Leading in uncertain times (when were they not?) needs confidence. But surely not the blind activist confidence of a red-in-tooth-and-claw A-type leader? ‘Don’t just sit there, DO something!’ Sometimes useful, but often the opposite is truer: ‘Don’t just do something, SIT there’. It’s how we sit that matters, of course. Consciously, aware, patiently, selectively. Irvin Yallom says that by managing the variables of meaning and care we create increasing engagement and motivation.
It’s hard to know what to do at any given time when each of us has a partial view of an unfolding future. What’s needed is for us all to bring these partial perspectives together and create a shared and bigger picture which holds more insight and truth about what is happening – and this better picture allows us to act with more clarity. But what do we need to manage in order to make this sharing of insight happen well? Sharing, is at heart, voluntary and nuanced, so managing meaning and offering a robust care can create better circumstances for the opening up of sharing than compulsive activism.
There’s a wonderful crazy Monty Python sketch about cricket where the commentators talk of ’supreme display of inertia’ – ‘extremely well not played’ and there is something to say for masterful inactivity. If the conditions have been set and the game needs to play out, what we may need is the discipline of self-control to allow the time to be right, the constellations to align and the events to unpack. And sometimes, like a heron silently patient, the lightning-fast and perfectly-timed strike.
Yes you can- according to David Kirsh and Brent Goldfarb of the University of Maryland after studying 700 start-ups – see the short video. “Spending time and energy tweaking your business plan is a waste of resources. It’s a limited-use document that will in no way substitute for the hard work of actually building a business. You’re better off investing in your idea, your social network, finding potential investors, potential customers – the intangibles around your business that are going to make it more likely you succeed. Invest your time in any other business-building activity but working on your business plan.”
They don’t teach business planning any more on their courses (’easy to find and do on the internet’), but rather spend a lot of time helping people to think carefully about the fundamentals of the business.
I get Kirsch and Goldfarb. I used to run a business incubator and innovation centre in New Zealand, and I found business plans of some limited use – especially when talking to people like bankers and some VC’s who believe in them 
. They do provide an easy foundation for running courses on start ups as a sort of ready-made template for teaching, but generally i think your time is better spent elsewhere. This guy, Rodney Schrader does believe in them (see video) and so do many others.
Keep an open mind, then….
What is strategy about? For me, it’s about doing good. Do good for your customers, improve the quality of their lives and you will have all the business you want. Do good for your employees and collaborators and you will attract talent, create energy, engagement and loyalty. Do good for humanity and the societies around you and you will build meaning into your life and work, energise commitment and networks, and build lifelong relationships, as well as lifting your vision and seeing the broader possibilities and opportunities.
Here’s an example about doing good, this time in an MBA strategy, design and creativity course I ran at the University of Cape Town last month, where 60 students stepped up to a class assignment to have an impact for good, and in the process learn about creative teamworking, by raising over $13000 and with their own hands building a house for a family in a South African Township. Here is the video, first the short version (3 mins) and then the long version (7 mins).
Find more videos like this on CREATEGY
Find more videos like this on CREATEGY
I can’t believe it but it’s true – we really do still use the bell curve to manage assessment at schools and universities. OK – I do get the logic about rigour and standards, but it is a dumb, old world logic in my view. My thing about bell-curving assessment is this – 1 standard deviation (1 sigma – 68% of the population) are deemed ‘average’ so only 16% can possibly be A’s… and isn’t it mainly the same driven few who obsess for the A’s? – so everyone else stops trying or believes they can’t do well… and any time there are more than 16% A’s they get ‘curved down’ to the 16% ‘cos the ‘assessor must obviously have made it too easy or got soft’.
So it doesn’t matter how brilliantly you teach, or how motivated you make people to learn – only 16% of your students can be A’s. And because you know that it’s a zero-sum game (ie someone else can only win if you lose) you don’t share info and help other learners…
Amazingly (not) when there’s no bell curves and everyone knows that if they do good enough work, they can get A’s, they work harder – and lots do get A’s… and it incentives people to help each other as ‘to teach is to learn twice’ and we can all do better if we help each other.
Ergo the whole darn way everything is set up in most of academia is nuts as it stops people from helping each other learn, stops sharing of info, makes people work stupider and undermines people’s confidence .. hey please, make my day and prove my rant wrong…. i’d love it to be.. 
. (Here’s the REAL way a bell-curve approach to grading gets done).
Let’s do it the Ben Zander way – think of the art of possibility and help everyone rise to an A. In fact give yourself an A…….
“Weighing a pig doesn’t make it fatter” – thanks to Eddie Obeng for that.
This is an article written about experiments we’re making in remoulding what an MBA can be in a world worth living in:
A criticism often levelled at that most illustrious of qualifications, the Masters in Business Administration (MBA), is that for all the technical knowledge and skill it imparts on its graduates, it lacks that all-important practical element that comes from doing rather than learning. Any recruiter will tell you an MBA is highly attractive, but only if it is matched by some measure of real-life experience.
This observation is by no means meant as a criticism of the MBA, it simply highlights the limitations of traditional learning as it has been practiced through the ages – learning that engages us on the rational, cognitive level only. Teaching that shares with us existing models of learning, instead of challenging us to create new ones. It’s a system of learning designed for an industrial age, and now we need to fundamentally overhaul it.
It may come as a surprise that this observation comes directly from a voice within the realm of the MBA – from an innovative academic at the UCT Graduate School of Business (GSB), Jonathan Foster-Pedley. Himself an MBA graduate of Ashridge Business School UK, he was also creator of the GSB’s much-lauded Executive MBA programme.
Foster-Pedley has put his alternative views on learning to practice with an elective on the UCT GSB’s MBA programme called Strategy, Design and Creativity. It is unconventional in every way imaginable, from the assessment methods and subject matter to the lecturers and intended outcome. Continue reading ‘Recasting the MBA – creativity in action’
Things really, really have changed. The information age has come – and stayed. Those with the skills for the age have prospered. The last growth curve has been driven by business services – lawyers, programmers, accountants and sharp-eyed, numerate MBAs. But a new time has arrived. These skills are still essential, but in terms of enduring success, are now nothing special. They are the market-entry stakes, simply what we need to play the game. In fact, many business services are migrating to developing countries – for example, over 50% of the US Fortune 500 companies now outsource software work to India and nearly half of General Electric’s software is developed in India. There you can find lawyers and accountants working on contracts and accounts for US and European companies half a world away, but effectively as close as if they were in next cubicle.
So if being a good analyst, code writer, accountant or lawyer is par for the course, an entry-level skill, then who and what makes the difference now? A symphony of new voices supported by wide and rigourous academic research is pointing to a new reality…. it’s the creatives – and the artist in all of us – who are the new leaders and builders of the future. Continue reading ‘The new creatives’
I believe we are all born creative. The question is – how can we remain creative as we grow up? And how can we recapture it once we feel we have lost it? As we pass through an education system that I would argue is benign in intent yet blithely destructive to creativity, we can count ourselves lucky if we emerge with much confidence in our own creativity, an intact imagination or a lively sense of questioning and experimentation. And all too often, creativity becomes a special case – a magic attribute of the “creatives” rather than being owned as a fundamental capability at the core of each of our identities.
Part of the problem is that the idea of creativity itself has been put into a box. Ken Robinson, in Mind the Gap, puts it like this: “Creativity has become hopelessly stereotyped. First, creativity is associated with particular types of activities, mainly the arts. For that reason, it is thought to be marginal to academic and economic success. Second, only certain sorts of people are thought to be creative. As a result, it’s often thought that creativity can’t be taught. Third, creativity is thought to involve free and spontaneous behaviour. In that respect, it’s sometimes thought to be the opposite of discipline and high standards. On all counts, promoting creativity seems to strike some people as at best irrelevant … and at worst positively disruptive.” Continue reading ‘Re-creating ourselves’
On those happy occasions when I actually get to the gym, I often wonder about all that sweat & effort going nowhere – why not link the treadmills and machines to generators to power the place and do some planetary good? Similarly I wonder about all those the intellectual heavy lifting in education – why not put those projects and assignments to some social good and make someone’s life better? Especially here in the developing world. 
So, applying this idea I gave an additional project to an in-company course to make an ‘impact for good’ while learning about project management and teamwork. Result – $60000 usd equivalent in 3 weeks, 17 tents for the national blood transfusion service, an irrigation system to make an HIV orphanage self-sufficient and one or two bursaries to give a talented and poor student a chance at a degree. Then 500 person-days of senior/middle executive time applied to 10 NGO’s ranging from Aids, orphanages, building houses, literacy education, fetal alcohol syndrome, free education, incubating township entrepreneurs, developing new vc methods adapted to developing countries etc.
Now, on an MBA elective 60+ MBA students are finding ways to learn creativity, design and strategy by creating real good for real people in real time, considering projects from carbon footprint reduction, tree planting, fashion shows to raise funds for entrepreneurs, building houses in a day etc.
So now I am convinced it works. Education and upliftment can work together, paying it forward while paying it back. And the beauty of it is that it seems to increase motivation, learning and effort and provide a lifetime memory for the learners too – often starting them in new directions. I’m hoping you will try it too and we can start a new movement to humanize and energize education.
According to the latest scenarios about South Africa produced by an energetic group of leaders and thinkers we face three possible futures – Walk Apart into a declining mess of social and national chaos, Walk Behind into a stagnant state with little creativity and drive, Walk Together into an activist and engaged future with creativity and energy.
Read the papers, ebook and see the videos here – useful thinking.
I was watching my cat the other day. He was sitting in the open glass doorway to the deck looking out over the garden towards the mountains by the ocean in Hout Bay, at the Cape of Good Hope. I was busy and full of big things, multiple projects and conflicting needs. He was sitting and watching. So I got on my knees on the floor and looked out over his shoulder to see what he was seeing. And it was nothing. Nothing. No drama, no movement, no things. Just trees moving in the wind, flowers swaying, clouds flowing over the mountaintops like a waterfall, sunbirds darting from bush to blossom.
And the longer i waited the more appeared. With his hunter’s eye he was watching the flights of sacred ibis curving with the air currents, the nervous darts of the white-eyes jumping in flocks across the trees, and with his feral ears hearing the tiny scratching of shrews in the undergrowth, between the cars droning on the road and the sharp barks of the dogs next doors. And the ibis would look down at us from the air, cat and man crouched in the doorway; a fleeting view and gone.
For a moment my matrix shuddered and i saw through to a new and always present reality – and then i returned to my, now, small big things. Changed, rewarded and grateful to my cat.
What do we worry about? Some of my most memorable moments and greatest successes have been small, invisible and slow ones. Push and wait, and wait – act and reflect, and reflect – and in uncertainty, move in order to learn.
And that is why I do this work. Some strategies are fast and clever, some slower and more reflective. Learning to see the difference is the art.
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