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Leadership

Collective Wisdom or Collective Folly: What Do you Nurture as a Leader?

I often say “we are smarter than me,”… referring to the increased capacity, deep wisdom, creativity, and solid decisions that groups of people can make – as opposed to one individual acting in isolation. No matter how smart that one person is, in general they will be “outsmarted” but a group of people. That is, of course, if that group of people can work together effectively.

Briskin, Erickson, Ott, and Callanan examine the phenomena of group decision making in their book, The Power of Collective Wisdom: And the Trap of Collective Folly. They answer how groups can come up with novel and powerful solutions to intractable problems at times – and at other times wallow in cobbled together solutions that are amazingly awful.

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Leadership

What Organizations are Unlearning

WARNING: If you love bureaucracy, you’ll hate this post. If your life is consumed with climbing the corporate ladder, this post will give you a splitting headache. If you are in what is considered a “safe” occupation (HR/accounting/law) – be prepared to be unnerved.

This is a follow-up to my post about unlearning. Here, you’ll learn what you might need to unlearn about how organizations operate and the work done within them. The content of this post draws both on my personal experience with a variety of organizations I work with, and the work of Frederic Laloux and his book, Reinventing Organizations: A Guide to Creating Organizations Inspired by the Next Stage of Human Consciousness.

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Leadership

Is Holacracy a new organizational structure that will catch on?

In November 2014, Tony Hsieh, the CEO of Zappos, the billion dollar on-line shoe retailer, announced the company was moving to holarchy, an organizational structure with no job titles and no managers.

Instead of the typical hierarchy, fraught with bottlenecks, slow decision making, and concentrated power, the company will be organized into 400 circles, with each circle having a number of roles. The intent is “radical transparency” and extreme adaptability. In this model, the CEO has less power and all employees are expected to lead and to act entrepreneurially. Zappos and its 1500 partners (you and I would call them employees) will be the largest company to date to attempt this type of organizational structure.

Let me explain what I think works with this model, as well as what bothers me about this model.

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Dynamics

Do Emotions Have a Place at Work?

I had a recent conversation with a leader in a large company who made the statement, “It would all be better if only people would just come to work and do their work, and leave their emotions at the door.”

It’s not the first time I’ve heard that sentiment – but this time it really caused me to pause and wonder. Would it really be a better place? Here’s what I think about emotions and work.

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Leadership

Being First

There are many life and leadership lessons to be learned in nature – both in actuality and in metaphor. One occurred in my yard this week.

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What India Traffic Taught Me

I’ve walked, taxied and driven in most major US cities. I’ve experienced my fair share of NYC cab rides and Chicago traffic jams. None of this prepared me for moving about in India. Here’s what it was like and what I learned from it.

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Evergreen Leadership