Seeing Is Believing

A bionic eye – or – more accurately, a retinal implant has been invented by scientists at Stanford University in California. Implants currently used in patients need to be powered by a battery but this new bionic eye is powered by light.

The new device uses a special pair of glasses to beam near infrared light into the eye which powers the implant and sends the information which could help a patient see. The glasses are needed as natural light is 1,000 times too weak to power the implant.

The Stanford researchers say their method could be a step forward by “eliminating the need for complex electronics and wiring”. The retinal implant, which works in a similar way to a solar panel, is fitted in the back of the eye.

A pair of glasses fitted with a video camera records what is happening before a patient’s eyes and fires beams of near infrared light on to the retinal chip. This creates an electrical signal which is passed on to nerves.

Because the bionic creation is thin and wireless, the surgical procedure is much simpler than in other retinal prosthetic approaches and researchers think that this new development promises the restoration of useful vision to patients blinded by degenerative retinal diseases.

You might think that this is a good way to link into a blog about creating a vision but we were thinking more about seeing as a leader sees. For us, an essential characteristic of leadership is the ability to see things differently – an ability which illustrates the importance of vision over short-sightedness.

One of our favourite stories of leaders seeing things differently is the example often quoted concerning Tom Watson Jr., the CEO of IBM between 1956 and 1971. Watson repeatedly demonstrated his abilities as a leader and the story in question concerned a young executive who having made some bad and costly decisions was summoned to Watson’s office where he fully expected to be fired. As he entered the office the young executive said “I suppose after that set of mistakes you will want to fire me….”

Watson was said to reply “Not at all young man, we have just spent a couple of million dollars educating you.”

A characteristic of leadership is to see things differently. Seeing mistakes as an investment in learning is a great example.

Things that get in the way of us seeing things differently include our obsession with more data, more analysis, more measurement and more process which leaves little space for intuition, creativity and the bigger picture. We look to employ people who are masters of the spreadsheet, rather than for their different skills and experiences. It is a recipe by which companies will converge to sameness, for incrementalism, and ultimately for irrelevance.

Ask Kodak, the market leader in photographic film for many decades, who within a handful of years found that their market had disappeared, swallowed up by alien digital worlds led by the likes of Sony and HP. They had not even been on their radar screen, until it was too late.

The essence of leadership is to apply intelligence in a more imaginative way. Imagination is required to see the uncharted waters, the bigger picture, to drive more sustainable innovation and differentiation.

Recent research shows that companies led by a leader that sees the complex interaction of external drivers generate 5.9% better shareholder returns than those led by people with an inside-out, operational perspective.

Seeing things differently sets apart the good from the great. They have yet to develop an implant that you can buy to deliver the sight of a leader and so until that happens it’s going to take some practice…….

Less is More

In a previous Zeitgeist blog we talked about Google’s patent for driverless cars which was granted back in December 2011. Well now driverless cars have taken a further step forward and will soon be a reality on the roads of Nevada after the state approved America’s first self-driven vehicle license.

The first to hit the highway will be Google’s modified Toyota Prius which continues to lead the way in driver-less car technology. Patent experts note that Google’s patent will not prevent others developing rival self-drive vehicles and indeed all the major manufacturers are investing large sums of money to develop their own versions of the vehicles requiring little human intervention.

The Prius’s first drive included a spin down the famous Las Vegas strip. According to software engineer Sebastian Thrun, the car has covered 140,000 miles so far with no accidents, other than a bump at traffic lights from a car behind.
Nevada changed its laws to allow self-driven cars in March. The long-term plan is to license members of the public to drive such cars. Google’s car has been issued with a red license plate to make it recognizable. The plate features an infinity sign next to the number 001.

This got us thinking about the need for managers and leaders within teams – the parallel between driverless cars and leaderless teams. There are a number of supporters for the concept of leaderless teams – the premise being that the contribution of the manager towards team success is debatable at times. Sometimes, it is even considered as counter-productive.

They suggest that a team usually works towards a common objective and common result and that when there is a leader, the organizational objective is seen as the leader’s objective. The task completion is the goal of the leader, whereas a team member’s role is usually only a part of the goal. That is why team members often get disenchanted and disassociated from the objective.

Leader-less teams area concept that organizations such as Toyota have had great success with. The majority of organizations however stick with hierarchical structures. Here at Zeitgeist we have no issue with leaderless teams where they have been able to work but we often see clients considering such situations as an antidote to a lack of strong team leadership. Investing in leadership development and ensuring that the development is applied as intended still brings greater reward in our experience.

A strong leader works hard to ensure that the whole delivers more than the sum of its parts through effective communication, good planning, a clear vision, clear accountabilities and empowering practices.

For us at least the role of the leader remains critical to organizational success. For transportation on the other hand it appears we are entering a new paradigm. For the back seat driver this new world delivers a whole new challenge…….

Complexity, Chaos and Confusion

You are sitting at your desk and yet another email notification pops up in the corner of the screen, you have a meeting in 20 minutes and you suddenly feel as if you’re swimming in a sea of impenetrable data, and you’re beginning to sink.

Welcome to the 21st century workplace…..you are under siege.

According to Dr Lynda Shaw you are not alone. Dr Shaw is a neuroscience and psychology lecturer at Brunel University. “I’ve been interviewing a lot of senior business people lately, and they’re actually hiding… because they’re frightened they’re going to be asked questions they can’t answer, so they’re delaying making really quite important decisions,” she says.

“When we feel overwhelmed we start to delay making decisions.” Dr Shaw says this is a symptom of the computer age. “We’ve really seen this incredible amount of information flooding us constantly. The problem with information overload is really new to the human brain.”

Staggeringly the rate at which we are bombarded with data on a daily basis is increasing exponentially and according to Cisco’s Visual Networking Index, average global IP traffic in 2015 will reach 245 terabytes per second, equivalent to 200m people streaming an HD movie at the same time every day.

Within the next three years, there will be nearly 15bn network connections via devices and nearly 3bn internet users, which constitute more than 40% of the world’s population.

So our world is full of mind numbing complexity and this resonates most with us in terms of modern leadership ability. The modern leader needs to deal with complexity on a daily basis.

Leaders that can adapt to their surroundings will survive and indeed thrive. An inability to adapt, to bring clarity to complexity or agility to ambiguity will see the individual struggle and an ineffective leader, without exception, creates an ineffective team.

Complexity tends to generate stress, confusion and other negative emotions. Fragmentation is one way people attempt to handle complexity. They try to master the situation by sealing off a part from the whole. Unfortunately, in complex situations all parts are interrelated and cannot meaningfully be isolated. Persistently concentrating on a part of the situation only heightens the negative emotions.  Another response to complexity is control, but complexity doesn’t let itself be so easily controlled.

The most senior roles deal with complex market or industry dynamics, possibly a global scope and extended timeframes. They place heavy demands on managers’ ability to handle strategic, complex and ambiguous issues. This is not just about ‘intellectual horsepower’ or ‘IQ’. Some leaders can score highly on standard reasoning tests yet still have difficulty in handling complex or strategic issues. This becomes further complicated when mapped against a backdrop of accelerating change in terms of technology and the competitive environment.

Better leaders manage complexity on behalf of their organizations by simplifying operations and increasing dexterity to change the way they work.

Leaders have two possibilities – they can simplify complexity and they can capitalize on complexity. Simplifying complexity is a coping mechanism to bring order and control to the situation and thereby reducing anxiety. Capitalizing on complexity on the other hand involves creative leadership by for instance inviting disruptive innovation, encourage others to drop outdated approaches, and to take balanced risks.

In short, capitalizing on complexity involves taking on the challenges and opportunities complexity presents. So view complexity as an opportunity rather than approach it with a siege mentality.

The Chicken and the Egg

A Sri Lankan hen has given birth to a live chick without laying an egg, in a new twist on the age-old question of what came first – the chicken or the egg. The egg was incubated inside the hen for 21 days and then it hatched inside the hen.

The chick is fully formed and healthy but the mother hen has been less lucky having died from internal injuries caused by the unusual and unique birth.

The government veterinary officer in the area said he had never seen anything like it before. P.R. Yapa, the chief veterinary officer of Welimada, found that the fertilized egg had developed within the hen’s reproductive system, but stayed inside the hen’s body until it hatched.

This question has caused consternation to man for centuries. Ancient references to the dilemma are found in the writings of classical philosophers. Their writings indicate that the proposed problem was perplexing to them and was commonly discussed by others of their time as well.

Aristotle (384–322 BC) was puzzled by the idea that there could be a first bird or egg and concluded that both the bird and egg must have always existed. More recently, intellectuals such as Nietzsche suggested that there is repetition of time. His assertion was that time is eternally repetitive, and therefore, there is no “first” in eternity; there is no creation. The answer then becomes that neither the egg nor the chicken is first. There is no “first” in a cyclical view of time.

In 2010 Researchers from Sheffield and Warwick universities in England thought that they had cracked (pun intended) the question when they discovered that the formation of eggs is possible only thanks to a protein found in chicken’s ovaries. That means eggs have to be formed in chickens first.

The chicken and the egg question bites us as leaders too. When trying to address a problem we are often times faced with the dilemma of potentially having to go first…… In these scenarios it is often less risky to wait for others to go first and then for us to jump on the proverbial bandwagon. But what if nobody moves? When is the tipping point reached when it is down to us to go first?

We are faced with such dilemmas frequently but of course as leaders we need to be brave. We need to have the fortitude to lead – to go first, to do the right thing and to lead from the front. Our regular readers and clients know one of our favourite sayings in coaching is “Lead, follow or get out of the way”. To be a successful leader you need to lead – it’s really implied in the title…..

Going first is a burden of leadership. It is a requirement. It is the role we are paid to carry out. So next time something needs to be done in your organization, don’t spend time on the chicken and egg conundrum. If it needs to be done, don’t wait for others. Regardless of whether you are a chicken or an egg, as a leader you need to go first no matter how hard that might be.

Leaders lead, others follow. The chicken and egg question may continue to baffle scholars but for us as leaders the answer is clear. Taking the lead and going first is our accountability.

Lead, follow or get out of the way!

On the tenth anniversary of the launch of Google, the company has been awarded a US patent for the ‘self driving car’.  The intellectual property rights relate to a method to switch a vehicle from a human-controlled mode into the state where it takes charge of the wheel.  It explains how the car would know when to take control, where it is located and which direction to drive in.

The application for Transitioning a Mixed-mode Vehicle to Autonomous Mode was applied for in May, but had been hidden from public view until this week.  Patent experts note that Google’s patent will not prevent others developing rival self-drive vehicles.

“This patent, which is effective in the US only, would only be enforceable to prevent other companies from using the same specific method and not to prevent other companies also providing autonomous vehicles in general,” said Andrew Alton, a patent attorney at Urquhart-Dykes & Lord.

Apparently Google has been testing a fleet of driverless cars for several years.  The test cars have travelled along Highway 1 between Los Angeles and San Francisco, over the Golden Gate Bridge and elsewhere. Two humans were on board at the time – one to oversee the driving and intervene if necessary, the other to monitor the equipment from the passenger seat.

On hearing this, we here at Zeitgeist got to thinking about the ‘self driving organization’ – a Nirvana state where everyone understands where to focus and leadership to drive the organization becomes just an outdated business practice.  Then we remembered that unlike a technical object with no feelings, conscience and will, human beings are significantly complex beings that require leadership to maximize their potential.

While the concept of organizational self-governance has been studied for years, perhaps the Brazilian firm Semco SA is the only organization to have successfully managed industrial democracy with any degree of success.  Ricardo Semlar’s organization has been visited by many major companies and yet the move to copy the model has been non-existent despite the growth and financial rewards achieved by Semco through their model.

To this end then, it seems like we are destined to continue down the investment in leadership path as we deal with complex adaptive systems more commonly labeled as humans.  The move away from command and control to more of a self governing culture is certainly more appropriate for the latest generation of employees but for us at least, leadership and good governance is here to stay.

Experts say driverless cars could become a commercial prospect sooner than most people believe.  For leaderless organizations the prognosis is not so good…

Zeros to Heroes

The worst soccer team in the world has won their first game…ever!   The US protectorate of American Samoa battled to a 2-1 victory over Tonga, after 30 straight defeats, to claim their first victory in their entire twenty year history.

Prior to this performance they were famous for being on the wrong end of the worst soccer defeat in International Football history, when they crashed to no less than perpetual football under-performers Australia, by the incredible score of 31-0 back in 2001.

So, on this Thanksgiving weekend here is one team that has a lot to be thankful for and observers at the match likened their celebrations to those of a team that had won a World Cup or Champions League title!  And, as an estimated 45 million Americans travel this weekend to celebrate with a turkey dinner, there will be a small community of Samoans perhaps enjoying the occasion that much more.

The story is an inspiring tale of relentlessly pursuing results despite continual set-backs.  At times we visit clients where many set-backs have been experienced and it appears (certainly to them) that they are never going to win.  How then do we coach them to maintain the focus and motivation to keep going?

The answer is as complex as it is simple in concept…  Vision.

Having a clear vision of the desired end state is key.  By focusing on the end game, the result or the future state (call it what you will), the leadership team will retain the faith that they are doing the right things and, like our American Samoan friends, eventually get the win.  We often mention the ability of leaders to see the future threats of Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity and Ambiguity as espoused by the futurologist Bob Johansen.  By doing so we can focus on the antidote – Vision, Understanding, Clarity and Agility.

The modern leader needs to be relentless in pursuit of the vision and the results… It is, after all, the results that count!

As for American Samoa it is yet to be determined if this run of form will continue beyond the one game winning streak but we will be watching the forthcoming results closely.

History Lessons?

We’ve often said in this blog that ‘change is the new normal‘, so we thought this brief list might be of interest:

• A volatile financial and economic crisis.
• The ‘corporatization’ of national politics.
• An increasingly vocal ‘disenfranchised 99%’.
• Increasingly ineffective political leadership – particularly in Europe.
• Growing nationalistic rhetoric.
• Rampant insider trading and overt market manipulation.
• Sudden bank runs driven by a collective loss of confidence in the banking sector.
• Demands for cash bailouts from China after ‘friendly’ economic partners fail to respond effectively.
• The manipulation of border controls leading to mass migration.

Although it might look like a precis of last night’s news, this is the backdrop to James Clavell’s Noble House – published 30 years ago, in 1981 – A fictional novel closely based on life, business and politics in 1963 Hong Kong.  The close parallels with current events suggest that, as ever, there is much to be learned from the events of recent history.

However, if we were to add to this list the latest news regarding the US re-militarization of the Pacific, growing pressure on the Syrian government from the Arab League and the ‘systemic crisis in of the Eurozone‘, it appears that not only is ‘change’ perpetual but that the rate of change is accelerating.

Finally, if the underlying global situation can change so dramatically, so continuously, is it any surprise that ‘change leadership’ and ‘change management capability’ are considered to be the essential, differentiating, skills of the modern leader in business?

Keeping Track

From all tragedies we can learn many things.  But, nonetheless, it’s still a shame that it sometimes takes a tragedy to re-focus a business on what is important.  So it is with the case in the UK of the Grayrigg rail crash in Cambria back in February 2007.

The enquiry report published this week points to a poorly maintained stretch of track which caused a train to derail at 92 mph and the sad death of one passenger and 88 others injured as the train left the tracks and crashed down an embankment.

David Lewis, an engineer with the company, broke down in tears on Monday when he told the hearing he had forgotten to inspect the track near where the crash happened.  He said he was “under pressure” when he failed to check a section of the rail line five days before the derailment.

Colleagues confirmed to the inquest that staff had to put up with “bully-boy” management and that the inspection team was under-staffed, not given the right tools or given sufficient time to carry out the necessary and prescribed track checks.  Even more concerning was the fact that Mr. Lewis has previously advised his management team of his concerns with the failures in process and inadequacy of the situation in maintaining a safe rail network.

As leaders we need to take note of such tragedies and the many others like them.  Clearly all businesses face pressures of hitting targets, driving down costs and meeting investor expectations but the focus needs to be on the right things.  Ignoring front line staff concerns, not providing the right tools and not addressing failures in core processes can only lead to failure.

For most of us failure comes in the form of lost revenues, increased costs or staff attrition.  A rail network and similar dangerous industries have higher stakes and people can and do actually lose their lives.

So next time you feel under pressure to take a short cut, ignore a subject matter expert’s concerns or feel the need to drive your employees beyond what is reasonable, take a moment to reflect and consider the consequences.

One of our key mantras here at Zeitgeist is “do the right thing” in all situations.  If you know, understand and do the right thing, results will follow.

Europe’s bad haircut

This week, Europe’s leaders are holding an emergency summit in Brussels aimed at tackling the eurozone debt crisis.  The meeting will try to agree a plan that was thrashed out at the most recent in a series of summits convened to address the eurozone’s problems.

In the past year, problems have spread from Greece to the Irish Republic and Portugal, to Spain, and to Italy. Now, even France is beginning to look vulnerable.  As a result, many commentators are of the view that the outcome of this meeting will determine the future of the single currency in Europe.

Once again the situation is described as ‘being on a knife edge’, with the potential economic ramifications, both for the EU and the rest of the world, profound.  And yet there still appears to be a basic lack of consensus amongst Europe’s leadership over the true situation and how best to address it.

At this stage many areas of disagreement remain and many issues still need to be ‘fixed’, including; how best to expand the European Financial Stability Facility (better known as the bailout fund for debt-ridden countries), how to reduce Greece’s debt mountain before it is forced to default and how to protect those banks that are vulnerable as a result of lending to highly-indebted countries.

Of course, the situation is further complicated by political self-interest.  A sub-plot to all the discussions is the realization that a ‘bad deal’ for their own country would dramatically shorten the career of the leader in question.  This is at the heart of the row between France and Germany over Greece’s “haircut”.  In essence, Greece will simply be allowed to pay back less than it actually borrowed. This means those institutions that lent money to Athens will have to write off some of the money they are owed.  France is concerned because its banks have lent more heavily to Greece, and are therefore more exposed, than those in Germany.

So, here we are: a continuing lack of consensus regarding the ‘true’ underlying situation; no agreed plan to address the root causes of the issues; disagreement over priorities and urgency; stakeholders still promoting their own interests ahead of the greater good; systemic slow decision-making and, most worrying, no respected, unifying leadership.

If the EU was a business, its days would be numbered.

Independent Amendment

In the US during the hot and sweltering summer of 1776, members of the second Continental Congress travelled to Philadelphia to discuss their frustration with British rule.

By the 4^th of July, America’s founding fathers approved a simple document penned by Jefferson that enumerated their grievances and announced themselves a sovereign nation.  We know this document today as the Declaration of Independence – the founding of a new empire.

It was also totally illegitimate and illegal… or at least that was what lawyers from the UK argued during a debate at Philadelphia’s Ben Franklin Hall on Tuesday night.  The event pitted British barristers against American lawyers to determine whether or not the American colonists had legal grounds to declare secession.

While undoubtedly an interesting debate, we drew parallels in business where we often see client organizations debating at length decisions or issues made in the past that are either irrelevant to the focus on key results or where there is no chance to change the decision that has been made or it is an outcome that cannot be influenced or amended.

Spending time debating such issues is fruitless, unproductive and frankly costs money.  It is also too easy to become victim to past decisions and to blame today’s performance on things determined in the past outside of your tenure or sphere of influence.

We like to remind our clients of the act of driving in such circumstances.  There is a reason that the windshield of a car for looking forward is far bigger than that rearview mirror.  While it is important to remember the past, the good leaders are those that can keep it in context, understand the influence on today’s circumstance but maintain perspective.  The past is not always a good predictor of the future.

If you are interested at all, the final debate vote fell in favour of the American argument, perhaps unsurprisingly bearing in mind that the event was held mere yards from where the original Declaration was drafted…