Disruptive Leadership

New year, new administration, global and domestic outlook not so nice. I've been reading lots of blog entries recently and everyone I'm reading is trying to find an upside. Umair Haque's new rules for creating value in a changed world are an example. ("Innovating from Constraint in the Developing World"; "Detroit's 6 Mistakes and How Not to Make Them") If a business can no longer succeed using old paradigms in established markets, it now looks to new markets and (one hopes) reshaping its paradigm to exploit that market. Haque is not alone in his advise, just a cogent voice worth heeding. And yet I wonder what business leadership makes of it all.

I'm reminded of previous market downturns, and the businesses I was working in at the time. Invariably, I found myself in a boardroom in which the company's leadership worked diligently to locate itself on the life cycle curve, and redefine what its 'real' business was (as in: 'We're not in the buggy whip business; we're in the business of motivating horses!") so to better frame its marketing. None of those businesses actually re-invented itself, although they survived the specific downturn -- and later, it all seemed rather foolish. The new mission statements and value propositions didn't necessarily leverage the business out of the general economic muddle, but coming up with them did focus the leadership on something positive -- so there was no doubt some benefit to the employees in hearing a message of hope and sustainability.

But actually what's needed now is disruptive leadership: breaks with the past and past assumptions. As I read thought leaders such as Haque, I'm reminded (again) of the Zander exhortation to choose to live in a world of abundance, rather than scarcity. As we look forward to what can only be an extended period of economic recovery, it is too easy to feel the world has contracted, and one's immediate world diminished. And yet, that viewpoint is simply one choice of many. Shifting your perspective 45 degrees, you can just as easily see a world of abundance. It does force you to put the world you're used to viewing on pause, and step out of the frame to shift your perspective. What's required is innovation leveraging constraint to create abundance. In recent history, businesses have routinely outsourced their 'innovation' to consultants, as if this is something that can be purchased. What's needed is not Cliff Notes; you have to do the work yourself. This is an exercise that does not reward years of industry experience - not knowing that you can't do something should have a premium, it seems to me.

Leaders need to think outside the boardroom. Get into your teenage mind, when you were so much smarter than the dead men in your history books, and were feeling absolutely bullet proof and so much more confident than the person you became 10 years later. You weren't thinking about mortgages and daycare and surviving the annual review. Along the way you accepted the world of scarcity. What if you let go that illusion, and re-entered the world of abundance you once abandoned?

This week I've been listening to Beethoven's 5th and 7th Symphonies, and found my heart leaping at the beauty of this very familiar music that was made completely new for me. Conducted by Benjamin Zander, the orchestra created a world in a different time: same notes, different tempi. This seemingly subtle change recreated the work; it was as if I was hearing the music for the first time. Change your personal time signature; explore the new associations created from disruption and unlikely juxtaposition; change the world.

Through the looking glass

Reading this morning's newspaper was an odd, Alice-like experience. First, alarmingly, a story that carries on the madness of using drugs for cosmetic enhancement: the pharmaceutical company that brought you Botox is now marketing its glaucoma drops for growing longer eyelashes. It sometimes seems that I've stepped into the darkest, most dystopian science fiction novel of my youth. I'm appalled by what seems our essential stupidity and superficiality.

But then, a story that took my breath away, in awe of the courage of Afghan schoolgirls (and their parents and teachers) determined to continue their education despite being terrorized and disfigured by acid attacks a month ago.

“My parents told me to keep coming to school even if I am killed,” said Shamsia, 17, in a moment after class. Shamsia’s mother, like nearly all of the adult women in the area, is unable to read or write. “The people who did this to me don’t want women to be educated. They want us to be stupid things.”

How transformative it would be, to refocus our scientific endeavors from the trivial and cosmetic, benefitting few in insignificant ways, to solving problems that would benefit all of humanity and leave the world better for it. But that would require us not to 'be stupid things.' That may be a tall order.

Mother's Little Helper

A Commentary ("Towards responsible use of cognitive-enhancing drugs by the healthy", Nature.com, 12/7/2008) in Nature's online magazine has generated a lot of discussion off- and online in the past month. The latest I read was an opinion piece by Judith Warner in The New York Times, which is a thoughtful response and yet fairly typical in addressing the Commentary's argument that this use is 'morally equivalent' to other cognitive-enhancing behaviors such as drinking coffee, getting enough sleep, exercising etc. I'm not particularly interested in the moral reading of using drugs to enhance mental performance. I'm much more interested in the nature of these enhancements.

According to the authors, the drugs (such as Ritalin, Adderall, and Provigil) act as stimulants that improve a healthy person's alertness, focus and memory use. People who need a short-term brain function 'enhancement' -- such as students taking a final exam or a physician on night call -- would, for the sake of argument, benefit. And so, in the popular mind, these are now 'smart pills': if use of these drugs help a student perform better on a test, why shouldn't we all take them to be the best we can be? The authors even state "..many different kinds of employee may benefit from enhancement and want access to it...".

So, apparently, did Arthur Conan Doyle believe that cocaine enhanced his fictional detective's already considerable mental faculties. In the 1980s in the US, this drug's popular use in creative fields led to heartbreaking losses and - more mundanely - some truly awful creative work. The syllogism is thus: John Belushi was brilliant; he did drugs; doing drugs makes you brilliant. May I suggest that anyone who fails to see the fault in that logic will definitely NOT benefit from taking cognitive-enhancing drugs?

My worry is not that this is the beginning of profligate use of drugs by healthy people, or that the bar for being 'smart' will become unattainable for those who can't afford the drugs. I worry that this argument will result in over-stimulated, under-disciplined brains that over-value their own brilliance.

The kinds of problems we rely on employees to solve in most workplaces do not require the cognitive feats of a student taking a final exam. The ability to access memory banks is not a premium in the workplace, where data is a few clicks away on the office file server or the Internet - you really don't have to remember it all and you don't get extra points if you do. The problems in business cannot be solved by a textbook: how do we increase throughput while decreasing costs? what will it take to capture more market share? how can we increase engagement and retention of staff? Businesses struggle with problems daily, and rely on the brainpower of their people to solve those problems. When a business does more struggling than solving, it's usually not because they lack the caffeine, or because they don't have enough geniuses on the payroll. But how do the people they employ use their native intelligence?

At least a generation of workers has been nurtured by an educational system that has taught to the test: memorization has had primacy. During this time, the obsolescence of technical knowledge has occurred with unprecedented speed. We've rewarded those students who were best able to commit to memory data that have a half-life of maybe a couple years. Teaching students how to synthesize ideas, how to make their thinking more plastic, how to apply rigor to critical thinking -- these efforts cannot so easily be measured, and therefore are not valued. And yet, aren't the problems we need to solve in industry and in the world just the types that require more than memorization -- they require flexible, inventive minds that work in a structured manner. They require the ability to work on problems over lengthy periods of time, much longer than the duration of a drug dose.

Of course, this type of cognitive enhancement is not on offer from the pharma industry. Unfortunately it's not regularly on offer from our educational system either. As long as we're happy to accept our lot as consumers of other nations' inventions, we can take our pills and feel OK about that.