Paradigm shift of leadership - What do YOU think?

Leadership in the Web 2.0 world

The evolving Web lately seems to spur some new understanding of leadership. A number of authors refer to a shift in culture, from one-way, hierarchical, organization-centric relationsips toward two-way, network-centric culture, participative and collaborative relationships (Shirky, 2008, Tapscott 2010, Hagel 2010, Li 2010, McGonagill/Doerffer, 2010).

The cluetrain manifesto was the book that heralded of the game-changing nature of Web 2.0 (Levine/Locke/Weinberger, 2009). Proposing the „end of business as usual“ in its book sub-title, the authors advocated that companies could no longer exert control over markets and delivering messages. Instead, they needed to figue out how to enter the global conversation, accepting „openness, decentralization, fallibility, messy context-rich information and sound of the authentic voices of individuals“(Levine/Locke/Weinberger, 2009).

In Here comes everybody Clay Shirky calls the developments of the Web a revolution and compares it to the invention of the Gutenberg press. He makes the argument that „we are shifting from closed and hierarchic workplaces with rigid employment relationships to increasingly self-organized, distributed, and collaborative human capital networks that draw knowledge and resources from inside and outside the firm.” He highlights that the collapse of transaction costs in the Web enables the new social tools to spur actions which had been impossible before (Shirky, 2008).

Supporting that patterns point to a new paradigm, Don Tapscott speaks of “age of collaboration”(Tapscott 2008a). In their bestseller Wikinomics Tapscott & Williams (Tapscott/Williams, 2006) see emerge new models of production in light of profound changes in technology, demographics and global economic powerful which are built on community, collaboration and self-organization, much less than hierarchy and control. Followingly in MacroWikinomics (Tapscott/Williams, 2010) they challenge to rethink fundamentals about education, media, industry and rebooting the public square. They argue that industrial age institutions brought mass production of goods, which functioned “on a centralized, one-way, one-size-fits-all mass model controlled by powerful owners of production and society”. A new force of “mass collaboration” is underway where social networking changes forever not only the way products and services, but also become a more encompassing societal shift. In core they advocate for 5 new principles to succeed in the new environment of rapid change by embracing collaboration, openness, sharing, integrity and interdependence (Tapscott/Williams, 2010).

While Charlene Li (2010) encourages leaders how to be “open” while maintaining control to tap into new resources and transform their organizations with the power of social technology, John Hagel advocates for a Power of Pull (Hagel/Brown/Davidson, 2010) to draw out the best in people and institutions by connecting people through three levels of pull- access, attract and achieve.

McGonagill/Doerffer (2010) observe the emergence of a new paradigm for leadership as more and more apparent in the two decades of rising Web impact, having analyzed a vast number of pioneer examples. The authors name seven indicators of the paradigm shift: The new leadership paradigm defines leadership rather as an activity and collective process, pointing to shifts from organization-centric to network-centric leadership and recognizing organizations as “organisms” where learning and adaptation call for new levels of leadership capacity. This requires most of all a mind-shift as well as new skills, knowledge and “Fehler-kultur”.

Buhse & Stamer as well as Reinhard identify the shift of mindset as most critical in Web 2.0 leadership. While inviting leaders to cultivate „the art of letting go“ (Buhse & Stamer, 2008), the authors recognize that the new challenge of leadership is to foster the best efforts of individual contributors and nurture the emergence of the highest possibilities from the collective. Reinhard underlines as key element in all Web 2.0 change the importance of authenticity and „walking the talk“ (Reinhard, n.d.).

German network guru Peter Kruse identifies the complexity as the greatest challenge in the Web-world. In order to successfully cope with complex dynamics of the internet and overload of information, he advocates that it is most important to recognize higher-level patterns (Kruse n.d.). He identifies this as a vital element to highl-level collective intelligence..Kruse concludes that „the more people are interested in the dynamics of society and the more they are able to detect underlying pattern-formation processes, the greater becomes the amount of distributed knowledge needed to gain collective intelligence“(Kruse, n.d).

What do YOU think?

for more information see "reader leadership: approaches-development-trends, part V:

www.bertelsmann-stiftung.de/leadership or /fuehrung

Participation = higher effectiveness*motivation: Workplace Democracy in the Lab

Workplace Democracy in the Lab

"Groups of workers that voted to determine their compensation scheme provided significantly more effort than groups that had no say in how they would be compensated."

Check out this interesting study, which just came out: http://ftp.iza.org/dp5460.pdf

Despite the difficulties to produce empirical evidence, it seems that a team of scientists at Middlebury College in Vermont and Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA), Bonn, Germany notably succeeded to prove that "consistant with intuition, allowing groups of workers to participate in determining the compensation scheme for their group increases effort significantly."

 

Scientists developed a behavioral experiment in which 180 subjects were able to earn money by solving math problems. The participants were divided into groups of three. Half of the teams could decide by majority vote whether the jointly produced profits staggered in equal parts OR to be paid to individucal employees depending on their performance. The other half had no influence on the compensation model.

It clearly showed that participants who could determine the model were more effective and motivated: they worked an average of seven percent more and increased productivity, as measured by the number of correctly solved tasks by nine percent. It did not matter, for which wage model, the group had decided.

 

Philip Mellizo / Jeffrey Carpenter / Peter Hans Matthews:

Workplace Democracy in the Lab, IZA Discussion Paper No. 5460

http://ftp.iza.org/dp5460.pdf

James Turell- feeling something, something come through light, come through space.

I have just been spending the afternoon reading the entire catalogue of James Turrell "Zug Zuoz"after recently having seen his skyspace in MoMA PS1 in New York. His reflections about light, seeing and being....outside-inside-outside light

"Even in the skyspace you are not looking even at the light; you are looking at what the light does to the sky. so this idea of the presence of light, making it physically felt to feel its power, you can't use it with image because then you're paying attention to the content or story. you can move through time with this light, as in music. ... Pianists can even sometimes go beyond what the composer was mapping out. and in mapping the territory, these people can very elegantly express that territory. So I see this quality of light without image as having the possibility of having a sort of inner pure emotion, or perhaps a stricter and more direct way to the idea of an expression of how to survive. you can begin to get toward that way of feeling something, and feeling something, something come through light, come through space... The big thing is that it's something we don't see a lot of, coming, moving through volume, just this color coming from behind, through the front, and then the color that's expressly part of it....I mean if you have something that has no image, and maybe there's no particular object, and nothing to focus on- so without image or object or focus what is there, you know?...It comes from nothing; and then, nothing is not nothing, emptiness in not emptiness...."

"I generally make a light that we don't normally see; I like that. Now we're looking at light. We're not looking at what light reveals about somethings else. Light is not illuminating another thing. We're looking at the light itself. "

"It's just like the skyspaces are a gentle reminder, or a mild koan - a koan being the Zen question that doesn't really have an answer about how we create the reality in which we live, because we color the sky but we are very unaware that we give the sky its color. and it is only becaus we give the sky its color, that I am able to change the color of the sky for you. ... We are not so much of how much this reality, this thing we receive is actually created by us....It is this idea of how much we ourselves make of this reality within which we exist."

That what people in leadership call the "inner place- a capacity that sets apart one person/leader from the other- that the same situation and actions can have two completely different outcomes, depending on that inner starting point." Otto Scharmer

Seize and enjoy this outside-inside-outside light!!

James Turrell 2009

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:James_Turrell-Zuoz-048.jpg

Book www.hatjecantz.de/controller.php?cmd=detail&titzif=00002602&lang=en or AMAZON

David against Goliath: "wikileaks mirror" is another breakthrough phenomena of web 2.0 & leadership

  

Within few hours the wikileak contents were copied by many more sites than Wikileaks had called for. The initial 50 pages were reached quickly, reaching nearly 100 in the early evening. The sites included peoplerule.info, wikileaks.geekview.be, wikileaks.the-secret-world.info. The names of many of these sites "are program". 

What is happening? Disregarding the fact what you think about Wikileaks, there seems to be something deeper going on. 

It is David against Goliath. Nation states, multi-national companies, international organizations gearing up to mute Wikileaks. But this seems to produce the contrary effect. Even more sites are adopting the content and splitter it throughout the entire net. 

It is about leadership. No longer a clear one-way, organisation-focused and often hierarchical leadership can trump and curtail the network-oriented, multi-way, distributed leadership of the wiki and web-world. 

Whatever you think and agree or disagree with Wikileaks- this is no longer a phenomena about news and transparency. This is the start of a fundamental discussion about leadership in a web 2.0 world.

I am curious to check out how many sites will be listed when I wake up tomorrow.

http://213.251.145.96/mirrors.html

session #3: Don Tapscott talking about Macrowikinomics & leadership

Landscapes of leadership session #3: Don Tapscott talking about Macrowikinomics and his understanding about new leadership paradigm.

"Future is to be achieved not predicted"

Enjoy! Interview with Prof Edgar Schein - "Helping & Leadership"

Why do crucial and vital items of information only get to decision makers too late or not at all? How can you ensure "upward und lateral communication" in your own context? What is "helping", what are the three roles of helping? What is "humble inquiry" in a leadership role and what do you achieve with it?













Edgar H. Schein, Professor emeritus of the Sloan School of Management / MIT, is one of the co-founders of organizational psychology and organizational development. Following his ethnological and socio-psychological studies and PhD in organizational psychology at Harvard, Schein developed the practice of process consultation and coaching. He is the author of numerous publications on process facilitation, analysis and development of organizational culture as well as career anchors.  Together with Warren Bennis and Chris Argyris he was a trainer at the National Training Lab and led a leadership research program for the US Army. From 1956 until 2004  he was professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

Spread your wings and fly

The young albatross always flap, wiggle and move their wings. They are exercising. Exercising for the one day when they are going near the end of the cliff. And then, then take a leap and spread the wings and fly.

One story i would like to share captures very well, i think, what i am referring to-- and at the same time is a parable for many other things we can do:


This week i was at this birthday party of a dear friend. A friend who means a lot to me, has inspired me and reminds me every day to " shine a light". Frances Hesselbein, long time CEO of the girl scouts for America.

I had volunteered to contribute to the evening with something personal- to sing German lieder, Schubert, Beethoven...you know. What I did not know at the time was that there would be rather 140 people than the 20 I had anticipated. What I also did not know was that General Shinseki was giving a birthday speech shortly before I did. And what I did not know was that there would be no piano or band who would accompany me as the set up of the room did not allow for this.

So here i was- the albatros at the cliff. 
And i felt that the only way to go, was the way to go ahead -- and spread my wings, trusting that they would carry me.
I sang- For frances and " for my life". beethoven and brahms.

In the first piece by Beethoven, I experienced some glitch. A very difficult musical cliff to manoeuvre. Reflecting what to do- as much as you can if you are singing- i decided to pull ahead. Maybe some people would notice, some others would not. And there was no music after all, so even that glitch seemed somehow ok.

The second song- was brahmas lullaby " guten abend gute Nacht". 
I felt that there was just the room and one option- to perform, in the literal sense. 
And all of the sudden there it was: the stream of air and aerodynamic. 






And I flew.

I flew and sang in a way, i dare say with all humbleness, that i have never heard me sing before, nor ever thought i was able to do. 

I barely remember anything else as i also felt my leg trembling, so nervous i was. But then suddenly i heard the People in the room softly humming along. A clear breeze and air stream. It made me smile.


And i flew and flew and flew.
It was an amazing feeling to see that i could do something i never thought I could.


So what is it that drives me to writ this?
I guess it is the strong feeling of encouragement and transformational experience I was so fortunate to experience. 

THAT is what it is all about: yes, exercise and practice. But then one day when it is time, and some may refer to it as the call, trust your abilities and spread your wings and fly.

Trust your abilities and discover what you are here to do......
And take a leap and spread your wings and fly!