Now for 3 small things to develop the leaders and types of leadership that we need:
The best way to predict who will take initiative and serve as a leader is to see what young people do at school. Participating in sports, school clubs and volunteering in the community are all strongly correlated with activism in later life. Strengthening our youth organisations is a real and proven way of growing leadership for the region. And as many people born and raised here are likely to return in later life, even if they have moved away between, this is a long term investment with several pay-back opportunities.
Travel broadens the mind, and there is nothing like it for giving a sense of proportion to incipient grandiosity. Humility – plain realism to most of us – is an unlikely leadership trait, but vital if we are to remain sane and well balanced. The best way to root it to the core of our attitudes is to discover how very peculiar we are – by looking at ourselves through the eyes of others. We should find low-carbon ways to travel, slowly so we can watch and listen, absorbing worldviews and priorities other than our own. This is an investment in tolerance, but also in cultural conviction, knowing what we really treasure. What all this adds up to is that we want leaders who are wise in their judgements about what really matters to us, and are able to adapt and preserve these through the complex changes ahead.
If everyone is creating their own version of knowledge, who is to say what’s right? I suppose there will still be some use for authorities on arcane subjects – we are bound to need some Professors. But much more significantly, we must ensure that we are all sensing, thinking, feeling, and judging as wisely as possible. We must make ourselves as fully human as we can – not merely rich. As John Ruskin famously said, ‘There is no wealth but life’,1 by which he meant a life force, the aspiration to beauty and harmony. We are blessed with wonderful nature and vivid arts here in the South West; we should accept no-one into leadership who is not a lover of the arts; we should train our leaders in culture and creativity – and that means all of us, because in the world of wikipedia, we are all authors and authorities.
Ours is indeed a wiki world, a worldly world, and in many ways it is a wounded world, in need of care. To produce the wise leaders we need, we should give young people an experience of leadership so they recognise the necessities of collective effort and responsibility; encourage travel and meaningful interaction with people very different to ourselves, so that we come to value our own treasures more realistically; and select only people with a love of beauty and culture to lead our institutions both within and beyond the region.
Readers will have noticed that I am much taken with words beginning with ‘w’ in this article (though I have desisted from mentioning our weather in the West of England, where I live – warm, windy and wet!). The most important reference in the forgoing is to wise leadership, because the main question underlying everything I have said is ‘wither the world’? We seem to be on the edge of crises in both the natural and financial climate, circumstances that all too often prompt calls for strong leadership, the rise of charismatic characters and the appeal of simple solutions. These are good and virtuous things – like most people, I like to be well led; and wise leadership is most likely when we share in its making.
Source: Jonathan Gosling, University of Exeter, 2008.
Footnote
1 The opening passage of Unto this Last, the book that inspired Mahatma Gandhi and, subsequently, Martin Luther King.
Crafting Strategy
by Henry Mintzberg
At work, the potter sits before a lump of clay on the wheel. Her mind is on the clay, but she is also aware of sitting between her past experiences and her future prospects. She knows exactly what has and has not worked for her in the past. She also has an intimate knowledge of her capabilities and her materials. As a craftsperson, she senses rather analyzes things. All this is working in her mind as her hands are working the clay. What emerges on the wheel is likely to be in the tradition of her past work, but she may break away and embark on a new direction. Even so, the past is no less present, projecting itself into the future.
Managers are craftspeople and strategy is their clay. Like the potter, they sit between a past of corporate capabilities and a future of market opportunities. And if they are truly craftspeople, they bring to their work an equally intimate knowledge of the materials at hand. That is the essence of crafting strategy.
The popular view sees the strategist as a planner or as a visionary, someone sitting on a pedestal dictating brilliant strategies for everyone else to implement. While recognizing the importance of thinking ahead and especially of the need for creative vision in this pedantic world, I wish to propose an additional view of the strategist – as a pattern recognizer, a learner if you will – who manages a process in which strategies (and visions) can emerge as well as be deliberately conceived. I also wish to redefine that strategist, to extend that someone into the collective entity made up of the many actors whose interplay speaks an organization’s mind. This strategist finds strategies no less than creates them.
What does it mean to craft strategy? Let us look at the words associated with craft: dedication, experience, involvement with the material, the personal touch, mastery of detail, a sense of harmony and integration. Managers who craft strategy do not spend much time in executive suites reading reports or industry analyses. They are involved, responsive to their materials, learning about their organizations and industries through personal touch. They appreciate that strategies can form without being formulated: they can emerge as people, learn their way into new patterns that work.
Manage stability
Managing strategy is mostly managing stability, not change. Indeed, most of the time senior managers should not be formulating strategy at all; they should be getting on with making their organizations as effective as possible in pursing the strategies they already have. Like distinguished craftsmen, organizations become distinguished because they master the details.
To manage strategy, then, at least in the first instance, is not so much to promote change as to know when to do so. Organizations that reassess their strategies continuously are like individuals who reassess their jobs or their marriages continuously – they can drive themselves crazy.
So-called strategic planning must be recognized for what it is: a means, not to create strategy, but to program a strategy already created – to work out its implications formally. This process is essentially analytic in nature, while strategy creation is essentially a process of synthesis. That is why trying to create strategies through formal planning most often leads to extrapolating existing ones or copying those of competitors.
Detect discontinuity
Environments do not change on any regular or orderly basis. And they seldom undergo continuous dramatic change, claims about our ‘age of discontinuity’ and environmental ‘turbulence’ notwithstanding. Much of the time, change is minor and even temporary and requires no strategic response. Once in a while there is a truly significant discontinuity or, even less often, a gestalt shift in the environment, where everything important seems to change at once. But these events, while critical, are easy to recognize.
The real challenge in crafting strategy lies in detecting the subtle discontinuities that may undermine a business in the future. And for that, there is no technique, no program, just a sharp mind in touch with the situation. The trick is to manage within a given strategic orientation most of the time yet be able to pick out the occasional discontinuity that really matters.
Note the kind of knowledge involved here: not analytical reports or abstracted facts and figures (although these can certainly help), but personal knowledge, intimate understanding, equivalent to the craftsman’s feel for the clay. Facts are available to anyone; this kind of knowledge is not.
Manage patterns
A key to managing strategy is the ability to detect emerging patterns and help them take shape. The job of the senior manager is not just to preconceive strateg
ies but also to recognize the emergence of strategies as new patterns anywhere in the organization and intervene when appropriate.
Like weeds that appear unexpectedly in a garden, some emergent strategies may need to be uprooted immediately. But management cannot be too quick to cut off the unexpected, for tomorrow’s vision may grow out of today’s aberration. (Europeans, after all, enjoy salads made from the leaves of the dandelion, America’s most notorious weed.) Thus some patterns are worth watching until their effects have more clearly manifested themselves. Then those that prove useful can be made deliberate and so be incorporated into the formal strategy.
Create a fertile climate
To manage in this context, then, is to create the climate within which a wide variety of strategies can grow. In more complex organizations, this may mean building flexible structures, hiring creative people, defining broad visions, and watching for the patterns that emerge.
Appreciate the past
While strategy is a word that is usually associated with the future, its link to the past is no less central. As Kierkegaard once observed, life is lived forward but understood backward. Managers may have to live strategy in the future, but they must understand it through the past.
Like potters at the wheel, organizations must make sense of the past if they hope to manage the future. Only by coming to understand the patterns that form in their own behavior do they get to know their capabilities and their potential. Thus crafting strategy, like managing craft, requires a natural synthesis of the future, present, and past.
Growing strategic flowers on the ground
Strategies are not tablets conceived atop mountains, to be carried down for execution; they are learned on the ground by anyone who has the experience and capacity to see the general beyond the specifics. Remaining in the stratosphere of the conceptual is no better than having one’s feet firmly planted in concrete.
Add all this up and it appears that managers may be most effective as strategists by letting a thousand strategic flowers bloom in their organizational gardens, rather than trying to raise their strategies in a hothouse. Thus, the strategy process is close to craft and enhanced by art. Science enters the process at the beginning and end but not in the middle. In the form of analyses, it feeds in data and findings, and at the end of the process it programs the strategies that come out by other means.
Source: Adapted from an article by this title in the Harvard Business Review, September–October, 1987. Copyright © 1987 by the Harvard Business School Publishing Corporation; all rights reserved. See also Tracking Strategies, Oxford University Press, 2007, and Strategy Safari, Pearson, 1998.
All change seems impossible, but once accomplished, it is the state you are no longer in that seems impossible.
Alain
CHAPTER 8
* * *
MANAGING MODESTLY
The fox knows many things but the hedgehog knows one big thing.
[Achilochas, circa 650 bc]
So – what to do about all this? Well – how about managing more modestly? More thoughtfully, more sensitively, but especially more modestly. People can manage modestly in all kinds of ways, as the readings point out. They can simply come to understand what gets in their way (for example, about being the deputy quartermaster in India, in our first piece); they can refuse obscene pay packages for the sake of teamwork, so that people really can become ‘a company’s greatest asset’ (as in our second piece, a fantasy letter by a CEO to the board); they can let everyone have ideas (our third piece). Overall, they can simply manage quietly. And they can even consider what managing would be like without managers (our last two pieces).
Yee gods, what do I do now?
by Ian Hamilton
… In 1896 I was Deputy Quartermaster-General at Simla; then, perhaps still, one of the hardest worked billets in Asia. After a long office day I used to get back home to dinner pursued by a pile of files three to four feet high. The Quartermaster-General, my boss, was a clever, delightful work-glutton. So we sweated and ran together for a while a neck and neck race with our piles of files, but I was the younger and he was the first to be ordered off by the doctors to Europe. Then I, at the age of forty-three, stepped into the shoes and became officiating Quartermaster-General in India. Unluckily, the Government at that moment was in a very stingy mood. They refused to provide pay to fill the post I was vacating and Sir George White, the Commander-in-Chief, asked me to duplicate myself and do the double work. My heart sank, but there was nothing for it but to have a try. The day came; the Quartermaster-General went home and with him went the whole of his share of the work. As for my own share, the hard twelve hours’ task melted by some magic into the Socialist’s dream of a six hours’ day. How was that? Because, when a question came up from one of the Departments I had formerly been forced to compose a long minute upon it, explaining the case, putting my own views, and endeavoring to persuade the Quartermaster-General to accept them. He was a highly conscientious man and if he differed from me he liked to put on record his reasons – several pages of reasons. Or, if he agreed with me, still he liked to agree in his own words and to ‘put them on record’. Now, when I became Quartermaster-General and Deputy-Quartermaster General rolled into one I studied the case as formerly, but there my work ended: I had not to persuade my own subordinates: I had no superior except the Commander-in-Chief, who was delighted to be left alone: I just gave an order – quite a simple matter unless a man’s afraid: ‘Yes,’ I said, or ‘No!’
Source: Sir Ian Hamilton, The Soul and Body of an Army, E. Arnold & Co., 1921, pp. 235–236. © by kind permission of the Trustees of the Estate of Sir Ian Hamilton.
A Long Overdue Letter to the Board
by Henry Mintzberg
Dear Members of the Board
I am writing to you with a proposal that may seem radical. In fact it is conservative, for my primary role as Chief Executive Officer of this corporation is to ensure its conservation as a healthy enterprise.
I am requesting that you reduce my salary by half and that you redesign my bonus system along the lines outlined below. From now on, I wish to take increases (or decreases for that matter) in the same proportion as our operating employees.
I have talked a great deal about teamwork during my tenure in this job, that we are all in this together, all of our people. Yet I am singled out by virtue of my compensation. How can I foster real teamwork when a disproportionate share of the benefits comes to me? (Lately, as more and more of our people become aware of my compensation, I have been getting increasing amounts of hate mail about it. This is certainly disconcerting, but most troublesome is that I have no reasonable reply to it.)
The assumption these days seems to be that the CEO does it all. I certainly lead, but only by respecting the contribution made by others.
My job is to release the energy that exists within our people. What makes true that old adage about leadership – that people will say they did it themselves – is that they really do. Real leaders know that. CEOs who have to fix everything are all too often succeeded by organizations that collapse. We will all have been successful if this place is as profitable after I am gone as it is now.
And that brings me to my second point. We talk a lot in our meetings about the long term health of this company. Well then, why then am I being rewarded for short term gains in the stock price? And why always those narrow numbers? We all know that I have all sorts of ways to cut spending at the expense of our future. If you want to reward me on the basis of those numbers, then save it – until five years after I retire. Then you’ll know!
Ever since we started this shareholder value business, our culture has gone to hell. Our frontline employees tell me it gets in the way of serving customers: they are forced to see dollar signs out there, not real people. And more and more of them just don’t give a damn any more: we don’t count, they tell me, so why should we care. All of us shall pay dearly for these short term gains, I assure you. In fact, I wonder if thi
s productivity surge being experienced in America is nothing more than the gains from short term cost cutting – at the expense of real productivity. After all, it doesn’t take geniuses to close things and cut things. Building things is the hard part; are we doing enough of that?
I have always prided myself on being a risk taker. That is one of the reasons you put me in this job. So let’s take a look at my compensation scheme. I cash in big time when the stock goes up, but pay out nothing when the stock goes down. I don’t even have to give back a penny of what I gained last year if the price turns around and drops this year. Some risk taker! You know what: I’m tired of being a hypocrite.
And why just me? Why not all of us equally? I propose that I receive no higher bonus, in proportion to my salary, than anyone else in this company. We claim to be a sophisticated ‘network’ of ‘knowledge workers’ marching into the third millennium. Isn’t it time we brought our practices in line with our rhetoric?
Management- It's Not What You Think! Page 14