Tag: leadership

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Power & Glory

Most people are uncomfortable with the exercise of authority and they usually resent those who do.   Lord Acton’s observation about the corrupting nature of power still applies.  (“Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men.”

Nevertheless, establishing order requires authority and w/o basic order, nothing much gets done.  Power need not be overly coercive and the most effective leaders are those who welcome the participation of other.    I have written on this subject on many occasions.  But sometimes you come to a bottom line where a decision must be made.   In those times, a leader who refuses to make the hard decisions is shirking his duty. 


  Leaders who refuse to lead are the leading cause of unhappiness in the workplace, IMO.   Worst of all are the guys who won’t lead, but like to boss.  Next worse are the ones who hide among the rules.  Rules apply to most situations and all routine decisions.  You need leadership for those times when they don’t. Leadership requires the exercise of judgment, which will always seem arbitrary to those who disagree.   

I learned an interesting lesson from an exercise in my leadership seminar last year.  Reference this link for details.  I don’t think it was the one intended.   I was chosen as a group leader by a more or less random and unfair procedure.   In the exercise, points were distributed based on rank but were also earned by individual and group effort.  I determined that our group could score lots more points if we cooperated and with my two leadership colleagues, we created a system that distributed the points fairly.  The facilitators were surprised and (I think) a little chagrined that we were scoring so many points w/o dissention.   We soon got dissention, when another group used the rules to seize power, despite the fact that it cost us all points.   The lesson I took was that the essential task of power is to maintain it.   Nasty and Machiavellian as it might seem, the simple fact is that you cannot accomplish your goals (even if your goal is to pass along power to someone else) if you are deposed.  Weak leadership does nobody any good.

I am reading a book Alex gave me for Christmas called Rubicon.  It is about the fall of the Roman Republic.   The author is very talented, but he evidently doesn’t like the Romans.  His description characterizes them almost as an infestation that infected and ultimately destroyed the ancient cultures of the Mediterranean.   Their virtues of perseverance, bravery and patriotism are seen as merely enablers of their cruelty.   A couple months ago I finished a book called Empires of Trust, which left almost the opposite impression.  I have been reading Roman history for a long time.  They are both right.   The Romans established the greatest Empire in history and brought order, a degree of justice & prosperity to the lands of Europe, Africa and Asia that surrounded the Mediterranean and now are thirty-six separate nations.  They were brave, resolute, consequent and practical.  They were also cruel, mendacious, superstitious and capricious.  In other words, they displayed all the usual attributes of power.

I admire the Romans, with all their faults.   Our world is very much based on theirs.  Our American constitution embodies many of the lessons of Rome, only better.  I believe in progress and that sometimes we can learn from history.   We learned from the Romans and we can be better than they were because we stand on their shoulders.  The fatal flaw of the Roman organization was their messy succession procedure.  Augustus established the principate (became emperor) through stealth and maintained it with the fiction that he was merely the first among equals.   He is recognized as a political genius and a great man for his achievement and it was probably the only way to pull it off.   But it avoided some of the responsibly of power and made each transition an unpredictable adventure which often involved murder and the exercise of military muscle.

The Romans were hated and justifiably feared because of their power.  They deprived the people of the Mediterranean of political freedom, what we would today call national self-determination.   If you annoyed the Romans, you paid a high price.   But the Roman Empire provided a great deal of liberty, tolerance and personal autonomy.  (Of course all ancient societies were horrible and oppressive by modern standards.   Remember that progress thing.  But compared with the available alternatives, you were probably better off living in the Roman Empire than anyplace else in the world at the time.)

Above – Romans perfected the dome and pioneered the use of concrete in buildings. Most of my ancestors were among the barbarians who destroyed the Empire and I imagine my grandfather many generations removed scratching himself in the Forum trying w/o success to figure out how all that water got to the fountains.  The Empire fell in 476 in the West (although it hung on until 1453 in Constantinople) but the idea of Rome persisted and the whole world is heir to their achievement.  You can see it in architecture from Shanghai to Seattle.  Washington looks a lot like a Roman city.  The Romans were not very original, but they were experts at assimilating and developing ideas from a diversity of sources.  They developed what became our concepts of rule of law, citizenship, the concept of a republic and separation of powers, so we Americans are especially indebted to them.   Our Founding Fathers knew what we sometimes forget.   

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Learning Organizations

The U.S. Marines are a learning organization.   During the year I was lucky enough to serve with them in Iraq, I was continually amazed at how fast information spread among them.   Then it would mutate, improve and become better adapted to the situation at hand.   The USMC skill and alacrity as a learning organizing was a necessary and key component of our success in Anbar province in 2006-8.   They adapted to changing circumstances and overcame obstacles.    

Like all greatness, the USMC success is based on apparent contradiction. The Marines manage simultaneously to be hierarchical and egalitarian.   The also have very strict rules and at the same time very flexible execution.  The commander’s intent is very important even if it turns out that the specific instructions did not survive first contact.  Finally, virtually all Marines are intensely interested in helping other Marines, although this is sometimes masked by their tough exteriors.  Officers take responsibility and interest in their men.   They spend a lot of time mixing and talking with them.   This is one of the things that make them a learning organization.   A lot of information passes informally.  The leader, in one sense, provided the organizational connective tissue. Anyway, scholars have studied Marine leadership for literally centuries and I know there is a lot more, but those are the lessons I took and the ones I think apply generally.

The Marine organization I saw in action in Iraq contradicts many of the stereotypes we hear about them.  I realize, however,  that if I say that I want my organization to be more like the Marines, most people will conjure up an image far different from the one I envision.   So let me fall back on some other ideas that have stood the test of time and are similar but civilian.  

I read In Search of Excellence when I started my MBA in Minneapolis in 1983.  It is hard to recall now what a ray of hope that book was for me and my classmates.  We were coming off the terrible end of the 1970s and had recently suffered double digit unemployment, double digit inflation and mortgage interest rates that reached 20%.  Pundits told us that America could not longer compete in the world.  We were doomed to become the hinterland for the Japanese juggernaut.   Our business models were defunct, they told us, and we better get used to being second rate, or at best a clumsy dysfunctional giant.  This wasn’t how it turned out, but the future didn’t seem very promising when the book came out in 1982. 

In Search of Excellence came along and told us about American companies doing excellent things and succeeding and it told us how.  In some ways the ideas were revolutionary, but in most ways they represented the traditional American adaptively. It was our American wisdom encapsulated.  This is one reason In Search of Excellence became one of the best selling business books of all time and why it remains in the core of classics on management and organization.  

The book identifies eight characteristics of excellent organizations.

  1. A bias for action, active decision making – ‘getting on with it’.
  2. Close to the customer – learning from the people served by the business.
  3. Autonomy and entrepreneurship – fostering innovation and nurturing ‘champions’.
  4. Productivity through people- treating rank and file employees as a source of quality.
  5. Hands-on, value-driven – management philosophy that guides everyday practice – management showing its commitment.
  6. Stick to the knitting – stay with the business that you know.
  7. Simple form, lean staff – some of the best companies have minimal HQ staff.
  8. Simultaneous loose-tight properties – autonomy in shop-floor activities plus centralized values. 

We can dress them up in terms more appropriate to 2009, but I think, precisely because they were distillations of successful practices, they still form the core of what a good organization should be like.   The only one I would explain is # 6.  It sounds less adaptive than it is.  The authors did not mean and I don’t think we want to stay with what you are doing now.   They were simply admonishing leaders not to just jump into the latest fads or spread themselves too thin with disjointed priorities.   They wrote the book at the tail end of the great merger mania, when giant conglomerates were making it difficult to identify core values or core competencies.  

I think the longer and updated version would be to branch out from core competencies rather than being distracted by every new thing that comes along.  I also think this should be modified with a little more systems thinking, but overall it stands.

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The Tao of Leadership

In a classic episode of M*A*S*H, Father Mulcahy grows some sweet corn.  After a summer of hard work and anticipation, he harvests the crop, turns it over to the chow hall cook and everybody looks forward to the hometown taste of fresh roasted corn.  But the cook has removed the corn from the cob and creamed it into the kind of slop he usually dispenses.  Insulted by the complaints, he replies indignantly, “I was just trying to be helpful. Next Fourth of July you can eat it on the cob for all I care.” 

Above is General Grant in front of the Capitol.  Grant was an unassuming man.  He could easily pass unnoticed.  They said that the only way you could tell if Grant was around was that things started to happen.   Grant was a great general, but he failed at everything else.  Is it enough to be really good at one thing? 

Leadership can be like that.   Sometimes it takes more time and effort to make a mush than to do the effective thing.   It is usually a good idea to lighten up and consider whether your problems are because of instead of in spite of your best efforts, but often the hardest thing to do is nothing.  Most of us have a kind of piece-work mentality.  We think we earn our money by how much we do.  Leadership often means that we add the most value by what we choose to leave undone.

A leadership technique that seems to work is to “get lost,” just be inaccessible.   I know that this goes against every fiber of the stay-connected zeitgeist, but sometimes you add no value and generally when you add no value in an organization, you are sucking up value by getting in the way.   At times when the problem is best solved by someone else, but you know that others may want to consult or defer to your judgment, the best response is to get lost. Doing nothing, BTW, is a very proactive strategy and is the appropriate one only in some situations.   It doesn’t mean you just sneak off to play golf, although in some cases that works by chance.  There are some places where things progress a lot better when the boss is not around and I am not talking about prescribed non-action here.

Of course, the whole technique presupposes that you have already built an environment of trust and autonomy, so that colleagues and subordinates will not merely cower in fear and indecision until your triumphant return.  And that is the big caveat. You are not allowed to reverse the decision for trivial causes and you can never get angry that it was made w/o you.  If you are prone to the character flaws that lead to these behaviors, you need to stay away from this technique, but recognize that your organization will never work at top performance because you won’t allow it.  And stop complaining about all the work you have to do or about your incompetent subordinates. That is the world you created by making yourself indispensable.   Live with it or change it, but in either case shut up about it.

And as the great Charles de Gaulle said, “The graveyards are full of indispensable men.”

I liked the “Book of the Tao” since I first discovered it when I was around twenty.  I bought a book at a used book shop for $0.25 called “The Wisdom of China and India.”  It was published in 1943.  They would never publish such a book today, since it lumped together these two great but very disparate cultures and presumed to aggregate the collected wisdom of most of Asia in one volume.  But it was a great book and I still have it.  The binding disintegrated when I gave it to Alex to read last week, but a little duct tape postponed its day of reckoning.

The philosopher Lao Tzu has some sage (really) advice on leadership and since this wisdom has persisted through various iterations and hundreds of generations, maybe there is something to it. For example:

“The Tao abides in non-action, yet nothing is left undone.  If kings and lords observed this, the ten thousand things would develop naturally.”

or

“Nothing is softer than water, yet nothing can be better at overcoming the hard.”

and

“A leader is best when people barely know he exists, when his work is done, his aim fulfilled, they will say: we did it ourselves.”

If you translated this wisdom into more modern terms, you would say that this sort of leadership taps into the intelligence and imagination of the people.  It makes them partners.  This is especially valuable when innovations are needed.  (Please refer to my posting re management gurus.) Centralized, directive leadership can almost never identify and develop innovation because whether they mean to or not, they bring the power of the organizing to bear to defend the status quo or permit only incremental and usually ineffective change.   That is the paradox that when you abide in non-action, you leave nothing undone.  I would refine it a little.   Leadership’s task is to create conditions favorable for progress and innovation, but it does not directly create anything.  To employ my favorite analogy, it is like when I use proper silviculture on my forests.  The thinning, fertilizing, planning etc allow the trees to grow better, but I cannot micromanage wood or leaf production.    BTW – Below is the exchange from M*A*S*H: 

Father Mulcahy: Don’t I know it. All week I’ve been dreaming of getting butter on my cheeks, juice on my shirt, and a niblet wedged between two molars.
[walks up to the table]
Father Mulcahy: Where is the corn?
Cpl. Igor Straminsky: You’re looking at it. The mushy stuff.
Father Mulcahy: You… You creamed it!
[on the verge of tears]
Father Mulcahy: You… you ninny!
Cpl. Igor Straminsky: [everybody yells at Igor] I was just trying to be helpful. Next Fourth of July you can eat it on the cob for all I care.

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Learning From the Management Gurus

If I could read only one magazine a week, it would be “The Economist” because it has such a variety of topics written in a style I enjoy. I have subscribed to the Economist since I was in graduate school and it has contributed as much to my education as my grad school experience.  Actually, all education, formal and otherwise, builds what went before.   I was reminded of that today with this Economist article on Fredrick Taylor. 

I met Taylor (figuratively) in grad-school when I studied operations research.   He is the father of “scientific management” and while I think the strict application of his theory is probably a bad thing (Lenin was a Taylor fan), he did start the systematic study of management processes that has done a lot to create the modern prosperity we now enjoy.   Peter Drucker wrote that Taylor was, “the first man in history who did not take work for granted, but looked at it and studied it. His approach to work is still the basic foundation”.    That was worth something.  

I don’t like the practical and complete application of the theories.   Even if you don’t know Taylor, you know his work.  He is the time management guy, the one who set loose all those guys with clipboards and stopwatches to measure workers.   “In our scheme, we do not ask the initiative of our men. We do not want any initiative. All we want of them is to obey the orders we give them, do what we say, and do it quick.”  That assumes you don’t want innovation or initiative. This was the frightening world of “Modern Times” or “Metropolis” and in the early 20th Century the trends didn’t look good.  Fortunately trends never continue and we got back to a more human and humane system, at least in theory.  Humans don’t work like machines and everybody is better off if everybody is thinking.

That’s Taylor on the left. I will let those who care enough read re the other stars of management.  Here are the links:
Max Weber, Richard Rumelt, Warren Buffett,  Richard Pascale, Alfred Sloan, Peter Senge, Laurence Peter, Henry Mintzberg, Peter Drucker, Geert Hofstede, Abraham Maslow, Douglas McGregor, Gary Hamel, Michael Porter,  Dale Carnegie, Igor Ansoff, Warren Bennis, Frank and Lillin GilbrethC.K. Prahalad.

Of course every real-world leader needs to develop methods that fit with his own strengths, circumstances and proclivities. The management theorists can inform choices, but they cannot make them for you (anyway many of the gurus are sometimes a bit like Harold Hill in the “Music Man.”) I learned a lot from reading the theories and then trying them out in practice.  I read most of Peter Drucker’s books and I had several of Tom Peters’ books.  In Search of Excellence” had a lot of influence on me because I read that when I was in grad-school and it was one of my first books of that kind.  I must have spent thousands of dollars on leadership/management books. BTW – I also consider the reading of biographies as a type of leadership training.   You learn from the experience of others.

I found Maslow’s hierarchy of needs a very useful construct when I was in Iraq.  As Maslow points out, you can’t accomplish much until you meet basic safety and security needs.   All the other things were just not possible out of that sequence.  That insight alone was probably studying him.    I am not saying that we should apply these ideas w/o modification, but they are very useful.   Most of the Marine officers I talked with in Iraq were familiar with Maslow and they got it right too. “The Economist” reminded me of something I had forgotten.   I read Henry Mintzberg in grad-school, but not since.  But I had internalized something he wrote, and paraphrased it for many years, probably because it fit in well with my personal preferences.   Mintzberg was very different from Taylor’s machine like idea of focusing on task.  The good managers he studied jumped from topic to topic.   According to Mintzberg, good managers thrive “on interruptions and more often than not disposes of items in ten minutes or less. Though he may have 50 projects going, all are delegated.” In a study of British managers at the time, he found that they worked without interruption for more than half an hour only “about once every two days”. He also found that senior managers spent more than three-quarters of their time in oral communication. He concluded, “the job of managing is fundamentally one of processing information, notably by talking and especially by listening.” To be a good manager you have to be a good listener.”

Management is not the same as other sorts of work.  That is why when the guy who seems to be the most serious worker in the place is put in charge, things often go wrong and why self-described hard workers often think their boss isn’t doing anything.    Making connections and understanding the whole becomes more and more important as you get farther along and the value of actual “work” declines.  It becomes more important to know what to do and work through others.

The management gurus tend to put leadership and managment in the same boat.  There are differences.  I think it is easier to study and define management.  In Taylor’s world, leadership is only management and even that is essentially surrendered to the system.  In a really well designed scientific management system managers are more like administrators.  Leadership is needed to set new courses and create change.  If you are not going anywhere, you don’t need leadership to get you there.

It is almost impossible to describe precisely what a good leader does that makes him/her a good leader, or when you describe it, it sounds trivial.  He just knows what to do.  Things just work better and more smoothly when some people are around.  And of course there are some leaders who are just creators of useless effort.  Life doesn’t have to be that hard. Maybe the management gurus can put it in better words than I can.

The lesson I took was that leaders working ostensibly hard behind their desks are not really working very effectively and if things are going wrong, it is more likely BECAUSE of rather than in spite of their best efforts.  Working hard on the wrong thing is worse than doing nothing at all.  Leadership above all means making the right choices.   Besides, as RR said, it is true that hard work never killed anybody, but I figure why take the chance?   Maybe they should waste a little time walking around and talking to the people doing the work, and read “The Economist” every Saturday.         

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Using Time Wisely

Not many people are around here on the day after Thanksgiving.   I like to work on such days.  Volunteering for such duty makes me popular and the quiet time gives me a chance to think.  This is my most productive activity.

Below is the Commerce Building.  When it was finished in 1932 it was the largest office building in the world.

I read the Seven Habits of Highly Effective People almost twenty years ago.  It was one of the books that most influenced my life.   There is not very much really original in the book.  Stephen Covey’s contribution is that he manages to put things we know we should do into understandable chunks.  I won’t go further into detail.  Suffice it to say that it gives practical methods to live a principle centered life and puts character development above the tricks most self-help books teach you to get ahead. 

One of the parts I found most useful was the section on time management.   I am not talking about making lists and accomplishing goals.   Covey talks about doing the right things and taking control of the process.  He divides tasks on a four quadrant chart.   Some things are urgent and important.  Some are important but not urgent.   Others are urgent but not important and the last quadrant has things that are not urgent or important. 

It is easy to get stuck doing the things that are urgent, whether they are important or not.  Can you resist picking up a ringing phone, even when you are having an important talk with someone in person sitting in front of your desk?   But the urgent is often not important and the urgency of many important events results from lack of anticipation and planning.  The place where you should spend most of your time is among the tasks that are important but not urgent.  (Preventing the fire is more effective than the urgent need to put it out, but which seems more heroic?)  This will put you in charge of your life and help you avoid lurching from one urgent task to another w/o the time to do them well.  It will also help you avoid doing many “urgent” things altogether.

BTW – I am writing all this from memory.   If the details are not perfect, I don’t care.   I had a chance to meet Mr. Covey a few years ago.  He told me that the ideas were meant to be internalized and changed to fit particular circumstance and personalities.  Ideas are like virus that live & reproduce only in human hosts.  They mutate and adapt.  The ideas I was “infected” with twenty years ago are now uniquely mine.  My experience has customized them and these are the lessons I took.

Below is Dept of Agriculture building completed in 1930.

I rarely agonize about decisions.  People who like me say that is because I just know the right thing to do.  Detractors see me as shallow, flippant & insouciant.   I believe the truth is that I can make quicker decisions because I have thought through similar scenarios and tried to apply values & integrate experience and I did this BEFORE I was faced with the urgent decision currently at hand.  Contemplation is an activity that fits squarely into the important but not urgent category. That does not mean that I make the right decision, BTW, but I am neither flippant (usually) nor do I just know what to do by some mystical process.

Covey and many other leadership thinkers tell us that is what we are supposed to do, but they always warn that other people might not like it (hence the flippant moniker) and they will give us a hard time for “not doing real work.”  All of our great achievements are created twice: first and most importantly in our minds and then only later in the practical world.   The intellectual capital is usually the most valuable, but others can see only the practical creation or activity.

There is a story about a man who has a serious plumbing problem. He calls the plumber who tells him he can fix the problem and it will cost $100.  The plumber goes down and whacks one of the pipes and everything begins to move as it should.   When he asks for his $100, the customer is irate.  “All you did was whack the pipe and it took only a couple seconds,” he says.  “I want an itemized bill.”  The plumber gives him the bill which reads: whacking pipe – $.05; knowing where and how to whack pipe – $99.95. 

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Education Options after the Leadership Seminar

Below – Washington Metro has nice vaulted ceilings.

Below – School of Athens by Raphael, also vaulted ceilings.  Both roads to learning (sorry for the hyperbole).

It has never been easier to learn but the options are daunting because there are so many of them.   I recently completed the State Department’s leadership seminar, which left me a little disappointed.   But my education is my responsibility and I will carry on.    There were some lectures I wished to have heard and when I got home I got some of them – on my computer.  

Below – oak tree in fall colors

For example, I wished we had talked a little about   prospect theory and its effects on decision making.   Prospect theory explains a lot re why we make what seem like illogical decisions even when we have the needful information.  So when I got home I listened to Nobel Prize winning economist Daniel Kahneman, who along with Amos Tversky originated the theory.   You can watch it too at this link.   At the same place, you will find a talk by Peter Bernstein re risk analysis.  Bernstein wrote one of my favorite books, “Against the Gods” the story of risk. 

You could always just read to all the books, but it is more effective to learn on a variety of fronts.   Reading reinforced by the visual or audio of a lecture is great and online even allows for interaction.   There are situations where audio works best.   I have regularly listened to audio programs for more than twenty years.  A long drive can almost be like a college course.   My sloppy way of listening enhances learning.  I tend to let them play again or pop in repeats.    Leadership and management programs are particularly appropriate for audio programs, IMO. 

Online education opens many more possibilities and variety.   What it lacks is the social aspect of education.  Discussing ideas with others helps fix them in the mind, sort out the pluses and minuses and make the learners see the bigger picture.   You cannot replace that.   I think that is why self educated people often have an uneven knowledge base.   The autodidact chooses what he wants to emphasize and will inevitably introduce bias.   Online learning exacerbates this, since you can find what you want very precisely and not come into even superficial contact with anything else.   The advantages outweigh the costs, IMO, but it is something to be aware of.

Other great sources of education in the Washington area are think tanks and the Smithsonian.   Most sponsor regular lectures and seminars on a variety of topics and they are usually not only free but you often get a free lunch.   These have the advantage of being in a social setting.   You can talk to people before and after the lecture and just being there in person adds something to the educational experience.   I took advantage of these things when I was last in Washington & will do it again.

Most learning isn’t done in formal settings and FS provides more opportunities than most jobs.   You learn most from your colleagues and fellow citizens and just by observing events and things.   In other words, you learn from experience, but learning is not automatic.   It is great to notice the trees and take time to smell the roses, but it is important actively to seek out and think about information and lessons from experience otherwise it just washes over you, runs into the mental sewers and is lost.   Socrates said that an unexamined life is not worth living.   I think we could extend that to say that an unexamined experience is not worth having.

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Generations (Leadership Seminar Day 9)

We talked today re managing various generations in the workforce.   Postwar baby boomers are still the most numerous of government employees, but there are still a very few from the WWII veteran generation, a growing number of generation X and the up and coming millennial.  All my kids are Millennial.  They sometimes call this generation the baby boom echo generation since these are mostly the kids of us boomers.   Most of us thought the idea was useful but that it was easy to overdo the generation analysis.    There are some general patterns.  For example, the veterans as a group are not very comfortable with technology, while the millennials are digital natives.   But some of it just depends on where people are in their careers.   The literature we read on the topic was a couple years old and the people at my table, boomers all but one, agreed that we were starting to look more like the veteran generation, with concerns about retirement and leaving a legacy. 

Generations make a difference in the government, since such as big percentage of us are or soon will be eligible for retirement.    We have to plan for a big turnover that has already begun and will continue for around ten years.  Besides the general challenge of simply hiring so many new workers, making sure the experience and knowledge is passed along.

There was an interesting lecture on possible futures.   This one was called the “Seven Revolutions” and it analyzed trends such as population, resource shortages, tech innovation, movement of data, global economic integration, conflicts and the challenge of governance.   The last one of these refers to the increasing inability of governments to cope with or even understand the other trends mentioned.

I won’t go into details.   Most of it is available at http://gsi.csis.org

Predicting the future is difficult.  When you think re all the predictions of the past it is easy to see the problem.    Think of all the apocalyptical predictions of the late 1960s and 1970s.   According to those guys we were supposed to have starvation in the streets during the 1980s and even global cooling by now.   “Soylent Green” was set in 2022.   I don’t think that future is very likely anymore, but it scared me at the time.    I think the trouble with predictions is that we have to project from what we have today.   Many of what will make the future better than the past has not been invented yet, or at least not developed for their eventual uses.    Developments like nanotech, biotech and alternative energies are just at past the starting line.   We really cannot make accurate projections. 

We cannot predict the details of the future, but we can think about possible scenarios and how we might react.   Tomorrow we have scenario simulations.  It should be fun.  

I got one good ironic saying.   In government we always talk about the dangers of stove piping in the organization.    Somebody renamed this.  They are now “cylinders of excellence.”   We sometimes talk like that.  I am not entirely sure it was supposed to be a joke.

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Leadership Seminar Day 8

I don’t have a real theme for what I learned in the seminar today.   I enjoyed it more than playing games in W. Virginia.    I will just list a few take away snippets.    Most are not new but it is good to think about them again.  Below, BTW, is a unrelated picture, again from my tree farm.  This is the last of my pictures from my visit yesterday.  I have posted them all now.

We took all did a survey that divided us into three categories:  conservers, pragmatists and originators.  The names imply what they are.   Conservers are careful and circumspect.   Pragmatist do what they think will work and are flexible.   Originators are change catalysts.    Each has weaknesses that are the mirror images of the strengths.  I fall right on the edge between pragmatists and originators, a little into the originator and I am not surprised.   I understand that I sometimes can be a little too enthusiastic, which is why I always try to make sure that I have conservers on my team.   That was the lesson.   A team is strong to the extent that it embodies diversity.   The team is stronger than the sum of its parts because members fill in for each others’ weaknesses.   It is like a diverse portfolio.   I remember reading “Founding Brothers” by Joseph Ellis.    Each of the founders had his flaws and strengths.   The flaws could have ruined anybody as an individual.  Together, however, they made a great team and produced a great result.    The other lesson is that they didn’t have to TRY to work together.    In fact their disagreements and even their animosity made the result better.   It is uncomfortable to have disagreements, but it can produce better outcomes. 

I also thought about “Decision Traps”.  That is a great short book about how to come to decisions.    The author talked about group decisions.   It is kind of a Goldilocks and the three bears situation.  If you have too much diversity and discussion, you never reach a conclusion.  If you have too little, you get groupthink and a rush to judgment.   You need the just right, but that is easier said than done.  Beyond that, the longer a group stays together the more group think comes in.   Finally, I thought about “The Wisdom of Crowds” and how the author says that you can often improve group decisions by introducing individuals with LESS expertise but also different viewpoints.    

When working to foster useful change, you work with a combination of pushing and removing obstacles.  It usually takes more energy to push than to clear the path and remove obstacles.   The book that helped me understand this process was “The Fifth Discipline.”

I count the seminar successful to the extent that it makes participants think and I thought back to a lot of the decision literature I had read over the years.  I was happy with the seminar today.

We also talked about the Embassy of the future and the differences between risk management and risk -avoidance.   I thought those were interesting subjects, but I didn’t have any strong take-aways.  You can download the PDF file re Embassy of the Future  at this link. 

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Unhappy Camper in WVA (Seminar Day 7)

Explanations of pictures are below.  Mixing the captions in the text was too confusing.

I am not very happy with this offsite part of the leadership seminar.   IMO this week has been not about leadership as much as about negotiation 101 or inclusiveness 102.   These are very good things in and of themselves, but much of what has been presented is the kind of things I have heard in my self-improvement and management tapes I listened to in my car years ago.  And they are things we all have practiced for 20+ years.   The review is okay, but we don’t need too much of it.

On the plus side, I am learning a lot from my colleagues and have benefited by sharing their experiences.  But I have to say that my high hopes for the seminar itself have not been met. 

We learned a lot of management techniques, but as I mentioned above they were usually ones I had learned before.  I would like the course to be more about leadership.   Leaders are what we are supposed to be.  We were told that we were supposed to transition from management to leadership.  I think the best way to learn about leadership would be by using experience of our State colleagues and case study method using examples from successful, and unsuccessful, leadership from history.    

I would also like more State Department specific information.   Surely we could do that.  Maybe we will get that next week back at FSI.  We have some good speakers on the schedule. Here in WVA we are assembling puzzles and practicing techniques of mediation or empathic listening.  I don’t find much use in practicing these techniques w/o context or value content.   It is great to be open, but I think we have to be more judgmental.  Leadership means making judgments & choices and setting priorities.   It is not merely employing Dale Carnegie techniques to win friends and influence people.    We need to persuade and change minds, not just take opinion polls.  Sometimes – often – the needful choices will be unpopular.  We need to talk more about that aspect of leadership.  

 

Don’t get me wrong.   My experience with participatory leadership has been good.  I believe in it and truly practice it.  Working with others and having them support me has been the key to my success.   Lord knows I could never have done anything by myself.  But sometimes the buck stops with the person in charge and it is our job to take the responsibility when it falls to us, not spread it out as far as possible. 

I have the opportunity to walk around during lunch breaks and listen to a Roman history course on my I-Pod.  You can learn from history and I enjoy examples of leadership – good and bad – and the consequences.  It is interesting when you study history and look at leaders to see that it is very rare for a leader to be well thought of and/or remain in power for a long time.  It says something about the episodic nature of leadership opportunities.  Solon left town after he made his laws.  Themistocles was exiled soon after the victory over the Persians.   In more modern times, Churchill was tossed out of office after WWII and Harry Truman left office with an abysmally low approval rating.   Of course these are much bigger deals than our small leadership challenges, but I think we little guys can learn a lot by looking at the big challenges, choices and their consequences. 

We had modules on coaching.   I think it is a good idea to coach employees and I recognize that I do it very often.  But the coaching we learned about in class was (my complaint again) very non-confrontational and value free.   I remember reading a biography of Vince Lombardi.   I think it was called “When Pride Still Mattered.”  Vince Lombardi was a pretty good coach, but I never got the impression he engaged in much of this touchy-feely stuff we are learning.    The Lombardi quote I recall is “The difference between a successful person and others is not a lack of strength, not a lack of knowledge, but rather a lack of will.”  I didn’t hear anything like that in our coaching session.

Anyway, I ranted a little about these sorts of things in class, just like I am ranting a little here.  I am not sure the instructors liked me very much by the end of the day and I don’t think it did any good.   Once again I get to be the skunk at the barbeque.   I don’t like to do it, but I guess I don’t mind either.

About the Pictures

1 – clouds over the conference site.

2 – You can see that there is no shortage of whitetail deer.    I saw nine at this one time.   That is the most I have ever seen.  Deer numbers have risen significantly in recent years all over the eastern U.S. 

3 – I don’t think “the Woods” community is doing very well.  I saw dozens of for sale signs.   This part of West Virginia was especially hard hit by the housing downturn because high gas prices made commuting out here to/from the population centers around Washington very expensive.   But that affects mostly the older, cheaper cabins build in the 1980s.   While they are up for sale w/o lots of offers, people are building new and improved cabins, presumably with the intention of using them. 

4 & 5 – These two are forestry pictures.  What you see in the first one are wind throws of Virginia pine.   The Virginia pine is easily pushed over.   They are transition trees and not long-lasting.   I did, however, count the stump rings of a Virginia pine that was at least 47 years old.  The ones standing nearby with similar stem sizes were about as big as a twenty year old loblolly in Brunswick.    The second picture shows loblolly.  I don’t know how old these are.   They don’t grow very fast around here.  The soil is not good and this is the northern edge of the loblolly range.   This stand is no longer under real management, as you can see by the dead heads.

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Leadership & Vision (Seminar Day 6)

Below – still no pictures from today, so I used some old ones.  The first is Vienna from my 2006 visit there and the second is London Bridge, moved some years ago to Lake Havasu, Arizona from 2005.

Our leadership seminar continued along the lines of process, not content.   We learn that we should have vision and that we should be collaborative with others.    I am not sure that is always the best idea.  IMO the most important thing about a vision is that it be right and that is not always what most people see clearly. Good leaders can often see that better than most others.  That is one of the traits of good leadership.  I don’t think you can assess leadership properly if you accept that it could be content neutral.    We have to judge by where leadership is leading and how it is working.  I am learning more from my colleagues than from the course.  This is the way it often works.  One of my colleagues gave the example of the “Music Man.”  The guy in the movie (Robert Preston) has vision, but in order to get buy in from the satisfied citizens of River City he has to create an artificial problem that only he can solve.    Con-men can create compelling visions.  In fact that is one of their peculiar talents.  Many “leaders” paint an inaccurately depressing picture of current events so that they can create support for their proposed solutions.   Honest decision makers know that it is very important accurately to assess where you are before you decide where you want to go.   The saying is “describe before you prescribe.” 

If you can make a bad vision popular with scam tactics (as in the “Music Man,”) it is also true that good leadership and vision may be unpopular.  Even the best plans don’t sell themselves and you may not get “buy in” from majorities or even large numbers of people despite the fact that the end result may be good or necessary.  Change is usually perceived as risky and often painful.   It may make people openly hostile, but that is why we need leadership.    Leadership means setting priorities and making the tough choices.  Leadership is not required if conditions are stable and decisions are trivial or within routine norms;  that is just administration.   You cannot be a leader by merely following the long-stated preferences and routine procedures of the groups you ostensibly lead and you cannot lead from behind.   My criticism of the leadership course is that the instructors seem uncomfortable with the harder, less popular and maybe the tough parts of leadership. 

I agree with the emphasis of the instructors of putting people first and trying to get cooperation, but that good bias can be taken too far.   As one of my colleagues pointed out, leadership must sometimes put the mission before particular people.    People are willing to sacrifice for a good cause and sometimes they have to do that.   I don’t think we talked enough about those situations and we don’t talk enough about the sometimes scary and lonely decisions leaders must make.

All the people of the past who we consider great leaders took decisions that were deeply unpopular at the time.    It is only with the fullness of time that we have come around to seeing the wisdom of their choices.   As someone who is interested in history, I wish we had more historical examples in the course.   Our course is being held not far from Antietam that back in September 1862 saw the bloodiest single day in American history.   That is a classic case study in the results of poor and timid decisions contrasted with bold ones.    McClellan had twice as many men as Lee and he had captured Lee’s battle plan, yet he still managed to produce only an inconclusive stalemate.  I think it would be useful to consider that George McClellan was very popular with both his troops and the public.   His decisions were broadly popular and particularly wrong.   On the other hand, Lincoln’s decisions almost cost him the election in 1864 AND that was considering votes only with the half of the country that had not taken up arms against his leadership (a fairly good measure of disagreement).    An opinion poll that included the whole country certainly would have given him a very low approval rating.

One highlight of the day was when three of my colleagues formed a panel to discuss transformational diplomacy.    They had been talking about it in a side discussion and shared it because it was of general interest.   (Such things excite us.  I guess we are indeed a pack of nerds.)  Most of us agreed that the ideas behind transformational diplomacy were good, but our class was divided about the efficacy of the program.  Some of the places that got resources had trouble absorbing them and the places that lost them suffered painful cuts.   It would have been better to ask for additional resources rather than just move priorities.   We all agreed that places like India, Brazil & China deserved more resources and diplomatic attention, but it was not a good idea to take them away from places like Germany, Spain or France, which are still very important places that matter to us even if they are pleasant, peaceful and familiar. 

One of my colleagues speculated about how the events around the Iraq war might have unfolded differently if we had sufficient diplomatic infrastructure on the ground in Germany & France to carry out strong public relations and diplomatic programs.   This was BEFORE the diplomatic transformation, but we had already lost a lot to the cuts of the 1990s and the movement of resources to the new states of the former Soviet Union.    You can only do so much with less.   We opened and staffed post in places like Kazakhstan, Latvia, Armenia and Azerbaijan w/o a bump up in resources.   I am convinced that we had significant problems with public diplomacy after 9/11 because our public diplomacy infrastructure was so decimated in the 1990s and spread too thin.   I wrote re that in an earlier post and won’t repeat it here.  Anyway, it was an interesting discussion.   

My colleagues made some comments worth writing down.   One said that vision means a leap beyond where you are – a leap of faith because it usually represents discontinuous change, not very catchy, but true.  The best line of the day was, “if you ask for infinity, you can easily settle for half of infinity.”