The Leader's Guide to Radical Management

Audio recordings of Smithsonian Symposium April 16 now available

Audio recordings of Friday's Smithsonian symposium Storytelling to re-invent the workplace are available here: http://bit.ly/9LTMFb

The final session about the future role of storytelling was particularly interesting and relates to the discussion here.

Some people saw storytelling as something to do in organizations but not to talk about it.

Some saw storytelling as an explicit leadership tool

Some saw storytelling as a way to transform the workplace into something more people friendly.

Paul Costello made the interesting suggestion that we need for an analytic framework to ensure that positive storytelling was encouraged and the de-humanizing storytelling was identified and discouraged.

More on this shortly.

Why did I abandon storytelling and get entangled in management speak?

One reader has written to me asking: “Why have you abandoned storytelling? Why have you in the last eighteen or so months allowed yourself to be drawn into 'management speak' and that has diluted the impact of your original approach that was so special, attractive and accessible to the many people who do not read management books and who are not comfortable with that vocabulary?”

Fair question. Why did I get entangled in all this management gobbledygook? Why did I abandon the pure air of storytelling and wallow in this horrible swamp? Why did I abandon storytelling and start talking about a strange thing called radical management?

In 2008, looking back over the previous ten years, I saw that I had had considerable success in promoting storytelling in organizations, had inspired and trained many individuals and had established oases of excellence in many organizations.

Yet... if I was honest with myself, I also had to admit that storytelling had not yet entered the mainstream, even in organizations where it was flourishing. In fact, it was vulnerable to the efforts of some new "manager" who would come in and close it down, and re-establish the "tight ship" that he/she had been taught about in business school.

This happened over and over. It wasn't just storytelling. It was knowledge management. It was innovation. It seemed that anything good and creative was in jeopardy from these "managers".

So I started to ask myself: why is this? Why is this happening? Why did "managers" act this way? Why were they proud of doing so? How did they get away with it? Why didn't anyone stop them? It made no sense.

So I began exploring: Is there any way to make the world safe for storytelling, a world where storytelling, and innovation and other good things would be honored, a world where if someone came in closed things down, everyone would stand up and object and explain why that didn't make sense?

So that's what I have been working on for a couple of years: understanding and describing this alternate universe.

I have to come to see that making the world safe for storytelling involves a shift from solving a simple linear puzzle to tackling a complex undertaking that has no single right answer. These traditional managers are taught in business school to look at the world as though the goal of an organization is producing a certain quantity of goods or services: success is finite and under management’s control.

In a world that is safe for storytelling, managers have a different goal: delighting clients. The goal is no longer finite and under management's control. The goal can only be approached by increasingly close approximations: it can never be fully attained or assured. As a result, making the world safe for storytelling implies a fundamentally different way of thinking, speaking and acting in the workplace. For want of a better term, I have called this different way of thinking, speaking and acting "radical management". Is that term jargon? If there is a better term, I would like to know about it.

Traditional managers are continually trying to reduce the world to a finite puzzle, and this is what is so debilitating and inimical to activities like storytelling and innovation. More enlightened managers accept the complexity of the world and embrace its mystery. They are two different ways of looking at the world and they have very different results.

Some people have said that this is a very binary way of looking at the world. My reply is that in this area, I think that there is a difference in kind. It’s not a continuum, with everything a matter of degree. Traditional management is about finding the solution to a puzzle. Radical management is about solving a mystery. Malcolm Gladwell has written about this in The New Yorker: http://www.gladwell.com/2007/2007_01_08_a_secrets.html

I will try to avoid jargon, although it is a continuing battle. I have been pressured for instance by to stop talking about "delighting clients" and instead talk about "continuous value innovation", even though the former term is intuitively intelligible, while the latter is not. I am told that CEOs are not comfortable talking about delighting clients. So be it. In that case, they won't like my book, because the book only talks about delighting clients and never mentions continuous value innovation.

Some people, particularly managers, are horrified by the idea of radical management. I am getting the kind of looks that I got, years ago, when I first started talking about storytelling in organizations. I am inclined to think that that's a good sign.

In any event, I haven’t abandoned storytelling. It is a key element of everything I am talking about in the new book. I will keep trying to do better.

The problem with servant leadership

David Brooks in the NYT has another plea for humble servant leaders.

“Extremely self-confident leaders,” he writes, “can ..be risky. … charismatic C.E.O.’s often produce volatile company performances. These leaders swing for the home run and sometimes end up striking out. They make more daring acquisitions, shift into new fields and abruptly change strategies. Jim Collins, the author of “Good to Great” and “How the Mighty Fall,” celebrates a different sort of leader. He’s found that many of the reliably successful leaders combine “extreme personal humility with intense professional will.”

The term “servant leader” was coined and defined by Robert Greenleaf and supported by many leadership and management writers, including James Autry, Ken Blanchard, Stephen Covey, Peter Block, Peter Senge, Max DePree, Larry Spears, Margaret Wheatley, Jim Hunter, Kent Keith, Ken Jennings and others.

Servant-leaders achieve results for their organizations by giving priority attention to the needs of their colleagues and those they serve. In order to be a servant leader, one needs the following qualities: listening, empathy, healing, awareness, persuasion, conceptualization, foresight, stewardship, growth and building community.

All of these elements are common to both servant leadership and radical management and represent strengths of the term, "servant leadership."

However I believe that the term, "servant leadership" has some inherent limitations as a catch-all phrase for 21st Century leadership. .

·        Inward vs outward looking goals: The goal of the servant leader is inward looking while the leader of the 21st Century needs to be outward looking. Thus the servant leader aims to “make sure that other people’s highest priority needs are being served. The best test, and difficult to administer, is: Do those served grow as persons?” The focus on helping the people doing the work to grow. By contrast, the goal of the 21st Century leader is not merely to meet their needs of the people doing the work and help them grow, but rather to delight the people for whom the work is being done. In the process of accomplishing that, the people doing the work will normally grow, but that’s a result, not a cause.

·        Energy level: As formulated by Greenleaf, being a servant leader about serving people and is relatively passive. Our image of a servant is that of subdued behavior in the background: who ever heard of a servant being exciting and inspiring? Being a 21st Century leadership means taking active steps to delight other people, and is inherently energizing and exciting.

·        Subservience: The servant leader is explicitly supposed to be “humble”. According to the dictionary, “humble” carries an implication of “a feeling of insignificance, inferiority, subservience.” 21st Century leadership can bear no such implication. The 21st Century leader is neither humble nor arrogant. “Arrogant” would be counter-productive, but “humble” risks not getting anything done. The modern leader is active and insists on the principles of radical management,. There is no implication here of humility or arrogance: these are simply basic assumptions of the world of radical management.

·        Boring: Being a “servant leader” is teeth-grindingly boring. Radical management is about delighting clients and having fun with a capital F. Work should be “more fun than fun,” as Noel Coward said.

Those are serious limitations of the term, "servant leadership" as a catch-all phrase for 21st Century leadership. It’s boring. It smells of the Jimmy Carter school of leadership. Solid. Dutiful. Moral. Yes, but it will have difficulty getting anyone’s pulse beating faster or taking us into the future.

The leadership of the 21st Century is about generating excitement and delight for clients, as well as growth of the people doing the work. It's about having the courage to look into the abyss of an unknown future and be willing to go there and inspire others to do so as well. The leader is open to other ideas, including the certainty that a proportion of what he or she believes firmly to be true is false. The leader is outward looking and neither humble nor arrogant—simply open-minded.

To learn more about radical management that inspires people to undertake deep change and creates genuine meaning and delight in people's lives, read The Leader's Guide to Radical Management: Reinventing the Workplace for the 21st Century .

What’s the blueprint for radical management?

Someone asked me yesterday for “the blueprint for radical management”. My answer was that the question makes no sense. It reflects a failure to understand the nature of radical management.

The word, "blueprint" implies the mechanistic depiction of inanimate things that characterizes traditional management. It implies that we can think about, and treat, people like things and still expect them to respond wholeheartedly and give their best every day.

To think that you can "engineer" the continuously innovating organization from a "blueprint" is to make a category mistake. Thus you can have a blueprint for a complicated thing like an airplane or a motor car or a command-and-control organization in which people are treated like things, but not for something complex like a flower or a continuously innovating organization that is practicing radical management.

Radical management involves a fundamental recognition that we are dealing with a complex, interactive living entity. It cannot be engineered. It has to be grown. So the word "blueprint" is inappropriate. There is no blueprint, any more than you can have a blueprint for a flower. This doesn’t mean we don’t know how to grow a flower or how to make a continuously innovating organization happen. To grow flowers, we follow the principles and practices of gardening.

To grow a continuously innovating organization, we follow the seven principles and seventy-plus practices of radical management. If we follow those principles and practices, our organization will grow into one that continuously innovates, provides deep job satisfaction and client delight.

But I'm sorry: there is no blueprint. We have to learn to cleanse our minds of such mechanistic thinking.

To learn more, go here http://bit.ly/99cZhP

Storytelling weekend: A conversation with Madelyn Blair

Last Saturday, I talked with Madelyn Blair about the upcoming storytelling weekend that takes place next week on April 15-17, 2010 in Washington DC.

Madelyn will be speaking on Friday April 16 about her new book and the seven principles of radical learning. On Saturday April 17, she will be talking about the "how to" of radical learning.

In the interview, she also talks about what the storytelling weekend has meant for her and how it has evolved over the ten years. Very interesting.

You can listen to the conversation with Madelyn here (15 mins, 3 megs, mp3)
http://www.stevedenning.com/audio/MadelynBlairApr3-2010.mp3

Not yet registered for the weekend?

The event is filling up. So don’t miss out. Register now at:

Thursday April 15:
http://residentassociates.org/ticketing/tickets/reserve.aspx?performanceNumber=219428
Friday April 16:
http://residentassociates.org/ticketing/tickets/reserve.aspx?performanceNumber=219477
Saturday April 17:
http://gfstoryconference.com/

Rational grounds for radical optimism

David Brooks in the NYT writes a column that is “a great luscious orgy of optimism,” in contrast to 60% of Americans who think the country is headed in the wrong direction: http://nyti.ms/b8hEga

According to Brooks, “In sum, the U.S. is on the verge of a demographic, economic and social revival, built on its historic strengths. The U.S. has always been good at disruptive change. It’s always excelled at decentralized community-building. It’s always had that moral materialism that creates meaning-rich products. Surely a country with this much going for it is not going to wait around passively and let a rotten political culture drag it down.”

The fly in Brook’s ointment of optimism remains not just a “the rotten political culture”, but traditional management in established organizations that has failed to generate practically any new jobs in the last 25 years: http://nyti.ms/cnXcam

When the managerial practices of most large organizations—the places where most people work—are sucking the life out of their employees, frustrating their clients and failing to innovate, one can see why would most people have questions about the direction of the country. The reality is that management is broken.

I share Brooks’ optimism—but if, and only if, organizations embrace a radically different management that ignites continuous innovation, deep job satisfaction and client delight: http://www.stevedenning.com/Books/radical-management.aspx

Manage your established firm like a startup

Research at the Kauffman Foundation suggests that in last 25 yrs, startups—firms less than five years old—created 40 million US jobs, while established firms created almost none. 

Thomas Friedman in the New York Times argues that the key to creating more jobs is to create more startups: http://nyti.ms/cnXcam

However that’s only one of two possible approaches.

The other: start managing the established companies like startups. In effect, start practicing radical management. 

Startups have to delight their clients, otherwise they never get off the ground. Established companies start to think that they don't need to bother--something management textbooks and business schools confirm.

Result: established firms start practicing traditional management and begin a slow decline in creativity, even as they appear to be making money. Often the money they make comprises "bad profits", i.e. profits that are undermining its long-term prospects.

The solution: keep focusing the entire organization on delighting clients by continuously innovating. That's what I call radical management:

http://www.stevedenning.com/Books/radical-management.aspx 

What can Hans Christian Andersen teach us about the Roman Catholic Church?

When I was writing my new book, The Leader's Guide to Radical Management, I happened to mention the Roman Catholic Church in a positive sense of an organization that had been successful for a long time with relatively flat management structure. I got a torrent of heatedly negative comments: how could I possibly cite such an organization as a positive example, given what’s happened! Some of the comments seemed to reflect deeply felt personal wounds.

More recently, when I referred in Twitter to the Roman Catholic Church in somewhat less positive terms, I was told that I was being rude and that I should go and re-read the Bible before I dared to say anything negative about the head of a religion.

How can we look at such an organization in a clear-eyed objective fashion?

The reality is that if you want a good example of traditional management on display, one need go no further than the Church’s dealing with the pedophile scandal. The Pope may not be a CEO, but he's certainly acting like a traditional manager. The Pope’s inability to say anything long, adequate, sincere and the role he played is simply typical CEO traditional management! “Why are people criticizing us? The devil is making them do it!”

Seriously.

Maureen Dowd suggests they need sexorcism, rather than exorcism: http://nyti.ms/aH3rvW

Sadly, the Pope and his entourage are doing what traditional management has always done in a crisis: circle the wagons, say black is white, and if anything is wrong, it's someone else's fault!

In 1837, Hans Christian Andersen advanced our understanding of the phenomenon with his tale, The Emperor’s New Clothes. The tale has a familiar part and an unfamiliar part.

The familiar part is that the emperor of a prosperous city is swindled into buying an imaginary suit of clothes. The cloth, he is told by a pair of scoundrels, is invisible to anyone who was either stupid or unfit for his position. The emperor cannot see the non-existent cloth, but says that he can for fear of appearing stupid; his ministers do the same. When the scoundrels report that the suit is finished, they pretend to put on the suit of clothes. The emperor then goes on a procession through the capital showing off his new "clothes". During the course of the procession, a small child cries out, "But he has nothing on!" The crowd realizes the child is telling the truth. That is the familiar part of the story.

The unfamiliar part of the tale is that the truth that the child has inadvertently blurted out makes no difference. Neither the emperor nor the attendant nobles pay any attention to it. The emperor holds his head high and continues the procession, as do the other courtiers. The charade continues.

Thus Hans Christian Andersen put his finger on a key feature of all hierarchies: the mere exposure of falsehood doesn’t put an end to it or change behavior. False statements that support the power structure of a hierarchy have precedence over true statements that put the power structure in question. Everybody in the power structure tends to go on acting as though right is wrong and black is white: that’s because their own role in the power structure depends on defending it.

Radical management is about doing the opposite: when something goes wrong, admit responsibility. Get to the root cause. Fix it before damage gets worse—much, much worse. 

If you would like to learn more about radical management and the new workplace, you might like to consider registering now for the Smithsonian symposium, April 16, 2010 in Washington DC: http://bit.ly/5SMWMN

Best stories from 10 years of GF/Smithsonian storytelling weekends

The tenth storytelling GF/Smithsonian storytelling weekend is coming up in just a few days on April 15-17, 2010.

Naturally, after ten years of these events, we have been tempted to look back to see what has been accomplished. It’s been quite a journey. In 2001, it was like, "Wow! Storytelling? Can that be used within the workplace?" Now we are looking not just at how to use storytelling within the workplace, but also: how can we use storytelling to transform that workplace?

Madelyn Blair, who has attended all ten of the annual events, was talking to me yesterday about her three favorite moments since 2001.  Her three favorites are:

1.      John Seely Brown in 2001 explaining how innovation happens :in the white spaces”;

2.      The community stories that emerged in the 2003 session;

3.      The 2007 weekend in which the theme was conversation, and questions prompted a whole lot of one-on-one storytelling.

You can listen to Madelyn here: (mp3, 3 minutes, 600kb)
http://www.stevedenning.com/audio/MadelynBlairFavoriteStoriesApr3-2010.mp3

That prompted me to think about my own favorites which are:

1.      John Seely Brown in 2001 telling the story of how he learned to (really) ride a motor bike.

http://www.creatingthe21stcentury.org/JSB4-motorbike.html

2.      Ashraf Ramzy’s story of "the perfect storm" in 2006: you can listen to it here http://www.stevedenning.com/slides/AshrafPerfectStormStory.mp3 5 megs, 5 mins

3.      Svend-Erik Engh telling The Raven in English and Russian (2008 and by popular demand, again in 2009). You can lIsten to it here (2 megs, 5 mins)
http://www.stevedenning.com/audio/SvendErikTheRaven.mp3

What are your favorite stories from the GF/Smithsonian weekends that you have attended? Would you like to share them here?

That may help to prompt some new stories that we will not only hear next week but linger with us for years to come.

Believe it or not, there are now only twelve days before the 2010 storytelling weekend. If you haven’t yet registered, you can do so here:

Thursday April 15:
http://residentassociates.org/ticketing/tickets/reserve.aspx?performanceNumber=219428
Friday April 16:
http://residentassociates.org/ticketing/tickets/reserve.aspx?performanceNumber=219477
Saturday April 17:
http://gfstoryconference.com/

Hope to see you there.

Steve