articles

Graduation Remarks at University of Technology at Sydney
Boardroom Intelligence
How Good Becomes Bad: A Failure of Renewal
Templeton Galt Letter
How To Make A Leader
The Leadership Requirements of a Green Glass Age
Six Renewal Practices

Comments to Graduation Ceremony
at University of Technology Sydney
By Paul Gilding, 25 September 2006

Firstly let me acknowledge the Gadigal and Guring-gai people of the Eora Nation, upon whose ancestral lands we stand. And I’d like to thank them for their patience and tolerance, given how we’ve treated them for the last 200 years.

I’d also like to acknowledge the Chancellor, Vice-Chancellor, Faculty Deans, staff, distinguished guests, graduates and their families and friends. It is an important day in your lives, whether you are graduating, proud parents or satisfied teachers. Today is a day for gratitude, reflection and satisfaction.

It is quite an honour for me to be asked to share some thoughts with you and I’ve reflected a great deal on what to say. My main exposure to university and academia is through my father Wes Gilding’s sister, Fay Gale, who was the Vice Chancellor at the University of Western Australia. Auntie Fay showed me the powerful contribution to social good that can come from education and study - through her work with Aboriginal people and through her passionate advocacy on behalf of education when she was the Chair of the Australian Vice Chancellors Committee. So thank you for this opportunity to make my own very small contribution to education in Australia.

Today, I want to share some reflections on the importance of leading a useful life. A life that is helpful to others, that leaves a legacy and that makes you happy. To do so, I’ll first tell you some of the things that have led me to the beliefs I want to share with you today. Over the past 30 years I’ve been quite busy…..

I've made my living by being:

That's just the formal career. On a personal level I've:

And I’m only 47. My mother Ruth is now thinking that, after a shaky start in the cake factory, perhaps I’m starting to come good.

By any analysis this is a fairly unusual career and life path. During it, I’ve been accused of being

Not to mention, confused!

There is in my view, no contradiction or confusion in all the things I’ve done. It’s been a long exploration on how to live a life that is happy and useful – trying to make the world a better place and being of service, while enjoying the process of doing so.
Through this life, I’ve developed the core beliefs and values that now guide me and that I want to share with you today.

1. We are slightly evolved monkeys.
Firstly, I believe we are, as Jared Diamond argues in the Rise and Fall of the Third Chimpanzee, slightly evolved monkeys. We’ve been animals, driven by basic instincts like survival, eating, passing on our genes and protecting our immediate families for many, many millions of years. For a very short 40,000 years or so, we’ve been vaguely human. So be patient with humanity, we’ve only just started being people and we’re not very good at it yet. It is very much a work in progress, and one definitely worth contributing to.

2. Ideology is a cancer.
I’ve learnt the hard way, to have a deep distrust of ideology and fanaticism. Whether it’s been hanging around with communist trade unionists, corporate free marketers or anti-capitalist environmentalists – I’ve seen ideology be a cancer that blinds us to seeing the way forward. So be open to new ideas. Yes, be clear and firm on what you believe, but listen carefully to others beliefs and test yourself constantly. Be comfortable in being wrong, changing and moving on.

3. The system is a mirror – focus on the behaviour not the institution.
I belief that society or the system in which we live is a mirror. Money is not evil. Companies are not bad. Charities are not good. Goodness and badness is in people’s behaviour not in institutions. We are the market, we elect the politicians, we get the media we pay for, we build companies by buying from them, we create the pollution that is killing us. We created all that you see around you. The system is a mirror we need to carefully look into each day and observe our reflection. So focus on the behaviour.

4. Attacking others mobilises emotion but also creates resistance.
My early activist days were all about attacking others. This was a great way to mobilise emotion both amongst our own supporters and the media. Seeing things in black and white is easier and more fun. It makes you feel righteous because you see others as wrong.

But it’s not actually very helpful if you want to fix something. The legacy of conflict is ideology, bitterness and resistance to change. We need to confront bad behaviour directly, we need to simplify and communicate what’s wrong with it, but, if you’ll allow me one gender insensitive sporting analogy, we need to play the ball, not the man.

5. Act with good intent.
I also believe in the importance of intent. When you act, be clear on your intentions – know what you’re setting out to achieve and why you’re doing so. Who are you acting for? What is your motivation? Is it clear? If your intention is good, then get on with it, but be easy on yourself when you make mistakes - adjust, refocus and move on.

6. Fun is great, but pursue happiness not distraction.
Fun is critical and helps us be happy. We should enjoy our lives, not have them be some kind of suffering obligation. But remember fun comes from satisfaction, not from distraction.

Helping others is a form of positive self interest. Helping other people succeed or making the world a better place is fun and brings me great joy. It’s not a sacrifice I make, but the way I gain satisfaction and generate a feeling of having a useful life. It makes me happy.

Conclusions
What does all this mean for you?

Let me finish by asking you to consider the following three suggestions as you go forth and consider your future.

Thank you your attention, thank you Chancellor for your invitation and thank all of you in advance for the great work I know you’re going to do, over the rest of your lives, to support humanity’s struggle to create the civilized and sustainable society to which we aspire.

Thank you.

Graduation remarks at University of Technology at Sydney, September 2006 by Paul Gilding, CEO, Ecos Corporation, New South Wales, Australia.

Boardroom Intelligence
By Tom Doorley

Recent governance reforms intensify the role of the board of directors, mandating increased involvement and contribution. Coupled with the sharp rise in merger and acquisition activity, directors are drawn deeply into the strategic dialogue. In times past, chief executives eschewed an active dialogue on strategic issues, preferring to present a well-crafted set of slides with little opportunity for the board to do other than approve a decision which was ready to be executed. However, our research with chief executives has uncovered a marked shift in attitude. As one chief executive put it, “I want my board involved. I’ve got them on board because they are experienced. But, how to leverage their talent; that’s the question.” The chief executive is correct. Since it is only recently that the board as been drawn into the dialogue, these are largely uncharted waters. Thankfully, some boards have overcome this dilemma. The program management utilised to engage boards represents leading practice. Such practices can be summarised in the following six rules:

What the board should do – understanding its purpose; the rational for engagement. Before developing a programme, the board and management must agree the basic purpose. All else follows. Three rules define the overarching charter given to the board. These rules provide the rationale for the board to be engaged in the strategic dialogue.

1. Accept that the board has a dual role, namely: to ensure that the enterprise is trustworthy; that the information it provides is honest, timely and understandable – this is the compliance role born out of the drastic loss of trust engendered by well-publicised acts of malfeasance; and, to make the enterprise better – this is the performance role; each director should bring an expertise to the table that can assist, tangibly, to improve the value of the enterprise.
As a first principle, the leadership team and its board must concur that both aspects are critical. While the most effective boards accept the latter role, many others shy away from this charter. Without embracing the performance element, directors are mere placeholders at the table.

2. Develop a mission statement to guide behaviour. Mission statements, done well, provide a meaningful guide to day-day behaviour. Boards and their management should agree a specific mission. The best we have seen comes from the published corporate guidelines of a global, listed telecom company. It says, simply “…the Board is empowered by the shareholders to protect and enhance the value of the enterprise.” Understanding the mission (especially the performance element), agreeing to its implications, and then monitoring follow through sets the enterprise on the path toward an effective board and strong performance. It demands a set of directors engaged in and contributing
to strategy.

3. Redefine strategy; focus on the ‘big things’, not everything. The interaction between a board and its leaders is complex. Both need to balance the tendency to micro-manage (a typical chief executive’s
complaint) versus not having adequate information to render an informed decision (a typical director’s complaint). As one chairman
commented, “We spend nearly as much time debating whether an issue is strategic and requiring our involvement as we do actually
discussing issues.” To clarify the board’s role another chairman says, “I want the board involved in the big things; whatever effects results substantially.” This redefinition of terms simplifies and lifts the dialogue. If an event or initiative could affect results materially then the board must be engaged. The board participates in the dialogue which identifies the ‘big things’ as precursor to monitoring the relevant actions and impacts.

Armed with these three rules, the board can understand its purpose and move to considering how to deliver.

How the board can deliver – engaging in the strategic dialogue effectively. With a fresh understanding of its purpose, management and directors develop a new program. Again three rules shape the course:

4. Re-set goals – become a decision-ready board. If the board is going to exercise its performance role it must be ready to render an informed decision on the ‘big things’ on its agenda. Thus, the board must be capable and knowledgeable. This implies that individually,
and for the board as a whole, core competencies and experiences must conform tightly to the strategic needs of the enterprise.
Further, the directors require sufficient, relevant information. Finally, to stay current with the enterprise, its strategy, operations and financial health (the ‘big things’ categories) the directors must commit time and effort. For a large cap company this can mean 300-400 hours per year.

5. Manage the strategic dialogue from concept to impact. Once the ‘big things’ are identified, the directors must know who is responsible for taking action, and must set up metrics to judge the effectiveness of follow through. To do so, the best organise the agenda of the board around a ‘governance cycle’, that is, four sequential categories intended to chart the course from early decision-making to results:

6. Evaluate board performance – against its purpose and its actions. Companies listed on the NYSE are required to undertake an evaluation of board effectiveness; the NASDAQ does not require it, but strongly supports assessments of performance. These two governing bodies send a clear message of importance. But no standards are in place to give the process structure. The leading practice is to customise an evaluation process based on the rules defined above. Thus, the evaluation needs a purpose component to ensure the board has a common understanding of its charter and level of engagement in the strategic dialogue. For example, does the board accept its responsibility to make the enterprise better? Secondly, there is an action component to test whether or not behaviour follows suit. For example, do the directors know the metrics in place to monitor an initiative’s progress? Evaluation processes require trust. By basing the analysis on the leadings practices of effective boards, the entire process can be undertaken with an increased level of objectivity. The goal is to lift the level of performance to a standard of excellence, not just uncover shortcomings.

In our observation, the most effective boards actively contribute to the strategic dialogue. These boards, working shoulder to shoulder
with the leadership team, describe the path to higher levels of performance.

“Boardroom Intelligence,” Financier Worldwide, February 2007, by Tom Doorley, CEO and Chairman, Sage Partners.

How Good Becomes Bad: A Failure of Renewal
(thoughts from John O'Neil)

All top leaders face the same persistent, overarching question: how is true greatness to be achieved and sustained? Every leadership team must cope with immense and increasing complexity, from markets to technology. And, each team must find its own particular way through the complexity. But, one common challenge stands in the way of persistent greatness and that is the quality and creativity of the people and the culture that supports them. How this challenge is met will determine which leaders find and hold onto greatness or slide into mediocrity.

For years I have been studying and working with leaders who build and maintain cultures that lift and enable the people who work in them. In these renewing cultures individuals and groups work effectively on vexing problem-opportunities while also expanding their individual and collective capabilities. These special cultures may be described as “fitness centers” where continuous renewal takes place. Let’s look at what goes on in cultures that promote renewal.

Organization as Fitness Center

Organizations of the future will embrace an activist-fitness concept of renewal. They will spot entropy and go to work reversing it. The best organizations are already pioneering their versions of fitness centers. These companies are real and I have been privileged to know many of them and work with their leaders.

Unimerco is real. The Russell company (now part of Northwestern Mutual), Hanna Andersson, Google, Goldman Sachs, James Black’s lab, Pixar, Doug Shears’s agricultural network, and Intel are all real. Each of these and other organizations are developing versions of the fitness center. Do any of them have all of the components all the time? Of course not. To say they did would be a violation of one of their working ethical standards—humility. One reason I am drawn to work with and study such organizations is their devotion to learning which starts with a purposeful naiveté, the antidote to hubris, and working humility, the beginning of the pursuit of greatness.

Templeton Galt Letter
By John O'Neil

Following the release of The Paradox of Success in 1993, I began to hear from leaders and investors around the world. Much of what I heard was stories of raw frustration. It seemed that the rules for how leaders conducted themselves were changing, and so were the standards used to measure their performance. Business leaders felt increasing pressure to satisfy demands for ever-rising quarterly earnings as well as to cope with quickly burgeoning global growth.

At the same time, leaders were being asked to make their operations more open, more accountable, more “transparent.” As the global economy continued to grow at a frightening pace, some business leaders and investors started trying to look at the consequences. At the 1998 meeting of the World Economic Forum at Davos, Switzerland, a combination of leaders from corporate entities, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and government called for reforms and increased openness. A few investment groups also grew vocal about the need for improved standards of corporate behavior, especially regarding environmental exploitation and the widening divide between the rich and poor. Around this time I began to meet at various forums with leaders who hoped to make globalization a powerful force for human good. Participants in these discussions addressed social responsibility issues seriously, though with many unresolved questions about the “how” and “how soon.”

Undoubtedly the expanding bubble of the late ‘90s exacerbated corporate tendencies toward expediency, cupidity, and secrecy. And in my ongoing work as an adviser to business leaders, I had seen dramatic evidence of ever-mounting pressure on leaders personally—of conflict between earnings imperatives and demands for openness, of chaos generated by the lack of dependable means of measuring performance in organizations and leaders. Indeed, I was struck by how few leaders even had a handle on what they should be measuring. Nobody believed that corporate abuses, or the accompanying backlash, would go away on their own, but we lacked the tools both to understand what was happening and to initiate real reforms.

I lamented the fact that most organizations evaluate their leaders chiefly by financial performance—how much did the firm make last quarter?—and by measures that are too linear: for example, how many new priests, rabbis, mullahs, or ministers were trained last year? Such information is interesting, even valuable, but not necessarily the most important measure of success. Another problem was that current metrics are usually historical, trailing what happened in the past. I described how, in contrast, ideal measurements of leadership would reveal a wide array of forward-looking activities and prospects; how the best metrics would be independently sourced, carefully screened for bias, and, when added together, predictive of future behavior.

Much of our trouble starts with hiding and denying, or lawyering up; getting ready to fight, spin, or say it didn’t happen.” Ideal metrics would take account of the level of transparency present within an organization and its openness with stakeholders and others on the outside. Each organizational realm, people, products and services, markets, and financials—should be probed for predictive indicators and tested for transparency.

I had some valuable outside data to build on. In 1997, for example, I served on a team commissioned by the consulting firm Accenture to discover what leaders needed to know and how they needed to change to become healthy, vital players in the global future. The Accenture team’s finding were published in 2003 in a report titled Global Leadership, which cited sixteen critical areas of leadership behavior that must be tracked and analyzed. Among the targeted areas of need were:

Even more important, the Accenture research found, is where learning needs to accelerate or where lack of readiness exists. These are all big, new, much-needed realms of measurement.

I began to synthesize the Accenture team’s research with observations I had gleaned from global-scale panel discussions, talks, and workshops on these topics, and with direct experience from my own work with leadership teams. As I went on to test this synthesis “on the ground,” the questions resonated strongly with leaders, leading me to believe we were looking at the right things.

Two key questions emerged. First: why aren’t the measures we use to assess leadership performance of any organization more comprehensive, objective, and useful? Second: why is transparency still lagging—or, to put it negatively, why is the organizational life of the world’s business still so shrouded in secrecy?

As we know, 9/11 coincided disastrously with the collapse of the US economic bubble, and markets continued to be punished for several years. The bursting of the bubble revealed countless stories of corporate corruption, large and small—many set in motion by poor metrics of leadership performance that deceived investors, workers, and the public alike. Some of these failures, which harmed so many good working people, will be examined in later chapters.

Few people in 2001 were prepared for the round of ugly shocks that resulted from inadequate measures and secrecy. Enron was the first and most notorious, in part because of its leaders’ uncomfortably close ties to the Bush administration. But company after company tumbled like monolithic dominoes, in the process uncovering flawed and even criminal leadership. Scandals compounded as great global audit and law firms toppled.

We deserve better leaders across the entire spectrum of our institutions. Certain symptoms of the late ‘90s malaise are still very much in evidence, however. The egos and paychecks of many leaders remain inflated out of proportion to their performance, and available measures of that performance don’t do the job. The checks and balances traditionally provided by accountants, lawyers, and regulators are dysfunctional or no longer trusted. And the “doctors” in charge of the cure are primarily politicians beholden to special interests. The Sarbanes-Oxley legislation, an early attempt at a cure, is costly, disruptive to business, and vulnerable to evasion. Investor confidence remains relatively low.

Credibility and confidence in American business leadership can be restored only by the adoption of clear measures: deeper, more reliable metrics of performance that are based on transparency. We need accurate, comprehensive methods of measuring our leaders and what goes on inside our institutions, especially the large, global ones. This includes government, churches, NGOs and of course, business.

(First) published in The Templeton Galt Letter, July 2004.

How To Make A Leader
By John O'Neil

Each time a large earthquake strikes California, the shaking terra firma leaves residents with broken dishes, pavements, highways and lives. The shaking can be worse psychologically than physically. True, we dust ourselves off and return to daily tasks as soon as possible, but we know that Mother Nature has changed something inside each of us. The same thing happens to the collective human spirit when social, political and economic upheaval occurs. The bedrock of our beliefs shifts under our feet and we are left feeling adrift.

The change wrought by the development of bold and even intimidating technologies has been nothing short of seismic. Complicating this picture are parallel upheavals associated with the collapse of command-and-control organizational structures, the blurring of lines between competitors and future partners, spiraling population growth and cruel clashes between cultures, religions, races and classes.

Our uneasiness is magnified when we are forced to review our own lives. There was a time when life-planning meant upholding our end of an employment contract virtually for life. If our talents and achievements permitted, we were given more responsibility and resources including people to manage. Now everyone's job is more precarious. Everything we once thought we knew about life has moved like a fault line beneath our feet. Those who still harbor a wish to succeed ask themselves: how can we learn to change? We must begin with self-assessment, clarity about values and a reevaluation of long-held assumptions.

Yesterday's assumptions included the dictum that good leaders sacrificed personal lives to accomplish great things. It was a myth that prevailed until disillusionment began to mount. The industrial age had promised better living with less sweat and more leisure time. Quite the opposite has occurred. Work has become more stressful, less satisfying, less secure and more anonymous, and technology is re-evaluation the business world.

Many businesses are responding by rushing to re-engineer, slashing at fat and hoping to miss vital organs. But in the rush they can overlook a critical additional element: leaders who can shepherd their companies into the future. Such people are in alarmingly short supply but the demand for transformative leaders has never been higher, especially in companies with a cross-cultural, global mindset. Current leaders are too often unprepared to succeed in the new workplace, much less to be mentors for the next generation.

In a study of business transformation by Douglas Ready of Gemini Consulting, a gulf was identified between the need for future leadership and current organizational capacity. The gulf involved crucial areas such as trust between top management and the rest of the organization, customer focus and organizational flexibility. Filling this gulf remains the task of transformative leaders.

In the new global organization a leader must be able to communicate with different cultures, convert vast amounts of information into decision-making chunks and grasp people's attachment to their natural environment. Above all, emerging leaders must know themselves: they must understand what drives them, what frees them to learn afresh and what anchors them during change. Unless leaders grasp what it means to manage within a sensitive global environment and understand the stress that rapid and profound change can bring, we risk substantial political, capital and human costs.

The practical question then arises: what exactly are the qualities of this new kind of leader and how can they be developed?

Getting language right is vital, for example: wise leaders have always sought to find the best words to convey their sense of the future, to find powerful, fresh images which explain a new trend before others have even identified it, and provoke others to think deeply about the portents of change. The lexicon for new leaders will come from science and psychology, and is wholly different from that of the industrial age, when purpose and meaning were conveyed by words such as forging and shaping.

I think of the future as the Green Glass Age. It is a compound image, representing a highly complex future. The first inspiration is the designer plant which throws evolution into high gear. The second is an awareness of the environment's fragility which challenges the industrial credo that growth is good.

Glass is the generic word for the wafers of silicon that store vast quantities of information and images and for the fibres that transmit them. Once the glass becomes extended or netted so that millions of users can interact, our assumptions about business, education and politics are up for grabs. "There is not a single aspect of business not overhauled, either directly or indirectly, by the introduction of network logic," Kevin Kelly points out in his recent book Out of Control, The Biology of New Machines. One such example is the prospect of greater interactive exchanges with customers, which can lead to rebellion or vastly improved service and relationships.

THE GREEN GLASS AGE
If HG Wells was correct when he said that humanity is locked in a race between education and catastrophe, we must look hard at the tasks that lie ahead. Business must now start to develop and deliver new programmes which can lead to mastery in the Green Glass Age: management training is not enough.

New technology can bring us massive quantities of information. But as we look towards a future in which training courses can be offered electronically, we must set priorities that link technical learning with personal growth and the new responsibilities of global citizenship. In practice this means we must know something of biology, ecology and psychology, the value of resolving personal issues that otherwise hamper progress. This can help create leaders who endure, who adapt quickly but who also have the abiding integrity which engenders trust.

Just as Peter Senge and his associates at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have argued for organisational learning, so each manager must go beyond economic laws and techniques and become a personal learner. Industrial Age leaders, once valued for skills at problem-solving in a command-and-control workplace, must now learn the value of personal re-tooling. Deans of business schools should let go of curricula that target higher production and consumption at the expense of personal and professional growth and family, global and multicultural values.

Long-distance leaders
What qualities amount to a long-distance leader? Such people develop practices and beliefs to sustain productivity and benefit their companies while maintaining creative, ethical and well-balanced lives. They are respected as stable, creative, flexible and hardy. Their egos are neither anemic nor starved. Their vision extends both towards the horizon and inward to the heart. They are self-aware and understand others. They are humble, indeed grateful for their opportunities and success. They are people like my mentor, John Gardner, who at 77 began his seventh career, teaching graduate students at Stanford University. Above all, like John, they remain astonished at life's infinite potential for learning.

Consider Roger Mills, a remarkable behavioral scientist, and member of the Social Venture Network - a collection of business leaders, investors, philanthropists and educators who are seeking to forge the principles of competition, good leadership practices and social responsibility. In 1987, Mills was asked by the authorities in Florida to turn his attention to teenage pregnancy, truancy, violence and crime in two of Miami's worst housing estates. The demographics for the Modello Housing Project and Homestead gardens were overwhelmingly discouraging: 85% of all heads of household were on welfare, 65% of residents had drug and alcohol problems and the truancy rate was 80%. Residents slept on the floor at night to avoid random bullets fired during drug-related drive-by shootings.

Problems abated significantly among those who worked with Mills during the project over nearly four years. Rates of unemployment have declined dramatically along with drug abuse and unwanted teenage pregnancies. Children are back in school, including six who entered college last year - a first for these residents. A number of them are working with Mills on similar projects, teaching others to begin their own upward climb from the spiral of despair. Many seek to be part of the Green Glass future, learning technology and planting gardens. Mills, now director of the Community Health Realization Institute within the California School of Professional Psychology, conducts leadership and self-sufficiency training programmes in nearly two dozen cities.

The same year that Mills began his work in Miami, philanthropist Josh Mailman and money manager Wayne Silby joined forces to start the Social Venture Network. It began with 50 participants, business and social entrepreneurs, foundation executives and philanthropists, investors and money managers and an education agenda that revolved around two questions: how can we develop socially responsible companies and organizations, and how can organizational life be more fulfilling and less stressful? Since that first meeting in 1987, SVN has expanded to over 500 members in the us and at least that many in Europe. It is now contemplating an extension into Latin or South America. Two US spin-offs, Business for Social Responsibility and Students for Social Responsibility, are growing even faster than the original SVN itself.

Its mission is future-orientated public service. Its goals are to foster environmental activism, good business practice and employee empowerment. It also strives to develop self renewing, well-balanced leaders and ventures designed to promote social justice and environmental sustainability. Members are expected to practice what they preach, and they do. Projects include contributions to children by Ben & Jerry's ice-cream business, Hanna Anderson's award-winning community and employee programmes, the Body Shop's environmental awareness campaign and Just Desserts community gardens for ex-convicts.

Both Mills and SVN leaders show that there are praiseworthy efforts at understanding future leadership happening around us. For the last 25 years, I have worked with and studied a large number of long-distance leaders. Taken together, my experiences lead me to conclude that the true exemplars of tomorrow's leadership are those who hold and practice the following beliefs:

Of the six practices, reassessment or testing I the spirit is the most difficult. In lives that are so busy, filled with responsibilities, tinged with guilt for not doing more, it is very hard to step back. But a regular practice of self-assessment is the key to self-renewal.

THE DESTRUCTIVE POWER OF HUBRIS
The points stated above sound so simple. Why then will managers fail at leadership and leaders fail to go the distance in the redesigned and re-engineered workplace?

Too many leaders blame others and deny their own participation in failure. In this way they fail to learn what failure can teach and what is needed for future development. They put themselves - at the centre, demanding instant gratification, and refuse help until the stakes get very high. Hubris strips a leader of healthy self-awareness and, in the process, guarantees failure. Remember what happened when Detroit scoffed at funny little German and Japanese cars? When Barings Bank disconnected its fiscal future and currency trading? When Japanese corporations went on a real estate buying binge, when IBM neglected both software and the potential for the personal computer? Sadly, many leaders fail to recognize that what they fail to see or do has repercussions. Sometimes they are blinded by success or let their own insecurities overshadow a creative leadership which makes unusual connections. Or worst of all, leaders simply follow the herd, terrified of missing out.

Failure is not the enemy of a career. The real foes are becoming stale and working harder for less and less satisfaction. Boredom can cause a lot of mischief. When leaders grow stale they spend their resources fighting against ennui; information is distorted while the needs of others, including customers, employees and shareholders, are overlooked. The zest for learning is lost in a downward-spiraling process that can be fatal.

The Green Glass Age is upon us and along with it the demand for new leaders who are assimilating what the new technology means for them. The change is massive, but there is reason for optimism. If we encourage promising leaders to search out good teachers and adopt practices that promote long-distance leadership, they can begin to integrate personal and professional growth. They can then pass on to others the arts and practices of future leadership. Pieces of the education we need are here: it is a matter of filling in the blanks. If we do, the numbers of qualified leaders will swell. The point is to begin - now.

Reprinted from Worldlink, The Magazine of the World Economic Forum, July-August 1995.

The Leadership Requirements of a Green Glass Age
By John O'Neil

The problem in facing change today is that we are caught between what is true (and mythical) about the Industrial Age and what we are not able to fully grasp about the information and communications age that lies ahead, or what I refer to as the “Green Glass Age.”

Green refers to future challenges in biology (our capacity to redesign the biological world we live in) and ecology (specifically, our capability to keep the population growth from actually devouring the ecological system that is required to support life in abundance). Glass refers to the silicon chips and strands that make up the global communications revolution. All the whirl about the Internet is only a glimpse of the real power that exists once we combine telecommunications, education, commerce, and entertainment. Those industry boundaries are already disappearing.

If one believes that a Green Glass Age is already under way, then the question becomes, what replaces what we already have as a legacy from the Industrial Age? For example, at an organizational level, we know we are not able to continue to have organizations that are basically command and control, pyramidal with lifetime employment, and with lots of linear, quasi-rational planning. The challenge therefore is to find the right combination of structures, systems, and staffing, but it is a challenge taken up amid great uncertainty and anxiety as we approach the end of the last decade of a dynamic century.

SIGNS OF A NEW AGE
The following lists some of the indications that point to a new age and describes the relevant impact on leaders and their organizations.

A change in language and metaphors. A quick look at the latest use of language shows a shift from what was the industrial age/military and sports jargon to ecology, communications, and computer sciences. We are beginning to talk the language of process, systems, networks, and the behavioral sciences. The more advanced the leadership team, the more precisely and carefully styled the language. Clunky old companies talk clunky old language.

Restructuring of organizations. We see new organizations being restructured and moving toward fast-response, self-led units connected by networks (and the better ones by values). The organizations are network federations with clear, complete delegations of power (earned trust guided by powerful values and ethics).

New requirements for leadership. We see a big change in the requirements of leadership in the new organizations toward managing creative, cross-cultural teams and building strategic alliances and partnerships (yesterday’s tough customer might be tomorrow’s needed partner).

A new way of planning. Planning is changing to a combination of scenario creation and dilemma resolution, which leads to organizational stories or “true myths.” The planning goes on throughout the organization and is not contained in a single staff department.

A new view of leadership preparation. Personal development and leadership preparation require a new kind of wisdom as well as just-in-time education for the technical aspects of growth. Wisdom comes from engaging in certain “master practices,” including self-renewal, that must be ongoing.

A shift in market development. Leaders are recognizing that they must change the way they view the global marketplace, moving from traditional product development toward strategies that ensure sustainable resources and consumption where practical. Marketing is facing a completely different demographic map as life expectancies increase combined with gender equity and new family structures.

These are profound shifts not easily comprehended. By putting them all together, we get a better picture of the seismic changes we face and an understanding of the amount of anxiety and stress that such change can bring. The answer to most of that anxiety and stress is to engage in proper new learning that is required to redefine our organizations, our markets, and our own and others’ leadership development.

WHY LEADERS FAIL TO LEAD
It is important to understand the reason why good people stop growing and producing and fail to fulfill their potential. The focus here is not on technical competence but rather on personal qualities that give leaders the edge they need at a time when traditional assumptions about work and careers no longer hold, organizational life must be one of rapid adaptation, and yesterday’s competitor may be tomorrow’s strategic partner.

As a member of and consultant to boards of directors, I see first-hand how attention spans have shortened; anger, impatience and scapegoating have increased in intensity; and the rush for quick and easy answers has become a stampede. Downsize! Reengineer now! Not a moment to lose! As uncertainty increases, leaders often layer on controls, engage in magical thinking, drive people and systems harder, and too frequently trade appreciation for human beings for information about human resources. During such stressful, dark times, too many managers and leaders fail not because of lack of information, technique, or knowledge but for deeper, more personal reasons. Here are a few:

They fail to grow emotionally. Like children they often put themselves at the center, can’t stay focused, and demand instant gratification. The saddest part of such stories is that too often bright people with too few emotional cards in their decks refuse to acknowledge the problem and, like the classic alcoholic, blame others, and deny that they have a problem. Thus, they don’t get help until the stakes get very high. Our educational institutions have put too much faith in IQs; we need to pay much more attention to EQs—emotional quotients.

They fail to make creative connections. Early on, the railroads overlooked the truck and the airplane. In recent years the North American auto industry scoffed at the funny little German and Japanese cars; Sears didn’t appreciate Sam Walton’s reinvention of retailing, and his Wal-Mart stores began to devour Sears’ market; and IBM neglected software (Microsoft) and didn’t see the potential of the personal computer (Apple). Sony went into the movie business and Mercedes Benz decided to acquire companies to broaden their auto franchise, and both put their core businesses on hold. Sadly, many leaders don’t discern their own personal creativity or are so blinded by their success that they think they are being creative when they aren’t. Or, in the tension between enhanced control versus creative chaos, control always wins. They feel more secure when controls are tight—a natural reaction, but it can be fatal when creative connections are neglected.

They know too little about the inner needs that drive our outer wants. The difference between a good marketer and a true market innovator is as great as the difference between an adequate manager and a truly inspirational leader.

They develop insatiable egos. Healthy leaders fight ego inflation, but marginal or sick leaders may allow their egos to develop voracious appetites. Such egos drain others in attempts to satisfy their insatiable needs. I once watched a prospect for a very large job lose it on the golf course. Because the man’s game was not going well and his ego was threatened, he grew enraged and threw his woods into the lake. That temper tantrum did not go unnoticed by the board chair, and he didn’t get the job. Again and again, the insatiable ego destroys otherwise good prospects for leadership.

They become numb to life’s jobs and challenges. Perhaps the most fatal disease for aspiring managers and mature leaders is simple staleness—loss of spirit and the inability to self-renew. A prospective client, a leader in her field for ten years, confessed to me, “I’m not sure why I keep getting out of bed in the morning. It’s part habit and part duty, but it sure as hell isn’t excitement.” In a software design firm I work with, the leader’s “little slump” almost took a very prosperous, penthouse firm into the basement. The true enemy of any career is not failure, it is staleness, pushing harder with less and less satisfaction. Obviously, people who lack physical vitality or suffer moral or ethical lapses are not good candidates to go the distance. However, the most severe setbacks, such as Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s polio, can be overcome and even provide moral muscle for the true “long-distance leader” (LDL).

KEY PRACTICES OF SUCCESSFUL LEADERS
Leader who succeed over the long haul are masters or renewal, and they are steady as a rock, even when they experience failure. During times of intense change, they are simply indispensable. They are viewed by others as stable, creative, flexible, and morally, mentally, and emotionally hardy. Their egos are neither anemic nor too hungry, and their vision extends both to the far horizon and inward to the heart. They are self-aware and tuned to the inner frequencies of others. Surprisingly humble, indeed grateful for their opportunities and success, they are, above all, excited by life and learning.

The wisdom of such long-distance leaders is available for the asking; many of them are devoted mentors and teachers. One of my favorites is John Gardner, who at age seventy-seven began his seventh career. After having been Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare during the Johnson Administration, founding Common Cause and the Independent Sector, he went to Stanford to teach in the School of Business and Education. He has advised and challenged me for thirty years. It is through the generosity of LDLs like John that I am able to offer these remarks. For twenty-five years I have studied these highly productive, happy, self-regenerative people. Knee to knee, I have posed questions, shared ideas, and learned from leaders in business, arts and sciences, philanthropy, education, public service, and the professions. Although these leaders differ in many respects (education, parental nurturing, temperament, gender, and personality), they do share common practices. Below are the key practices of LDLs.

Seek self-knowledge. It is the foundation for all other practices. All LDLs are self-aware, not narcissistic, but knowledgeable about their inner needs. They fight against the obscuring puffery that praise can bring. They see wins as milestones and losses as learning opportunities. They treasure good coaches and teachers. The listen deeply and reject the easy, popular, faddish, magical answers. They avoid thunder-think, the mob psychology so frequently invented or inflated by the media. (Churchill spent time oil painting because he knew he needed its therapeutic benefits—“Like a sea beast fished up from the depths… my veins threatened to burst from the fall in pressure. I had great anxiety and no means of relieving it… it was then the muse of Painting came to my rescue.” He knew what he needed and he found it, and it may have saved his life.)

Make all plans guilt-free and enduring. LDLs are keenly aware that all plans, personal as well as professional, can easily produce results that provoke guilt or stifle learning. A plan that focuses too much on the leader’s role robs others of credit and can make the good leader feel the dreaded guilts. Overly cautious plans that limit risk can preclude learning opportunities that failure can bring. Either winning or losing can uncover old guilts supposedly long buried. Many suffer a sharp and surprising pain of guilt when they either surpass their parents’ achievements or “let mom and dad down.” This can happen in many ways long after parents are gone: walking among the homeless, not having our families and friends, having so much when others, even close associates, have much less. Guilt works stealthily, causing us to unconsciously distort our plans to avoid its bars. Master leaders work to make guilt-free and learning-promoting goals. These are goals that go way beyond self, spread credit for success, and allow failures to become learning opportunities, not blaming exercises.

Develop communications excellence. Communications excellence is necessary to develop a robust organizational culture. LDLs know that enlightened cultures depend on appropriate language, a carefully crafted vocabulary that articulates the primary mission and clarifies goals. When I visit an organization filled with old slogans, hear tired homilies, read cliché-ridden annual reports, I know that the culture is stale and unhealthy. Language is the long-distance leader’s baton and lightning rod. With it, the beat is kept and energy drawn (e.g., Jack Welsh, CEO of General Electric, uses the word “boundaryless” as a description of the company that the members need to build: a company with no boundaries between people, departments, cultures.)

Make value-driven decisions. LDLs act with integrity, and each decision of a leader is an opportunity to serve a value that is important to the mission, such as integrity, fairness, safety, and so forth. Many leaders act as if they are value-neutral, claiming that decisions are based on facts or are “data-driven.” This is both a deceit and foolish. Our values always creep into decisions and they should. The trick is choosing the right values, making them clear, and articulating how they are in service of the mission. Data and information are fickle and easily manipulated. What the long-distance leader seeks is the best, cleanest data, plus solid interpretation and knowledge blended with wisdom. Wisdom encompasses values, history, intuition, passion, and self-awareness. It provides the feel that makes the difference. (Sam Walton understood small-town values and the yearning people have for what they perceive those values to be: honest, straightforward, fair bargains, fresh stock on the shelf, no frills, etc. All of Sam’s decisions reflected those values. Sam also knew the power of technology to make the values work.)

Develop a personal resiliency. This is the rebound factor—the capacity to bounce back. This is the dimension Vaclav Havel calls transformative. He believes we need a revolution of the spirit to counter the excesses of raw, runaway competition tied to increases in consumerism and mass culture. It was Georgia O’Keeffe’s indomitable spirit that allowed her to leave the career success of New York and enter the uncertainty of an art future in the desolate spaces of the Southwest, to survive setback and uncertainty and go on to become a modern art leader. It is what Churchill found in painting, what Gordon Sherman, founder of Midas Muffler, Inc., and the founder of modern franchising, found in music, nature photography, and fly fishing.

Understand that we are not all masters of our fate. What I call O’Neil’s Law of Unintended Consequences in its first part provides that we are not masters of anything, even our own fate. In California, one good earthquake settles that. Leaders of the Soviet Union and IBM were masters of command and control. They lived by it ad succumbed to it. The new leaders must learn to be “out of control” to survive. The second part of the law is that the unforeseen consequences of an act may overshadow the objectives the act was intended to achieve. This result probably occurs if the decision maker believes urgency should be valued over clarity, setting priorities is a low priority, rational planning tools are irrationally important, and the unconscious plays no part in decision making. (Sir James Black, who shared the 1988 Nobel Prize in medicine with two U.S. researchers believes that all research worth doing gets “out of control” and that the unexpected frequently garners the prize.)

Reassess goals. The siren song of perceived success, believing the press clippings, is very seductive. The master leader knows that it is necessary to step back periodically and reassess goals and objectives and examine what is being done to achieve them—to see whether true north is where it was thought to be. One needs to ask: Who am I really serving? Am I really learning, or is staleness creeping in? Am I using my time wisely? How can I download, make room for the fresh challenge? Is it time to move on? Have I got a life that works? This is the hardest practice of all. Religious practices include retreats for such work. St. Ignatius called it testing the spirits.

FUTURE LEADERS
Each person who would lead must find the right practices for the life he or she wishes to live. But, we all need teachers, coaches, mentors, because it is easy to lose our way. I have tried to share some of the collective wisdom of many such teacher-practitioners. Now the real work begins—learning how to adapt this knowledge to our own pursuits and serve those who look to us for guidance and help.

Reprinted from The Law Governance Institute, Winter 1997.

Six Renewal Practices
By John O'Neil

For over 25 years, I have studied renewal practices. Over the years, certain questions kept jabbing at me. How is it that so many people never recover from the ego swelling that early success can bring?

For example, look at John Updike’s character, Rabbit, stunted and forever defined by his high school athleticism. Why does defeat send some into a crippling depression while others spin failure into a luminous journey?

My search has been to find the common practices that set extraordinary characters apart—yet are available to any of us to apply in our own lives.

SIX KEY PRACTICES
The practices break down into six categories. There is considerable overlap among these categories, and individual styles vary widely.

1. Retreating for renewal. This is the cornerstone practice; the capacity to step back from daily pressures, to let the soul breathe, to think deeply. To refresh and renew is the necessary first step toward renewal. Choices range widely: flying, fishing, walking, meditating and praying can all be retreats that renew.

The renewal benefits of retreat practices are many and varied. Some people report feeling refreshed, more relaxed, but energized. Others describe creative bursts, cracking open problems like fortune cookies. Others claim epiphanies, major life-changing insights that flow from retreats. The paradoxical aspects of retreats seem to be that the simple act of letting go of the daily, sweaty, swirling demands life produces higher order thinking, and improved solutions to life problems. Churchill wrote of the benefits of his painting retreats: “Change is the master key. It is only when new cells are called into new activity, when new stars become the lords of the ascendant, that relief, repose, refreshment are afforded.”

2. Finding new learning curves. Long-distance leaders have the capacity to spot a decaying learning curve, to know when they have stopped growing. The modern mantra of enlightened organizations is continuous learning. All agree that fresh learning is imperative to handle the changes delivered by the massive backwash of global market forces. But what learning? What does each person at various life and career stages? Most managers fail at leadership tasks not because of ignorance about methods, skills, or processes—most fail because they have an inadequate emotional range, and they don’t make the proper connections between seemingly disparate ideas and concepts. They fail at exerting the appropriate torque in motivating people. They fail at asking “why” questions. They fail to get ego out of the way. They fail because they grow stale.

People cling to spent learning curves for comfort or because they are afraid of the unknown. At the base of every new learning curve is a dark whirlpool of chaos. The security of the familiar must give way to the risk of failure. That’s hard. What people don’t see is that the other choice is riding the old learning curve too long on a guaranteed trip to stagnation. What they must come to appreciate is the deep satisfaction new learning brings. This appreciation starts with small efforts and grows very slowly at first.

3. Cultivating creativity. The virtues of creativity are obvious. We need more creative solutions to longstanding, intractable problems. Creativity produces a competitive advantage. Creativity adds beauty to our lives. However, long-distance leaders use creativity in a special way; it is the juice, the charge, and the healing path for them. They apply creative practices as a direct means of renewing themselves.

4. Setting guilt-free goals. Narrow, self-serving goals promote guilt. Again and again I encounter successful people who are sick at heart. The prize they pursued and won has turned to dust; the race over, they feel a dark loss. Trace elements of guilt remain in the psyche when we unconsciously outstrip our mothers and fathers, when we have so much when others have so little. Rooting out guilt can be hard work, even when awareness dawns. Practicing goal setting mindfully to avoid menacing guilt is a solid investment in prevention.

New goals cannot be put in place until the clarification of some old issues takes place. For each person, the way is different. For most it is sufficient to recall explicit parental expectations, stated or unstated, that still linger behind the curtains of daily performance and whisper, “That is not good enough.” Some people need psychotherapy to throw their beasts to the ground; for others, small, daily practices of mindfulness are sufficient to keep guilt out of goal setting.

5. Developing strong psychic and spiritual immune systems. These include optimism, gratitude, humility, and altruism. It serves no useful purpose to separate out the toxins that harm the soul from those that weaken the psyche. When our spirit is sick, we are sick all over. There appear to be four elements to the immune system of the spirit: an earned optimism, an abiding gratitude, a deeply felt humility, and an exercise of altruism. I have deliberately stayed away from the word love, so hammered and worn it has become, but all of these elements contribute to acts of love or give rise to its expression.

6. Accumulating teachers, coaches, and mentors. It is always surprising to find how few people continue to enjoy the pleasure of learning under the wise gaze of a superb teacher. All long-distance winners treasure the company of learned people and go to great effort to find it.

The practices of long-distance leaders are neither exotic nor trivial. Renewal is the overarching goal, and there are no shortcuts. Each practice has the prospect for great satisfaction and provides the motivation needed when the flag touches the ground.

Reprinted from personal excellence, March 1996.