Blog

Halftime in America: The power of story

Posted on February 23, 2012 by David

A day or so ago on the Harvard Business Review Readers discussion group the topic was posted:

What did you learn from the best Super Bowl ad?

Clint Eastwood

The Super Bowl is a huge marketing showcase… of which a few commercials stood out. Watch them. Also, please share your favorite and why it is!

I didn’t see much of the Super Bowl live and I caught up with the ads later. The standout was Clint Eastwood’s Halftime in America (Youtube Direct Link). Here’s my take on why:
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Posted in Change, Leadership | Tagged analogy, Clint Eastwood, community, desire, Halftime in America, narrative, narrative truth, seamless success, shareholder value, story-telling mammals, Super Bowl, trouble | Comments Off

Complex Systems – Learning from A River

Posted on February 21, 2012 by David

The Mississippi River

The Mississippi river complex drains the heartland of America, exiting, as everyone knows, below New Orleans. The river, its catchment basins, flood plains and deltas comprise a complex system that has evolved over the eons to deal with change. Huge fluctuations in rainfall and snowmelt are handled by allowing the plains on either side of the main channel to flood and the main channel itself twists and winds whenever the local topography permits it. On the flat plain the river writhes like a serpent. Continue reading →

Posted in Change | Tagged Army Corp of Engineers, Atchafalaya, complex systems, Katrina, Mississippi, Mississippi delta, Mississippi floods, New Orleans, systems, wetlands | Comments Off

The Fusion of Ideas: Welding Imagination to Experience

Posted on February 16, 2012 by David

A combination of two or more different frameworks can lead to a creative fusion of ideas

The Fusion of Ideas

In a recent HBR blog, Bronwyn Fryer, a contributing editor to hbr.org , put out a call for what she called “idea fusers”. She pointed out that great inventions are often the result of the fusion of ideas from very different domains. Steve Jobs said that he fused calligraphy with technology to produce Apple’s elegant fonts. Rent the Runway is the mash-up of high-end fashion and a Netflix-style rental scheme. She wondered why more firms didn’t hire the kind of people who could do this in-house, rather than farming out the work to firms like IDEO. She was concerned that society has placed too much value on specialists, people with deep knowledge in particular areas, who then “put fences around their fields of expertise”. She lamented the decline in humanities education and the liberal arts and with that the passing of the generalist, who can think broadly across a variety of different fields. She wondered whether firms should consider hiring people from more diverse backgrounds, both social and intellectual…

What follows are my comments on Bronwyn Fryer’s post:

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Posted in General | Tagged 3M, Anglo-Saxon capitalism, cooperation and collaboration, creativity, ecologics, egalitarian teams, fission-fusion, Google, herding dynamics, horizontal thinkers, hunting dynamics, IDEO, innovation, Jump Associates, Mitt Romney, neoclassical economics, power hierarchies, Rent the Runway, T-shaped thinkers, vertical thinkers | Comments Off

Command and Collaborate

Posted on February 14, 2012 by David

Helmuth von Moltke the Elder: expert practitioner of mission-based command

In a recent HBR blog, INSEAD Professor Herminia Ibarra reported from the World Economic Forum in Davos. The theme of the meeting was “The Great Transformation: Shaping New Models”. As far as leadership was concerned, she wrote that the emerging solution seemed to be a “yes/and” model that embraced the need for leaders to be both more decisive and more collaborative and inclusive. She suggested that “command and collaborate” might become the mantra for a new leadership model. But, she said, we don’t have to reinvent leadership, just add some new elements to the old model. I agree entirely with her first point – we need a “yes/and” model – but not with the second. It is going to take a fundamental reconfiguration of the model. The New Ecology of Leadership does just this and develops in some detail an ecological management model that shows why and how to do it. What follows is my comment posted to her blog:

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Posted in Leadership | Tagged both...and, command and collaborate, constructivism, critical theory, Davos, ecological management model, either/or, German General Staff, Helmuth von Moltke the Elder, mission-based command, Toyota Production System | 1 Comment

Scribblings from the Garret

Posted on February 7, 2012 by David

Welcome to my blog, the launching of my new website, and the pre-launch publicity for my forthcoming book, The New Ecology of Leadership: Business Mastery in a Chaotic World.

In his January/February article in Foreign Affairs, The Future of History: Can Liberal Democracy Survive the Decline of the Middle Class? Francis Fukuyama points out the lack of left-wing, populist mobilization in response to the global financial crisis of 2008 and attributes it to a failure in the realm of ideas. There is no “progressive counternarrative” to the neoclassical economic doctrines of the libertarian right that have led Anglo-Saxon capitalism so meekly to deindustrialization, the threat of a “Great Stagnation” and the destruction of the middle class. “Imagine, for a moment,” he writes, “an obscure scribbler today in a garret somewhere trying to outline an ideology of the future that could provide a realistic path toward a world with healthy middle-class societies and robust democracies. What would that ideology look like?” He then goes on to suggest that it would have to reassert the dominance of democratic politics over economics and the ending of powerful interest groups’ domination of politics. It would not be a denunciation of capitalism, but a critique of the variety of capitalism being used and a new vision for the role of government in helping societies change. Continue reading →