distinctive leadership | ralf schwartz

Happy Xmas! Have a Great Time Everybody Out There!

(shot by me, altered with instagram)

Thanks for reading, sharing, discussing, and - of course - following via twitter, rss-feed, eMail Newsletter or facebook.

Thanks for trying to become a little bit more distinctive, to outgrow yourself and inspire your world.

Thanks for growing into a role model for your co-workers, colleagues, and bosses.

Via baubauhaus.

 

Having said this ... ENJOY YOUR HOLIDAYS!

Yours,
ralf

Visionary Leadership by Kiran Bedi, Director General of the Indian Police

"Kiran Bedi has a surprising resume. Before becoming Director General of the Indian Police Service, she managed one of the country's toughest prisons -- and used a new focus on prevention and education to turn it into a center of learning and meditation. She shares her thoughts on visionary leadership at TEDWomen. ...

Kiran Bedi was one of India's top cops - tough, innovative and committed to social change. Now retired from the national police force, Bedi runs two NGOs that benefit rural and urban poor." (TED)

Till 03:00 Kiran talks about her background, and then begins to talk about change. Please listen carefully:

"I did not want to make it different, but it was different
- because I was different!", Kiran Bedi.

The 3 Most Basic YAHOO Leadership Learnings from Last Week

Last week's Yahoo announcement might end up to become their biggest self fulfilling prophecy ever. Announcing to close down a service might lead to people fleeing that service - and the mother services, too.

Last week's announcement was just the last management mistake in a long history. It is about time to end that by ex/changing the whole management team.

The 3 most basic leadership learnings from that are:

Understand Your Own Product Offering!

Delicious does not fit into Yahoo's longterm strategy? A bookmarking service does not fit into a search, mail, photo sharing services portfolio? Come on!

What is the value proposition of Yahoo anyway?
- What Difference does Yahoo make?
- Does Yahoo create Value?
- Would anyone miss Yahoo?

These are the most basic questions every leadership should be able to answer on the spot. It seems the Yahoo management never truly understood Yahoo's offering.

Understand Your Customers!

Just after announcing the delicious close down the Yahoo management learned about their customer's affection for delicious? Come on!

To understand the value of a service you must understand your (potential) consumers! You need to know about human's new individuality, independence, and impatience - and how to anticipate it!

If the management proves it does not know what is happening out there - and due to that does not understand what consumers think about the company's own services - you cannot trust the management anymore (and it does not matter about which of their products you are thinking at the moment).

I myself think about leaving Yahoo mail because nobody knows what will happen to mail, or search, tomorrow. I do not want to risk all my mails and connections on that bet.

But you bet there are uncounted outside thinking about the same as I do now. Why add any link to delicious, why upload any picture to flickr, write any mail via Yahoo mail?

Have a (clear) Vision!

As Yahoo does not have a clear idea about future itself, a vision about its own future development, product offering and value creation, why stay there?

A vision in its most basic definition is: to know what I want to do or achieve. Yahoo does not know. Every company without a vision does not know what to do or - even worse - why to do something!

A communicated and clearly put vision is something like a proposal, an engagement, an approach to common sense that this company, this vision, or value proposition might succeed.

Without a vision there is no meaning, no goal, no path to that (non-existing) goal. No common agreement to reach that (non-existing) goal or vision ...

Without a clear vision consumer's and employee's trust, the brand itself, the future and wealth of a company will fall apart. And that must not be obvious to everybody. Might happen in silence - until it is way to late. Until last week for Yahoo. Until next week for your company or brand?

Start creating value for the individual, adding value to the corporation now!

Don't Ask "What IF" - Ask "What If Not"

Via sinnumero

 

Sorry, the Next Coffin Nail for Traditional Managers and Politicians: Future Leaders will be Technology Shifters

“Technology has progressed more in our lifetimes than it has in the last 3,000 years,” ... “But ... we haven’t really evolved that much [and] that’s testing our limitations as human beings.”

The big question for businesses today is how they adapt to that, .. and particularly how the leaders of companies handle the implementation of technology inside their organizations, and try to help their employees evolve and succeed.

And the leaders of the future will likely be those who are flexible enough to move with those changes, rather than the people who moved up through the ranks in the traditional ways, ..."

Via Progressology.

Can you imagine our average existing business leader or politician shifting technology? Managing change for the better? Being an inspiring role model for tech's development, adaptation, and usage?

But it would be very easy! You just have to take a look around. Follow your children, partner, colleagues and friends, understand their new life. Understand Amazon, iTunes, Google, facebook, twitter, foursquare ... ie. the obvious ones to start with.

Understand the web, the infinite possibilities. Understand the combination of digitalization, the web, and mobility!

Understand people's new individuality, independence, and impatience!

Understand that nobody can stop that r/evolution! Understand that it makes much more sense to be ahead of it, than to retard it!

Understand what people's new individuality, independence, and impatience combined in dialogue, advocacy, cooperation, collaboration, and co-creation could mean for creativity and innovation, for your own business, your party, your country!

Understand what shifting technology, embracing change, creating and realizing a sustainable vision could mean for your development, success, future, wealth - mentally and physically!

Become a Technology Shifter, a Game Changer!

Addendum

Dec, 16th > 09:37hrs > ... mit seiner Ankündigung der nuklearen Sperrverfügungsoption seine Offlinigkeit dokumentiert und sich damit final in die Riege der Politikergeneration einreiht, die wegen mangelnder Zukunftstauglichkeit dringend abgetreten werden muß ..., christian koehntopp.

Seth Godin: "There's No Rigid Line between a Job and Art"

"There’s no rigid line between a job and art. Instead, there’s an opportunity. Both you and your boss get to decide if your job is a platform or just a set of tasks."

Seth Godin, Where's your platform?. Via hitenshah.

TALKTANK - A Distinctive Leadership Offering to Ad-hoc Problem Solving

2010 has shown a quite interesting uprise in intensity within my pre-consultancy discussions and meetings - and it doesn't matter, if those managers are from agencies, large corporations, or smaller commercial entities:

01 - Too many people are out there trying to sell stuff nobody needs. They do not want to solve their client's individual problems. They want to sell their standardized products, 'solutions' they call them ... They are sellers, not problem solvers.

02 - Managers sometimes just need to talk to somebody to re-collect and reflect their thinking. Talk to somebody to leave the shallows of daily business. Talk to somebody who still has a Beginner's Mind. Somebody saying 'Why not?', instead of always 'Yes, ... but ...'.

These insights of course are nothing new to the world, but made me think about a very open, individual, fast, tailor-made to the situation approach to support these managers.

I came up with TALKTANK, a dialogue format I describe at its small web presence as follows:

The Situation

You know that feeling: everybody delivers just THEIR solutions, nobody even tries to solve YOUR problems.

You need answers, no hogwash. You need to see the wood for the trees again. You need a real perspective. You need drop-dead simple and distinctive solutions.

The Solution

We talk. We discuss. We might even argue a little bit.
We add crystal clear thinking - and a Beginner's Mind.
We avoid the shallows of daily business. We reframe.
We add pattern recognition, philosophy, perspective.
We identify quick wins, solve problems, find answers.

We just add an hour or two of mental wealth to your thinking - over lunch or dinner, or a walk in the park ...

 

More than ever top management needs time and space to focus and concentrate, to think and talk without limitation. Otherwise it won't find the answers to those urging questions of today and tomorrow.

Informal markets are one of future's gold rushes, but how to identify them by being stuck in formal markets, definitions, and thinking?

Let's talktank!

Dear Business Leaders, Politicians, and Publishers, you are Mind-Bombing us back 500 Years in Time

You do not know what I mean by that headline?

Okay, a hint from wikipedia: "The high quality and relatively low price of the Gutenberg Bible (1455) established the superiority of movable type, and printing presses rapidly spread across Europe, leading up to the Renaissance, and later all around the world."

Does that ring a bell? Okay, great.

And now just replace 'Print' by 'the web' in the following few lines from a great wikipedia article on printing and you will understand:

"Print gave a broader range of readers access to knowledge and enabled later generations to build on the intellectual achievements of earlier ones. Print, according to Acton in his lecture On the Study of History (1895), gave "assurance that the work of the Renaissance would last, that what was written would be accessible to all, that such an occultation of knowledge and ideas as had depressed the Middle Ages would never recur, that not an idea would be lost".^[8]

Print was instrumental in changing the nature of reading within society.

Elizabeth Eisenstein identifies two long term effects of the invention of printing. She claims that print created a sustained and uniform reference for knowledge as well as allowing for comparison between incompatible views. (Eisenstein in Briggs and Burke, 2002: p21)

Asa Briggs and Peter Burke identify five kinds of reading that developed in relation to the introduction of print:

1. Critical reading: due to the fact that texts finally became accessible to the general population, critical reading emerged because people were given the option to form their own opinions on texts.
2. Dangerous Reading: reading was seen as a dangerous pursuit because it was considered rebellious and unsociable. This was especially in the case of women because reading could stir up dangerous emotions like love. There was also the concern that if women could read, they could read love notes.
3. Creative reading: Printing allowed people to read texts and interpret them creatively, often in very different ways than the author intended.
4. Extensive Reading: Print allowed for a wide range of texts to become available, thus, previous methods of intensive reading of texts from start to finish, began to change. With texts being readily available, people began reading on particular topics or chapters, allowing for much more extensive reading on a wider range of topics.
5. Private reading: This is linked to the rise of individualism. Before print, reading was often a group event, where one person would read to a group of people. With print, literacy rose as did availability of texts, thus reading became a solitary pursuit.

"While the invention of printing has been discussed conventionally in terms of its value for spreading ideas, its even greater contribution is its furthering of the long-developing shift in the relationship between space and discourse".^[8]

The proliferation of media that Ong is discussing in relation to the introduction of the printing press, to the death of an oral culture and that this new culture had more of an emphasis on the visual rather than in an auditory medium. As such the printing press gave birth to a more accessible and widely available source of knowledge in the sense that it broke down the boundaries between the possessors of knowledge and the masses. The narrative or discourse now existed in what would become indirectly through time, the global village."

You still think it is right, helpful, and a progress to our world, what you are doing at the moment to our future, wealth, talents, and potential by mind-bombing us back 500 years in time?

Didn't we learn anything at all?

Addendum

12:20hrs > The Fight of Governments against wikileaks is that of Incumbents Fighting Disruptive Innovation, by Tim Kastelle, via leadmarke.
22:34hrs > Kreditkartenfirmen: Ku-Klux-Klan ja, Wikileaks nein, süddeutsche.
23:54hrs > Why WikiLeaks Is Good for America, by wired's editor-in-chief Evan Hansen.

Dec, 10th > 17:22hrs > die grösste gefahr für die demokratie: gut gemeint, wirres.

A Person who is nice to you ...

Via davidtiniusrossi.