^[9], 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 ^[10] and can be reached at: The Chalfont Project ^[11] or email: [email protected]. ^[12]

Somewhere along the line, in the history of ‘business’, something went wrong and people took the wrong turn at the bifurcation on the road. The world of ‘business’ started to speak a funny language and the 9 to 5 man (and at that time it was still 9 to 5 as opposed to today’s 24/7) became a species in its own right, eager to show that it was different from the ‘the rest of the day men’. Perfectly reasonable people at home, in church, at the kids football match and in the bars with friends, became ‘managers’ at 9:00 am, and not only did they speak a different language, but also behaved differently.

Something must have been in the ‘management’ clothes put on at 09:00 am that allowed people to speak and behave on behalf of somebody else: the bosses, the Board, the shareholders, or something quite esoteric and never seen, as invisible as a neutrino, called ‘the market’.

On behalf of ‘business’, managers started to exercise power over others and seek more and more control over life. When pain was inflicted, the word ‘they’ had to be invented: ‘they want us to do this’, ‘they will not like that’. This magical ‘they’ could justify almost anything. Then, Darwinian forces took over, and power, status and ability to dictate percolated ‘business life’. In this business life, things that were not acceptable outside ‘business life’ became very legitimate here. It became possible, for example, to fire people on Twitter.

Modern Darwinian Alpha managers could be rude, ruthless, take no prisoners and do that on behalf of ‘it is business, isn’t it; we are here to make money’. Also, a convenient, transitory schizophrenia became epidemic: ‘it’s not me, it’s the system, if it were me, I would not do this, but I have to, it’s business, it’s not personal’. Which is in itself the most personal statement a manager can make.

The power dynamics become a force of its own. I will always remember one of these schizophrenic corporate moments that I experienced a few years ago with a client, when the head of the division, my client, was told by her bosses that she was doing the most fantastic job, had created the best alignment of people, funded the most innovative leadership development for the top managers, and, she was a model of the modern way of doing things in the company, a benchmark for all. Now, unfortunately, the division was to be disbanded the following month and amalgamated with a bigger one (who had been playing Barbarians at the Gate for a year), everybody either absorbed into a different (usually lower ranking) job or asked to leave. Needless to say, our Leadership Development plan, benchmark of the universe, sadly, had to be stopped, now. Hey, but how are the kids?

There was no logic, no sense, no reason, certainly no business or organizational reason. This was magical schizophrenic thinking. The only reason why this happened was because of a capricious request from the Bigger Power Holder to ‘reorganize’ and give extra troops to somebody else. Pure currency, bazaar transaction, absolutely nothing that ‘the business’ could gain from.

These kind of situations are not unusual. The music in the background is the same: ‘it’s business, not me’. But the situation above had nothing to do with business. It was simply the same as street, neighbourhood, territorial distribution between gangs in downtown Powerville. Whoever thinks that things in organization, particularly reorganizations, happen because of the business, the markets, the customers or the environment, has perhaps not worked in a major corporation. Stuff happens because of power dynamics. Some organizations are successful despite this.

If every time that something absurd, let alone, unethical, rude, disrespectful, or inhumane, is done on behalf of ‘business’, Mr Business could come out of the closet and shout ‘Not in my name’, we would have a different society.

I have deliberately painted a black and negative scenario. I am conscious of that. If your business is not like this, congratulations. You belong to Planet Sanity. Hold on to it. So if you see some of this somewhere else under the ‘it’s business, isn’t’ it’, as coterminous for inhuman, please join me and shout, not in my name!

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To continue the conversation on challenging absurd management practices – explore  The Flipping Point – Deprogramming Management ^[13].

 

A flipping point in the trend for adopting absurd management ideas needs to be reached. ‘The Flipping Point‘ ^[13], contains 200 short vignettes exploring what ’deprogramming management’ may look like.

 

This book asks you to use more rigour and critical thinking in how you 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!

Available from major online bookstores ^[14].

__________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Dr Leandro Herrero is the CEO and Chief Organization Architect of The Chalfont Project ^[9], 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 ^[10] and can be reached at: The Chalfont Project ^[11].

 

 

There are many compilations but I found these examples in distractify.com. These are cases of rejection that should make us think twice about giving up in adversity. Some are better known than others:

• Walt Disney was fired from a paper because he ‘lacked imagination and had no good ideas’.
• JK Rowling suffered dozens of rejections, including Harper Collins, before somebody considered publishing Harry Potter.
• Oprah Winfrey was fired as an evening news reporter because she mixed too many emotions in her stories.
• George Orwell was told ‘It is impossible to sell animal stories in the USA’. So they did not publish Animal Farm.
• Elvis Presley was told by a manager that he was better off sticking to his previous job of driving trucks in Memphis.
• Steve Jobs was fired from Apple. He was asked to go back, of course!
• Stephen King ‘s wife saved a manuscript of Carrie, which had been rejected thirty times and was in his trash.
• Marilyn Monroe was told she should consider becoming a secretary instead of modelling.
• Abraham Lincoln, I quote here the entire sentence: ‘Demoted from Captain to Private during war, failed as a businessman and lost as a political candidate several times before becoming President’.
• Madonna was also rejected, Andy Warhol was rejected by the Museum of Modern Art, New York, U2 was rejected by a record company, Sylvia Plath was requested to cut half of ‘Amnesiac’ by The New Yorker, and more…

If you’ve been rejected because of your imagination, rest assured, you are in good company!

________________________________________________________________________________________________

Dr Leandro Herrero is the CEO and Chief Organization Architect of The Chalfont Project ^[9], 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 ^[10] and can be reached at: The Chalfont Project ^[11].

Business organizations have grown in a traditional alpha male model where emotions are weaknesses, irrationality is banned and ‘the human stuff’ is not what we are supposed to talk about.

We are even afraid to use expressions such as ‘this will make us more human’ (eyebrows raised) and would go a hundred times more for ‘this will make us better professionals’ (breath, approved). I count a notable exception in one of my best clients, although even there I still see dubious smiles.

But what is the point of ‘the organization’ if organizing does not take us to the next level of our humanity? Would anybody seriously approve, let’s make it ‘inhuman’?

My challenge to leaders is that, when they think about their legacy (yes, they should; start with legacy, then go backwards) they aim at people saying ‘that place changed my life’ (in a good way, that is!). Working for A or B, having X or Y as a boss, being exposed to such and such, changed my life.

The abused change term does not apply only to process, systems and structures but also behaviours. And in doing so, it must surely apply to people’s lives. No apologies, no eyebrow raised, no dubious smiles, no shyness. We all influence somebody else’s life one way or another. Why not a concerted effort to make it big, at a scale, lasting, for good?

There is no incompatibility between the financial objectives of the firm and the provision of a platform for ‘changing people’s lives’. And, if there is, well, you have a problem.

We’d better come down to earth and end the mechanistic, alpha male, adrenaline boosting narrative of the organization. My bet is, stop the human shyness epidemic, get personal (another old trap in the business organization is ‘don’t make it personal’) and those wonderful operational and financial objectives will have a smoother ride.

And if you are on the side of ‘In the Beginning There Was Shareholder Value’, it may just be that those shareholders make more money and get more value when we enhance the lives of people responsible for that.

(I agree, there is a moral principle here. Show me where there isn’t).

________________________________________________________________________________________________

Dr Leandro Herrero is the CEO and Chief Organization Architect of The Chalfont Project ^[9], 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 ^[10] and can be reached at: The Chalfont Project ^[11].

 

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 ^[10].

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 ^[15] to discuss your needs and to create the most appropriate virtual session for you.

Thomas Hylland Eriksen is a Norwegian Anthropology professor that has achieved more than any of his fellow anthropologists: you only need to read his books once.

His books are gems. My favourite is ‘Small Places — Large Issues’ ^[16], followed by The Tyranny of the Moment ^[17].

And we have a lot of this tyranny in management. The book feels dated more than a decade after written, but its principles are sound and even more prominent today. For example the argument in favour of ‘private periods’ of thinking without interruption. Have you heard about that one?

In the 24/7 regime we live in, the instant is a premium. Forget instant coffee, it is instant knowledge and instant answers. It is instant broadcasting, and posting, and liking it, and requesting an (instant) answer. Prisoners of the moment, our concept of space and time is changing fast.

The world is split between the ones who say that we are going in the wrong direction, the ones who say this is great, and the other third who say, what the hell are you talking about? The later is Age Related Incomprehension to ridiculous dilemmas.

There is a tyranny of the moment in our management lives. You’ll find it in the Outlook calendar booked weeks in advance, the secretary responding with the usual, I don’t know if this will be possible until (read here months in advance, even) and the Overall Kingdom of Busyness for the Sake of It.

Again, another leadership, little reflection. Much of this may be self-inflicted. This is bad enough. But as leaders, we are inflicting that tyranny on those working for us. Surely, we must stop and think.

(Wait a minute, did you mean now? In this very moment? What a Tyrant!).

Perhaps there is a form of Liberating Leadership waiting for a book.

________________________________________________________________________________________________

Let’s Join Forces!

 

The team at The Chalfont Project ^[9] are here to support you and your business.  We can deliver webinars, remote keynotes, masterclasses or round tables tailored to your organization – all designed by Dr Leandro Herrero.  Example topics include:

• leadership
• corporate culture
• internal influencers
• leading change
• employee engagement

To find out more or speak to us about your specific requirements, contact us now! ^[11]

Or if you want to be informed about talks, events, masterclasses or courses organized by The Chalfont Project and designed by Dr Leandro Herrero. Contact us now ^[11] .

 

The space of your Self is occupied. By you. This is good news and bad news. On one hand, you are always with your Self. On the other hand you may be too much with your Self. The Self can be your worst enemy (‘we are our own worst enemies’) but also you could be your best friend. Best friends occasionally irritate you, precisely because of their closeness, their proximity. Perhaps you have wished, a few times, to take a little break from a ‘best friend’.

Leaders need to be good friends with them-selves. They need to have the insight and the maturity to see their Self in action: taking too much space? Too little space?

There are times when you should take a holiday from ‘yourself’, as the late John O’Donohue would say. It does not have to be a long, exotic holiday, but more of a time-out or a break.

These are five sets of symptoms which may suggest that you should  consider that holiday (soon):

1. You find yourself talking too much about you.
2. For a little while you have been too harsh, perhaps too unkind, on yourself, blaming yourself for an unusual number of things.
3. You are missing some life-lines (not dead-lines) such as kids birthdays, anniversaries, reunions. People seem to have a habit of having birthdays and anniversaries on the days you are travelling or absent.
4. You find yourself interfering too much in other people’s lives, professional or personal.
5. You have not had a chance recently to ask yourself that question about ‘what your legacy as a leader is?’, ‘what kind of house are you building?’, ‘what you are leaving behind?’.

There may be more symptoms but these are pretty important. Trust me, I am a doctor.

Sure, to identify the symptoms some insight capacity is required. Which I am assuming a leader has. If not, the case is terminal, anyway.

You may not have these leadership insights flagged in a traditional ‘leadership manual’. This is part of the ‘Not-Off-The-Shelf-Leadership-Stuff’ Series.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Let’s Join Forces!

 

Let’s join forces. We can deliver a webinar tailored to your organization and delivered to an in-house audience or a remote keynote, masterclass or roundtable on topics including:

• leadership
• corporate culture
• internal influencers
• leading change

and more– all delivered by The Chalfont Project and designed by Dr Leandro Herrero. Contact us now! ^[11]

Or if you want to be informed about talks, events, masterclasses or courses organized by The Chalfont Project and designed by Dr Leandro Herrero. Contact us now ^[11] – we want to hear from you!

 

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. ^[13]

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 ^[18] and Amazon ^[19].  Or ‘Look Inside ^[20]‘ for a preview.

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Continue the conversation, by joining Leandro and his team for the next free webinar with Q&A, in the Feed Forward Series, ^[21] on 30th July, as they debunk The Myths of Management. ^[21]

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! ^[21]   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 ^[13].

 

 

 

 

I don’t know where this quote comes from, but I have always seen it as a source of reflection on leadership. It describes the leadership journey in which true understanding is emergent, even for the leader who thought he understood himself very well in the fist place.

It tells us that leadership is social, a praxis, something that one learns, something one becomes. Becoming a leader is a better term than being a leader. We are always becoming and, in that journey, sometimes we have to tell ‘them’ three times so that we understand, finally.

I worry about the kind of leadership that has all the answers, that has ‘arrived at the destination’ as if there was an organizational Sat Nav, a Leadership Tom Tom, or Garmin, or Google map, that takes you exactly to a GPS destination point.

Leadership is not real leadership without an invitation. The invitation is to others to navigate and find better ways, better success, better lands. But it requires this human, humble element of ‘understanding together’.

Perhaps at the third time!

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Don’t miss our next free webinar on 2nd July.

Can we put the company in an MRI? Can we diagnose its health in terms of its internal connectivity, communication and collaboration? ^[22]

Yes we can. You can have a diagnosis. Learn how 3CXcan provides this analysis based on the highest scientific principles of network sciences. In the current environment it’s important to base the recovery and the post Covid-19 organization with full understanding of its formal and informal connections, communication channels and internal collaboration. Suspend judgement about your assumptions and find the truth. This webinar will show real examples of this kind of diagnosis performed in real companies. Understanding the real organization, which may or may not be the one you assume it is, will show a completely new baseline upon which to navigate the future.

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Each participant who attends any of the live webinars of the Feed Forward series will be eligible for one copy of Leandro Herrero’s new book: The Flipping Point ^[13]

Friends, my heart is broken today. The UK is leaving the European Union tonight at 11:00 pm continental time. Many will celebrate. I don’t have anything to celebrate.

32 years of this Spaniard living in the UK, I don’t recognise many things anymore. Yet, fantastic, honest people all over.

On this day, I’d like to reproduce the words of a British Green party MEP: ‘I am not asking you to solve our domestic discussions. I am asking to leave a light on, so we can find our way home’.

Our kids will be back. Just leave that candle on. It’s very dark around here.

Leandro Herrero

European Citizen

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.

Is LinkedIn a Digital Rolodex? A digital Resume/CV Library? Do you connect with people who have already given you the business card, sort of? Some LinkedIn members adhere to the rule of not accepting connections from people they don’t know. Indeed this is a LinkedIn recommendation and part of the system, as they describe and explain.  Other people accept everybody who asks. Obviously, these are two very different interpretations of ‘linking in’. For the former, LinkedIn is a controlled acceptance of being part of my ‘library’. For the latter, it is partially the same, but the primary goal, stated or not, is to increase the size of the network. And this increase is likely to take place via people you don’t know, that is a, ‘Weak Link In’.

‘Weak Links’ (technically ‘Weak Ties’), are an old sociological concept that has proven very valuable. They are the opposite to  ‘Strong Links’ (technically ‘Strong Ties’)

In 1973, the sociologist Mark Granovetter ^[23], wrote a very important article with the title: ‘The Strength of Weak Ties’. The title says it all. Your weak ties (people you don’t know well, a bit distant, not strong connections, but certainly not zero) open your horizons. In Granovetter’s research, the chances of getting recommended for a job are greater when coming from weak ties (people who don’t know you well) than from strong ties (people who know you well; too well?). That was a counter-intuitive finding at the time, as much as today.

LinkedIn is obviously a spectrum of Weak and Strong Ties. People very protective of their connections, who will never accept anybody who is not ‘known to them’, create a digital Rolodex and, in the extreme, miss the point completely in terms of the Granovetter factor.  Other people on the other side of the spectrum, create a wealth of Weak Ties (the Strong Ties are a given, but may be a small part) and they are higher in ‘connectivity  strength’, using Granovetter’s concept.

I think there is a case for a Linked Out (as in out in the world) system. Social networking today is the vehicle for Strong and Weak ties. Concepts are now completely redefined in digital terms. We need more research to define which ones are more powerful. My gut feeling is that Granovetter still wins today.

William Stafford’s (1914 – 1993) poem reads:

The things you do not have to say make you rich,
Saying the things you do not have to say weakens your talk.
Hearing the things you do not have to hear dulls your hearing,
And the things you know before you hear them, these are you and the reason you are in the world.

Attention leaders. Judging by the above, we are pretty poor. We talk too much, we command too much, we say too much, we repeat.

I am not against the famous ‘walk the talk’. It’s just that I think the order is wrong. Walk first and then do the talking about the walk: why the walk, the benefits of the walk, why others should join the walk… Talk the walk! If people see you walking, maybe then you will have less to say. And, if as a leader, you accumulate more and more things that you don’t have to say, you are rich, and you are doing great as leader.  This is lesson One of Disruptive Economics for Leadership.

The things you don’t have to say make you a rich leader.

Forget work-life balance. It was a good concept that did a lot of good but has now retired. It cannot any longer  survive in the digital world.

This is not an apocalyptic warning of a permanent state of work slavery. In fact, on the contrary, the end of the world in this area has been permanently postponed. But it forces us to deconstruct the building of the original idea and reconstruct one with perhaps some of the old bricks, but looking very differently.

The first thing to go is the arithmetic. The ‘balance’ implied a number. How much of work? How much of life? Was 50/50 OK? Or perhaps 40/60?

Also, work-life antithesis promoted an automatic and unconscious judgement: life became the opposite of work, so work equals not life. Perhaps here the expression ‘get a life’?

Today, the current ‘imbalanced slavery’, if any, means 24/7 attached to the server. Or in the cloud. How did we get to this?

For starters, some managers expected it and even demanded it. But this is old stuff. I have known many who clearly and openly stated ‘I expect you to answer my e-mail within 4 hours’. I remember vividly a particularly highly paid super leader of a highly complex organization, admittedly with an ego highly hyper-developed. All his direct reports were terrified. I am talking many moons ago. So, yes, there were, and are, leaders expecting this.

But then, the smartphone came in. They (we) don’t need to be that vocal now. All they (we) have to do is to fire emails, or texts, at 2 am, or every hour, or half an hour, so that the world knows that they (we) are active, ‘at the helm’, hard workers and committed corporate citizens. Nobody needs to say respond. People just do, because everybody is online anyway, so the circle perpetuates itself.

This tale of villainous bosses and heroe employees looks today increasingly rubbish. When humankind walks around looking down, bended towards a screen, and a sophisticated and overpriced watch can bip you every few seconds with an alert, friend’s text, a news alert, or your pulse, the old blame game does not hold anymore. We are all victims. We all are villains.

Imposed bans on ‘hours of email’ or weekends blackout are increasingly dated, if not absurd. Many people want to do work emails on weekends so that they can feel ‘free’ on Monday morning, For those, the slavery is the prohibition.

Today, the individual needs to lead the on and off switch. Always on is bad. Always off is bad. Maybe. You find out. (But, as leader, what you do or not, is not just personal, it has implications as a role model).

The work-life balance today and the one just a very few years ago have little to do with each other. The dichotomy concept does not make sense anymore. The question is not that balance anymore. The only question, one that the new young generations seem to be rather proficient at, is, what kind of Life.

Perhaps the  best we can do for the next generations is to understand their dreams. They are not the same as our grown up dreams. OK, I am speaking for myself.

Then, if we can, facilitate the journey. Yes, the dream journey is very personal, but we can sense what can help or not. The Brexit situation is a total betrayal of the dreams of the British youth. They may never forget.

If I could, I would send a message to these youth. Don’t defer the dreams.

Here is a poem by  Langston Hughes that always makes me think ,again and again.

What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore—
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over—
like a syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.
Or does it explode?

No idea why, with age, my dreams increase. I am not talking night time. My fitbit tells me that all sort of things happen during the night. There are peaks and valleys. And dreams. But the daytime ones are unnoticed by the device.

Not deferring dreams. I don’t know if I could have a better wish for everybody in this 2019

PS. Daily Thoughts occasionally crosses these borders. I know. Weird

On one side, taxes are good, big government, social welfare, fighting for social justice and social mobility, human rights, women rights, pro-abortion, pro gay marriage, pro LGBT, piss off bankers, pro immigration, diversity and inclusion, and transgender education in schools. Ah, climate change is big and a green world is a super super priority.

On the other side, not to abortion, any, individual achievement, ‘there is no such a thing as society’, taxes are bad, government to the minimum, freedom of the individual, traditional family, piss off transgender education in schools (trans what?),  low taxes, no immigrants.  Ah, and climate change not sure, really, overrated at least, and green  world, well, I am already doing my recycling.

I have no idea which side I am anymore. I have been offered every single day a polarized, binary, Manichean world, and I’m am supposed to tick all the boxes to ‘belong’.

I am of an age that this polarization annoys me enormously, but I can navigate. The new generations are offered a package. Package One or Package Two.

The problem is that there is an insidious,  cognitive halo effect that is unconscious. If you care for the environment and social justice, great. Automatically you will be pro-abortion and big taxes. I have never understood what abortion and taxes have to do with each other, or pro LGBT and climate change for that matter.

If you defend the traditional family and declare yourself pro-life, you must surely want no taxes and think that climate change is a hoax.

Try to choose the bits you want and you’ll find yourself orphan.

Sad that, if you vote, you’ll need to choose the less-evil.

Polarity is the new slavery of the mind.

A few days ago, I went to a conference. It’s unusual for me these days because I have close to zero  time. Public conferences are for me hiding places. I am there unapologetically anti-social, love sitting at the back and having  as my single duty for the day to utter a solemn ‘with milk please’ to the waiter in the coffee table outside . The best conference is the one where I don’t talk. Yes, I am talking about me, in case my friends and colleagues may wonder.

I went to that conference. It was a long drive form home. Even better. Even more monastic. I arrived early. There was a table selling books from the speakers of the day. I was browsing then when a patriarchal looking man in his fifties approached me from the back, muttering something.

This was the dialogue:

Patriarch: Oh, hello, mm, looking at the books?
Me: (Saw his badge, he was one of the speakers and one of the books on the table had his name). Oh, yes, well, looks interesting.
Patriarch: Oh, well, this is me. (And he reached into his pocket and gave me a business card. He then repeated) this is me.
Me: Oh, thanks, very nice meeting you (now I am reaching into my pocked). Here is my business card.
Patriarch: Mmm, grr, no, mmm, err, don’t… don’t get business cards. (And stepped back a few centimetres so not to be too close to my hand and my business card).
Me: Oh, well, in that case, have yours back.

The patriarch transfigured himself with disbelief and obvious incredulity, looking at the young student minding the table (who by now exhibited a barely restrained smile) for a sign of something, maybe sympathy, maybe call security, I don’t know, and walked away muttering undecipherable sounds.

The funny thing is that it all happened fast and I did not give any thoughts to my behaviour. It just happened. Afterwards I thought I had been a bit inpolite with the patriarch. But my Bullshit Detection System (that sits somewhere in the amygdala of the hippocampus, completely out of reach from the cortex) did not think so at the time.

Then I went to my seat. At the back. Even the stream of platitudes that came from some big  name presenters ‘ who had been in CNN and CNBC’, showing meant-to-be-clever slides with last century data, did not bother me.

The patriarch was still giving cards at the break, looking very serious and confident, enjoying himself and polishing his ego with enormous care.

Back to the motorway, there was rain.

What is authenticity? For starters, a very nice word. One of these that we love to attach as a command: ‘by the way, be authentic, you have to be authentic’.

So what’s the opposite to being authentic? Being a fake, I suppose. There is the authentic Rolex and the fake Rolex. There you are. Simple.

Do I have several versions of authenticity? It sounds like a silly question. A fragrant contradiction with the fake non-fake categories.  But Erving Goffman (1922-1982),  a key figure in Sociology and Psychology, told us that we have ‘persona’. As in the old Greek theater concept of mascara (The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life , 1956) We present ourselves with prosopon like the ancient Greek actors wearing different masks (mascara) to express different emotions.

What’s my mascara for today?, we could ask. Is the real me the obviously kind and helpful that morning or the irritated and intolerant the same afternoon. OK, I hear the ‘It’s Both Brigade’ (there is always a ‘It’s Both Brigade’ near you)

And why on earth am I entering in this philosophical discussion? Don’t we have ‘in business’ better things to do?

OK, just finishing here.

If authenticity has to do with truth, I love this line from The New York Times columnist and author (latest great book ‘The Second Mountain’): ‘The hard  part of intellectual life is separating what is true from what will get you liked’.

If according to American Justice Potter Stewart ‘you know when you see it’ (he did not know the threshold between obscenity and pornography but claimed he would know when he saw it), then you may know you  have been authentic when you have created a bit of restlessness and dislike. Translation, not  telling people  what they want  to hear.

‘Need of being liked’ is a personality treat. It percolates life and you find it all over the place. Certainly in some leaders. But wearing the mascara of being liked all the time is bound to compromise the truth. Being liked may bear a big authenticity cost.

I think that, as many times in human affairs, we are close to the reality when we know or express the negative. We often know more (and are able to express better) of what we don’t want than what we want. Anti-something is easier than pro-something. Maybe, just maybe, we are very authentic when we have found out that people did not like it.

Not that I prescribe being dis-liked.