Leaders In London

A little reminder of the learning from Leaders in London 2007 - a clip of former Disney and Paramount supremo Michael Eisner on how punishing mistakes will lead to mediocrity. There are more clips from some of last year’s speakers, including Steve Levitt, Andrew Zolli and Marcus Buckingham here

Posted on behalf of
Leaders in London
by
Phil Dourado of
The Leadership Hub

Tom Peters, the business guru, says this promo for Dan Pink’s new book is one of the coolest you’ll ever see. In the 2000s, the animating question at work, says Pink, is WTF? What is work for? What is the new workplace contract that will engage people? The author of A Whole New Mind is coming to Leaders in London to run a one day masterclass on ‘whole brain’ thinking.

A lot of leadership lessons have come out of NASA over the years.

Teamwork and innovation

Leadership and innovation consultants often remind their clients that NASA would get two teams to compete on coming up with an innovative solution to a problem and that the competitive element accelerated the innovation process, for example.

Connecting everybody’s job with the overall mission, vision and purpose

And then there’s the probably apocryphal story of JFK visiting NASA HQ at Houston and stopping to talk to a man with a mop in the corridor and asking “And what do you do at NASA?” to be answered by the janitor with “I’m helping put a man on the moon sir” - often used as an example of connecting people’s everyday jobs with the overall purpose of the organization and how critical it is for leaders to do that.

Set the vision even if you don’t have all the answers already

And, of course, there’s the famous promise by President Kennedy to ‘put a man on the moon before the end of the decade’ when the technology didn’t exist to do that.

I heard once from Mike Harris, who was founding CEO of the UK bank First Direct, and who was originally a scientist specialising in boron chemistry (and who is a brilliant organizational leader in the mould of Jim Collins’ Level 5 leadership) that Kennedy’s scientists said, among other things “But, we don’t even have a fuel that can take us to the moon and back!” And the answer was “Go and invent one, then”, which led to the creation of a whole new field of chemistry - boron chemistry - which led to the creation of the right fuel. Now, I’m not a scientist so I hope I’ve remembered that right and not garbled the science.

But, we also learnt from NASA about crisis leadership

If you’ve seen the film/movie Apollo 13, you know what I mean. If we leave aside for the moment the tragic subsequent deaths in the space shuttle years later, the way that the NASA team at Houston was led to save the lives of the astronauts in Apollo 13 after an explosion in the oxygen tank - using duct tape, plastic hose and cardboard to rig up a contraption to increase the oxygen (or decrease the carbon dioxide - can’t remember) in the Lunar module so they didn’t run out before landing - was inspiring crisis leadership at its best - with everyone in the project team taking the lead at different times under the guidance of the overall team leaders to do what seemed impossible.

It was April 17th 1970 - 38 years ago today - that the Apollo 13 lunar module splashed down safely.

We spend so much time planning, writing procedures, training people in competencies and so on for leadership. We forget how leadership in the field, in real life, often comes down to improvising with the resources you have available. And we forget just how powerful the ability to improvise can be in leaders at all levels during a crisis.

Posted on behalf of
Leaders in London
by
Phil Dourado of
The Leadership Hub

I was just thinking about this, this morning: There’s a scene in the movie Casablanca that is an example of Jim Collins’ Level 5 leadership (modest, unassuming, ego-lite leadership that tends to go unsung and unnoticed, but has deep effects in creating longterm success).

The movie is set in French-controlled North Africa (Vichy, hence German-controlled really) during World War II. When a group of German soldiers start singing about the Fatherland in Rick’s nightclub, around the piano, the French people in the club, their homeland occupied, look downcast.

The resistance leader husband (Paul Heinreid?) of Ingrid Bergman walks up to the band and tells them to play the Marseillaise. The band leader glances across at Humphrey Bogart (Rick), sitting at a corner table. Bogart nods imperceptibly (well, it’s perceptible to the band leader; stop being so picky).

It’s his nightclub. This is a big risk for him to take. It’s a hidden act of leadership. The band starts playing the Marseillaise, gradually drowning out the German soldiers as, led by the resistance leader, the audience stand up one by one and noisily sing along. The German soldiers give up. For now.
This has always been one of my favourite scenes in a movie and I have always thought that the grandstanding leadership of the resistance leader - admirable though it was - inspired me less than the little nod given by the hidden leader in the corner, who let it all happen, taking on a risk to himself and his livelihood, and took none of the credit for it.

That’s just one kind of leadership. As Rene Carayol taught us at last year’s Leaders in London, there is no leadership template to aim for, no set of competencies to learn to become the perfect leader. As the marketplace teaches us, he said, uniqueness and difference work. Sameness (as in the identikit leadership development courses people are put through) won’t make you an inspirational, stand-out leader. Being yourself, however, will. See the post about Bill George’s latest book, below, on ‘authentic ledership’. And come to Leaders in London this year to learn how to…be more yourself, I guess.

Posted on behalf of
Leaders in London
by
Phil Dourado of
The Leadership Hub

60 Second summary of Bill George’s latest book on how to be an authentic leader:

1. Leadership is about what makes you different; there is no perfect model of a leader
2. Stop trying to act like a leader; think ‘leadership’ not ‘leader’
3. There are five dimensions of authentic leadership: Purpose; Practising solid values; Heart; Relationships; Self-discipline
4. Engage people’s hearts and minds behind the organization’s purpose, rather than behind an individual leader
5. You can use authentic leadership to become a market leading organization; it’s about high performance, not about being ‘nice’ for the sake of it

Longer summary (and a critique) here: Leadership books

Bill George is speaking at Leaders in London later this year

Just a reminder that it was 40 years ago today that the world lost a great leader, at just 39 years old, in Martin Luther King. If you haven’t yet viewed the moving and inspirational speech Robert Kennedy made on that night, it’s below.

A little story I heard our Leaders in London conference chair Rene Carayol tell, he having heard it from Rudy Giuliani, two-time Mayor of New York, who is coming to speak to us at this year’s summit: Giuliani’s father took him to see Dr. King speak, saying in advance something like “I want you to see what a dangerous man sounds like. America has to be careful of people like this.” After they’d both listened to Dr. King speak for a little while, Giuliani’s father leant down to him and said something like “Forget what I said. You are listening to a great, great man.” Giuliani says there were tears in his father’s eyes. Just to remind us that the best leadership moves and inspires us.

Here’s Robert Kennedy on that night forty years ago. Professor John Kotter showed us this speech at Leaders in London 2006 and told us a story of the hidden acts of leadership behind this public face of leadership that night. Over 100 American cities saw riots that night in outrage and grief at Dr. King’s death. But not Indianapolis, thanks to this speech and the other acts of leadership orchestrated by Kennedy in the background, involving 100 young campaign supporters of his who went out into the city after this speech as peace emissaries, with the job, Kennedy told them, of looking for trouble spots, and comforting and consoling people who were fiercely angry, and reminding them of what Dr. King stood for. The screen is dark for thirty seconds as the cameraman was taken by surprise:

Posted on behalf of
Leaders in London
by
Phil Dourado of
The Leadership Hub