The Next Generation of Leadership

Provocative perspective . . . quantifying states of mind to create viable, sustainable businesses.

While anecdotal evidence, today's proliferation of social sites, Twitter and a like, provides insights into the mind state of a vast variety of potential customers from teens to seniors.

Such social sites allow a glimpse into the psyche of various groups - I bet F. Scott Fitzgerald or Wm. Shakespeare would find diamonds among the drivel.

A man's dream is that if he can get enough information, he can understand and influence emotions and ultimately change behavior. As a man married to a brilliant, beautiful woman for 40 plus years, there is nothing further from the truth, and unfortunately for us men, women are the ultimate consumer.

An organization's success, including Gallup's, will be built on finding individuals (like Marcus Buckingham/First Break All the Rules and Bill Gates and Art Fry) and letting them run with their often scary and unorthodox ideas.

1. I agree with the notion that there has been few advancements in leadership in recent future however leadership based on the behavior economics is small thinking. Our world is made up of profit, not for profit, government, military and educational institutions, large and small, requiring a much larger disruptive thinking model to accelerate change.

2. I don't believe that process improvements have achieved as much as Jim has referred to in the article. Just pick up the phone and call your local government office, visit your local doctor, send your children to school, or stay at a hotel and you'll see rampant process failure. (GE does not represent the 100's of thousands of organizations in the world.)

The US Government failed operationally in the execution of the Cash for Clunkers program throughout the entire program. Our physician's office notified our family that they had the flu shot available for our children and when my wife arrived for the scheduled shots, they had made a mistake in their count and did not think to notify any of the scheduled patients. In the past two hotel stays this past week, at hotels were the rooms are $250 to $2000 per night, the staff forgot to deliver the newspaper and to make an important wake up call. I could make a list of a hundred such occurrences in just the past week.

3. The next wave of leadership advancement will be about improving the leaders ability to think. The work will be based on improving decision making accuracy in selecting the best decisions and the speed of leadership and management thought.

David Goldsmith
MetaMatrix Consulting Group
david@davidgoldsmith.com
Author of the soon to be released book Paid to Think 2010

This resonates with my experience with both nonprofits and corporations. The only addition I would make is to your comment on marketing. The reason leaders are unable to use marketing to convince their publics of a pathway is not just because the media market is so fragmented.

Media is fragmented, but it is because the old model of "one-way push" messaging is not accepted any longer. Now, communications must be be two-way, interactive and come from a perspective of the "we" rather than us and them. This fits perfectly with your position of the need for leaders to understand and measure the emotional behaviors of their audiences and make sure their messaging is in sync with that. The best way to do that is with interactive, open communications.

Interesting take -- I agree with many points, but disagree with the assessment of Process Improvement. There is much inconsistency among training and deployments (not even GE got it "perfect"), but if you accept the broad definition that Lean, Six Sigma, Lean Six Sigma are the scientific method (iterative process between the subjective and objective), then behavioral economics is a specialization of the mathematical improvement strategies, such as Six Sigma.

I agree, we definitely need to get better at hearing and understanding our customers state of mind, but that is not a problem of the methodologies, but of the understanding and execution of these strategies. Hopefully "behavioral economics" can shed greater insights on this aspect of process improvement.

I believe this also parallels some of the work I've seen in "retail anthropology", which is another fascinating specialization.

Thanks for provoking some great thoughts and interactions!

-craig d. crook
linkedin.com/in/craigdcrook

The old concept of the successful CEO being a History or Political Science major had an exceptionally fine track record. Richard Sennett's "Culture of the New Capitalism" goes into the necessary value of corporate culture over the bottom line. He points out that efficiency and cost containment has negative impacts on the enterprises future. As a survey researcher with 35 years experience, I have observed that future trends, especially changes, can be predicted more effectively when the researcher understands cultural cycles, nature of human attitudes and the impacts of of similar historical events as well as economic and/or survey trends facts and/orresponses.

A well written argument. And Gallup has an obvious vested interest in suggesting we collect lots of data in an attempt to change consumer behavior. Unfortunately, changing and manipulating behavior has become the lingering dream of quixotic brick-and-mortar types who don't see what's going on out here.

In this real world, the most we can aspire to is authentic engagement with consumers. Anyone who uses the Internet effectively can always find some new way to take ownership of their life and choices. And they are becoming increasingly expert at spotting any attempt to manipulate or change their behavior.

An interesting perspective that I agree with as long as you define a process independent of people. But of course a process is not, and adding people and their "states of mind" to a process creates a leadership challenge that cannot be solved only with Lean or Six Sigma, or only looking at states of mind. I beleive the next generation of performance improvement will come from treating enterprises and their relationships with customers and vendors as adaptive complex systems with performance issues that cannot be solved with linear equations or approaches.

Leadership is not about being predominantly process-oriented or people-oriented. Leadership is about being amazing at the art of the dance. What is that “dance?” It is the place where the sociological “people-side” of the organization successfully integrates with the technological “process –side.” This is the true challenge. Very few leaders have strengths in both arenas. They are either extremely socio oriented or extremely techno oriented. What it takes is truly learning to be open to both sides and then finding out how you can navigate successfully in not just the middle ground, but truly be able to surround your leadership with a team that is powerful in both arenas.

I agree that the focus on efficiency with Six Sigma/Lean etc has brought us to the end of an era of sorts. If you are a company that is focused on that and done it well, it has become your new normal and there is not another initiative left to make improvements in that area. My worry the way Clifton talks about it is that this statement is clearly a macro point of view, but there are so many industries and organizations that have not taken full advantage of these tools - that I believe his statements are not accurate for more than half the organizations left doing business. I see organizations losing their focus due to staff cuts and poor leadership - so many have taken steps backward and their new reality is that they don't do the basics well any more.
What people need to take from this article is that leaders have to know the 'pulse' of their people, and with social networking providing a tool to swing the pulse quickly one way or another, the importance of communicating(talking AND listening) well is even more important to leaders.