The Leaders Journey

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I believe that twentieth century scientific discoveries (from quantum physics, chaos/complexity, ecology, etc.) will spread through the social and philosophical systems of Western industrial society. New knowledge will expand our consciousness in explosive ways forming a new ecological worldview that will transform how we relate to nature, one another, and ourselves. A science based organic worldview (indigenous cultures have long had organic worldviews as have artists and mystics through the ages) will lead to personal transformations within leaders from which they will lead sustainable organizational transformations that will coevolve with a sustainable global economy and a sustainable environment.

Personal transformation is difficult. Perhaps it is as difficult as anything a human being will do in life–as a person, leader, or follower. “It is very hard work to make this personal change,” said Richard Knowles, consultant and former leader of transformation at DuPont and in the vanguard of leaders who’ve made this inner shift. “For me it was a painful journey.” This personal development requires the courage of a pioneer, the honesty of a child, the imagination of an artist, and the confidence of the naive.

The first step in our conscious evolution (seeing our potential and moving intentionally toward it) is to see reality as it is and to accept that the old ways of control, domination, and alienation are bringing forth unacceptable unintended consequences for nature, communities, and people. A moment of metanoia–a change of the inner person–is required. We pay attention and accept the call to begin a courageous journey within–resisting the system’s efforts to impose its controls on our spirits.

Richard Knowles was tough enough to climb through the ranks at DuPont to become a plant manager in Belle, West Virginia. He has a PH.D. in engineering and was a mechanistic thinker by education, occupation, and upbringing. His entry point to transformation:

I was troubled by the way we led because it seemed to be so harsh and difficult for people. I didn’t understand why that had to be. I was just in it, and I was trying to live in that system, but I had no understanding. Once I began to wake up to that, I had to break it because I couldn’t reconcile the huge disconnect. I felt like it was going to destroy me either physically or emotionally. The dominant culture is often brutal, and it doesn’t have to be that way.

Once he became aware of the cruel impact mechanical ways of management have on people, this tired warrior could not return to the archaic and failing methods. To refuse the call of his insights would perpetuate the unacceptable, and he would join the legions of the walking dead. For Dick refusal was not an option; this courageous man would not live a divided life. He chose to be authentic and began the process of conscious evolution.

The new adventurer wanders and explores in search of new insights and wisdom. By braving the unknown, the leader is energized and experiences being alive in profound ways. Richard Knowles:

I thought I was going insane, because I didn’t have anybody to talk to. The stuff we were doing at Belle was working; the work on myself was very difficult and hard, but seemed to be paying off. I had read Gleick’s book on chaos ( 1987) and said, “damn, there is something here.” Until then, my work was intuitive. It was scary as all get out; it was working, but I had no frameworks for it. I didn’t have the vocabulary.

I went to the Second Annual Chaos Network Conference in Santa Cruz, California in June 1992. I was so desperate at that point I felt, “well, I am going to go.” I told my boss I was going to an O.D. conference since chaos sounded far out. He apparently never read my expense account either. At least he never said anything because the conference was held at a place called The Dream Inn, and I just thought that was staggering. Here you are going to a chaos conference at the Dream Inn, they’ll think I’m crazy.

It was about a three day meeting and my whole world changed. Everybody there understood what I was doing. They gave me a vocabulary and a framework. I met Meg Wheatley, read her new book Leadership and the New Science, and felt like I was coming home.

The leader’s new growth is difficult and painful. The naive, curious, innocent, and courageous adventurer moves from a world of absolutes into a world of paradox. The limits of traditional thought are reached, and the seeker grows comfortable with ambiguity until new understanding emerges.

The proud achiever realizes that rigid boundaries between people must be torn down. The leader comes to realize that life in organizations is often narrow and superficial, and the importance and contribution of executives is often inflated greatly. To build trust, empathy, and understanding the humbled traveler accepts, reflects upon, and grows from feedback given thoughtfully by diverse people. Great insights come from those the emerging person might not have paid any attention to when living the elitist executive role. The trail blazer meets fellow travelers on the journey, and they provide support and encouragement. Mentors and teachers appear mysteriously at the moments they are needed and guide the learner along the way.

The lonely traveler understands how unaware leaders often are of the organization’s reality and how little truth exists in organizations. As consciousness grows, the leader realizes how little those with power know about people, leadership, and thought itself. The leader begins to see the potential that waits to spring forth from people. A growing person becomes comfortable with feeling scared and inadequate much of the time. Despite the persistence of these hated emotions, confidence grows and courage and authenticity increase. Strong resistance to change and unexpected enemies build the leader’s capacity to stand alone.

Despite the shock of seeing reality in a whole new dimension, great excitement emerges for the potential the visionary can see in the evolving picture of the future. Commitment grows and the leader’s sense of purpose is strengthened. The leader dies many deaths and emerges as a changed person. Knowing the path is uncertain and even dangerous, the leader points out the direction and will never be distracted from living the new vision of truth.

The leader finds new meaning and shares new knowledge with others. Life in the organization becomes participative to gain the wisdom in the system and to utilize the diversity needed for sustainability. The leader does not go to diversity classes. Instead, time is spent with people different from oneself, and the leader learns from the experiences.

The leader understands the importance of authentic feedback for change. A climate of openness exists, decisions are made on merit, and it’s okay to be real. Turbulence is encouraged, and leaders in all areas of the organization tinker and experiment. This emergent growth heals and frees people and as restoration occurs people begin to come alive and their restricted potential comes forth. This is how transformation happens, how movements begin, how recovery occurs, how paradigms change, and how people self-transcend. This journey within can be taken by anyone but only those of courage and character will heed the call to be more than they are. Those who want to lead sustainable organizations must.

Henry Miller on the Art of Living

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The art of living is based on rhythm — on give and take, ebb and flow, light and dark, life and death. By acceptance of all aspects of life, good and bad, right and wrong, yours and mine, the static, defensive life, which is what most people are cursed with, is converted into a dance, ‘the dance of life,’ metamorphosis. One can dance to sorrow or to joy; one can even dance abstractly. … But the point is that, by the mere act of dancing, the elements which compose it are transformed; the dance is an end in itself, just like life. The acceptance of the situation, any situation, brings about a flow, a rhythmic impulse towards self-expression. To relax is, of course, the first thing a dancer has to learn. It is also the first thing a patient has to learn when he confronts the analyst. It is the first thing any one has to learn in order to live. It is extremely difficult, because it means surrender, full surrender.

[…]

Life, as we all know, is conflict, and man, being part of life, is himself an expression of conflict. If he recognizes the fact and accepts it, he is apt, despite the conflict, to know peace and to enjoy it. But to arrive at this end, which is only a beginning (for we haven’t begun to live yet!), a man has got to learn the doctrine of acceptance, that is, of unconditional surrender, which is love.

Later, Miller turns to the illusory nature of what stands between us and this complete surrender:

‘Normality,’ says Howe, ‘is the paradise of escapologists, for it is a fixation concept, pure and simple.’ ‘It is better, if we can,’ he asserts, ‘to stand alone and to feel quite normal about our abnormality, doing nothing whatever about it, except what needs to be done in order to be oneself.’

It is just this ability to stand alone, and not feel guilty or harassed about it, of which the average person is incapable. The desire for a lasting external security is uppermost, revealing itself in the endless pursuit of health, happiness, possessions an so on, defense of what has been acquired being the obsessive idea, and yet no real defense being possible, because one cannot defend what is undefendable. All that can be defended are imaginary, illusory, protective devices.

Miller zooms in on the “key words in howe’s doctrine of wholeness” — balance, discipline, illumination:

For the awakened individual, however, life begins now, at any and every moment; it begins at the moment when he realizes that he is part of a great whole, and in the realization becomes himself whole. In the knowledge of limits and relationships he discovers the eternal self, thenceforth to move with obedience and discipline in full freedom.

Writing at the time surround WWII, Miller reflects on a cultural era not at all dissimilar to our own today, a transitional period he calls “an equinoctial solstice of the soul”:

There is an illusion of ‘end,’ a stasis seemingly like death. But it is only an illusion. Everything, at this crucial point, lies in the attitude which we assume towards the moment.

Brain Pickings.

The Psychology of Self-Control

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People naturally vary in the amount of self-control they have, so some will find it more difficult than others to break a habit. But everyone’s self-control is a limited resource; it’s like muscle strength: the more we use it, the less remains in the tank, until we replenish it with rest. In one study of self-control, participants first had to resist the temptation to eat chocolate (they had a radish instead); then they were given a frustrating task to do. The test was to see how long they would persist. Radish-eaters only persisted on the task for about 8 minutes, while those who had gorged on chocolate kept going for 19 minutes. The mere act of exerting willpower saps the strength for future attempts. These sorts of findings have been repeated again and again using different circumstances.

We face these sorts of willpower-depleting events all day long. When someone jostles you in the street and you resist the urge to shout at them, or when you feel exhausted at work but push on with your email: these all take their toll. The worse the day, the more the willpower muscle is exerted, the more we rely on autopilot, which means increased performance of habits. It’s crucial to respect the fact that self-control is a limited resource and you are likely to overestimate its strength. Recognizing when your levels of self-control are low means you can make specific plans for those times.

 

A Letter to Best Buy

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A letter to Best Buy CEO Hubert Joly:

The distance from the vision of the board room and the store floor is often great.

On November 27, 2013, I picked out a new computer I wanted to buy. Normally I buy items from Amazon, but for major electronics I like to talk to someone with expertise. I had seen you on TV and read about your transformation at Best Buy in the newspaper. I decided to go to Best Buy.

I entered the Minnetonka store at about 10:15 AM. The story was near empty. I went to the computer section and walked directly to the computer I wanted. I stood in front of it and waited. And waited. And waited some more. I waved at clerks, paced the floor, complained to other customers, and looked irritated, because I was irritated. Two clerks walked by and told me they would send someone to help me. No one came. I did not see a clerk in the entire section the entire time I was there. Finally I pulled a box out from under the counter, carried it to the front of the store, and the man at the door said, “Sir, can I see your receipt?” I replied, “Hell, I can’t find a clerk to talk to me and tell me about the computer I want to buy.” He said, “Do you want to see the manager?” I said I did. The manager came, and I told him my story. He apologized. I paid for the computer and left. I never did speak to a clerk about the computer. No one ever talked to me about an extended warranty, or the Geek Squad. I could have purchased the computer at Amazon for less cost, less time, and much less irritation. I posted my story at the Best Buy Face Book page. A customer service person wrote me with great scripted empathy. When I posted my story on my Face Book page, I immediately received horror stories from nine friends.

I worked in management and executive positions in the Circulation division of the Minneapolis Star Tribune for many years and led a transformation there in the early 1990’s. I then completed my Ph.D. in Leadership and Organizational Change and consulted with leaders on transformation for 13 years before I retired from consulting. I recently published an e-book: “Value Driven Leadership: A Story of Personal and Organizational Transformation” on Amazon.

A couple of observations:

1.      Your message is undercut drastically by such poor service, recovery from that service, and scripted empathy. I walked into Best Buy expecting your enthusiasm and promise of a great customer experience. I wanted that expertise. I got none of it.

2.      The manager looked stricken. He apologized. But if he really understood customer service, he would have known the importance of a strong recovery when the store falls short. He might have said, “I will get my most knowledgeable clerk to go over this computer with you until you are totally satisfied.” He didn’t. The person who wrote the Face Book response was being empathetic from a script. That’s not empathetic; that’s being a trained reader.

3.      The behavior of the clerks showed they had not internalized customer service: had they, one of them would have taken responsibility for me until my needs were met. None did.

4.      Maybe many clerks were in training, in a meeting or doing something else. Then the manager should have interrupted them and said, “Customer service is our top priority. Our customers are not being served. Everyone get out on the floor and take care of the customers.”

5.      The last data I read long ago said that every unhappy customer tells 14 other people. I told hundreds via social media, and I’ll probably blog about it too.

6.      You might consider a “secret shopper” program to use as a positive method to recognize, reward, and coach employees.

Best wishes,

Eleanor Roosevelt on Happiness, Conformity, and Integrity

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Thoughts from Eleanor Roosevelt:

Happiness is not a goal, it is a by-product. Paradoxically, the one sure way not to be happy is deliberately to map out a way of life in which one would please oneself completely and exclusively. After a short time, a very short time, there would be little that one really enjoyed. For what keeps our interest in life and makes us look forward to tomorrow is giving pleasure to other people.

It is easy to slip into self-absorption and it is equally fatal. When one becomes absorbed in himself, in his health, in his personal problems, or in the small details of daily living, he is, at the same time losing interest in other people; worse, he is losing his ties to life. From that it is an easy step to losing interest in the world and in life itself. That is the beginning of death.

I have always liked Don Quixote’s comment, ‘Until death it is all life.’

Someone once asked me what I regarded as the three most important requirements for happiness. My answer was: ‘A feeling that you have been honest with yourself and those around you; a feeling that you have done the best you could both in your personal life and in your work; and the ability to love others.’

But there is another basic requirement, and I can’t understand now how I forgot it at the time: that is the feeling that you are, in some way, useful. Usefulness, whatever form it may take, is the price we should pay for the air we breathe and the food we eat and the privilege of being alive. And it is its own reward, as well, for it is the beginning of happiness, just as self-pity and withdrawal from the battle are the beginning of misery.

It’s your life — but only if you make it so. The standards by which you live must be your own standards, your own values, your own convictions in regard to what is right and wrong, what is true and false, what is important and what is trivial. When you adopt the standards and the values of someone else or a community or a pressure group, you surrender your own integrity. You become, to the extent of your surrender, less of a human being.

via Eleanor Roosevelt on Happiness, Conformity, and Integrity | Brain Pickings.

For Want of Imagination

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In early 1992, I  recommended that the Star Tribune newspaper (Minneapolis, MN)  investigate using our distribution system (warehouses, computer system, trucks, knowledge, and experience) to deliver items that would be purchased on the Internet and delivered to purchaser’s doors. I imagined that we could become a regional distribution company. I was told that what I proposed was not “our business.”

In 1995, Jeff Bezos began Amazon.com. He delivered the first packages to the post office himself and had trouble raising $1 million. Since then, Amazon.com has reinvented itself over and over again and today has 225 million customers worldwide. Their mission is: “To sell everything to everyone.”

Since 1995, the newspaper industry failed to renew itself and crashed and burned because of the Internet.

In 2009, the Star Tribune filed for bankruptcy.

Within five years, Amazon plans to deliver products to customer’s doors within 30 minutes via drones.  Drones may or may not materialize. What is important is that Amazon continues to imagine, experiment, and get new ideas from new things.

The newspaper industry doesn’t have a vision for a sustainable future.

Amazon had what the newspaper industry lacked: imagination.

Jeff Bezos recently purchased the Washington Post.

For more about my career at the Star Tribune and the newspaper industry see my book: “Value Driven Leadership: A Story of Personal and Organizational Transformation.”

Viktor Frankl on the Human Search for Meaning

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Every day, every hour, offered the opportunity to make a decision, a decision which determined whether you would or would not submit to those powers which threatened to rob you of your very self, your inner freedom; which determined whether or not you would become the plaything of circumstance, renouncing freedom and dignity to become molded into the form of the typical inmate.

via Viktor Frankl on the Human Search for Meaning | Brain Pickings.

The Fall & Future of the Newspaper Industry

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“Everything I thought I knew about leadership is wrong.”

  – Mort Myerson, former Chairman and CEO of Perot Systems

We’ve watched the newspaper industry fall for years now. I led transformative change at the Star Tribune newspaper in Minneapolis, MN in the years just before the industry and the Star Tribune crashed and burned. I came to believe that the newspaper industry would not change in the ways it needed to, and I left the Star Tribune in early 1994 to consult with leaders on transformation and to complete a Ph.D. in leadership and organizational change. I completed the Ph.D., consulted for 13 years, and have been a prolific writer about leadership and organizational transformation.

Here’s an example of the kind of real-life boardroom drama that must have played out one way or another at every newspaper in the country over time:

In 2011, Tim McGuire, former editor and senior vice president of the Star Tribune—and currently the Frank Russell Chair of Journalism at Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication—wrote in his blog, McGuire on Media:

The Cowles family imagined it [the drop like a rock in newspaper profits] and after years of strong stewardship decided in 1997 the old saw about discretion and valor made a lot of sense to the family. Early in 1997 David Cox, then Cowles CEO, commissioned the major consulting firm Booz-Allen to analyze the future of classifieds. I would dearly love to have that report in front of me now, but I vividly remember sitting through the excruciating pounding my beloved business got that day. While I only remember the broad outlines of the report I remember enough to know that as seers the Booz-Allen people were almost mystical. They predicted the classified demise with a precision that today strikes me as awesome. At the time I thought they were a bunch of negative doomsayers. Unfortunately, they nailed it.

There were two available reactions. Mine, which was “nothing could be this bleepin ‘bad!” In my defense, people like McClatchy’s Gary Pruitt and other newspaper buyers saw it my way. The other possible reaction was, “our entire net worth is tied up in this company and the risk is simply too great.” That was the Cowles family reaction and within months they announced they were going to research “strategic alternatives…”

In 1998 the Cowles family sold the Star Tribune to the McClatchy Company for $1.2 billion.

On December 26, 2006, the Star Tribune was again sold. The sale price was $530 million plus a future tax benefit of $160 million.

In January, 2009 the Star Tribune filed for bankruptcy.

This was a company—and an industry—in free-fall decline.

The change that overwhelmed the Star Tribune and the newspaper industry was different than normal revenue cycles or gradual readership losses. This was discontinuous change: It came without precedent or operating instructions, and fundamentally and forever altered life as newspapers had known it.

I sympathize with the newspaper people. Discontinuous change scares, confuses, and paralyzes people when it hits. Their underpinnings go out from under them. No matter how intellectually prepared one may be, no one knows this kind of change and how discombobulating it can be until it socks you in the gut. Did this cataclysm effectively end life for newspapers with no real hope for sustainability as an industry? Maybe, but people do not give up without a fight.

Despite the nature of change, industry leaders weren’t complete victims of powerful forces outside of themselves. Over the decades, they bore a fair share of responsibility for what befell them. They knew trouble was ahead of them, but they didn’t expect how much they got. Some ignored, others denied, still others minimized. Many executives got lost in the weeds and couldn’t see the big picture. Many clung to the way things were always done or to the ways that had made them rich. All were too timid. The truest voices were often shot down.

To have a chance, newspaper industry leaders, when the catastrophe hit, who hadn’t said it already needed to exclaim it now, “Everything I thought I knew about leadership is wrong!”

I can imagine a tough-love message to the industry, appropriate for a long time:

We are a haughty and stodgy industry with a moribund culture. We’ve lacked foresight and imagination. We are mediocre when it comes to utilizing people’s talents. We are far behind where we should be in adapting to a changing environment. We are in trouble. Maybe it’s too late. We have to put our self-importance aside, learn everything anew, and get comfortable with feeling scared and inadequate much of the time. We have to think bigger, differently, and change more than we ever imagined we could. We need to move fast. And even then, we may well not endure.

Executives in all industries often develop new strategies and do their reorganizations and other changes from the same beliefs and assumptions that may have served them well in the past but have now led to the problems they are trying to fix. Such change is like putting a new façade on an old building; it looks new and shiny. It will occupy and distract us for a time. But underneath it’s the same leaky plumbing and faulty wiring that will soon make things worse. I fear this is what the newspaper industry did in response to the crash: The recreated what they were trying to change.

Faced with an existential threat, newspapers had to do more than reinvent what they had always done. Newspapers needed transformation (fundamental change that cuts to the core of the company’s values, culture and operating methods.) and no one transforms anything by repeating their past. To transform, organizations need transformative leaders who see their environment accurately, learn new models for leadership and organizations, and creatively reimagine from new beliefs and assumptions the fundamental nature of their business: what their business is, and how they do the work of that business. Nothing is “not our business.” Organizations and industries then adapt continually in a symbiotic relationship with their environment, and they fundamentally change organizational and leadership designs.

Imagine a hypothetical newspaper that embraced transformation and went boldly into the future. What the process might have looked like:

Our imaginary newspaper began their journey with study and conversations. The leaders went through the early and difficult struggles and learned much new about leadership and transformation. Leaders applied new ways of thinking to vision, strategy, and business models as well as to operating units. Armed with the courage and excitement of new insights and creativity, they leapt into the future with a shared vision, strong values, and the noble purpose of the newspaper industry. All operating units felt great intensity for the challenge ahead. Instead of running fear-filled from the threat, people sprinted alive to a new future. They understood that such change did not come with a guarantee of success, but it improved the odds compared to continuing to do what no longer worked.

Many people throughout the newspaper had their personal inner shifts, and many leaders with new skills were empowered at all levels of the enterprise. Employees were fully engaged. Many obsolete sacred cows were painfully sacrificed and many new experiments tried excitedly throughout the company to find what worked for the future. The work was hard; the pain great at times. But people felt alive.

The ways things had always been done changed. Accountability became high: mistakes were allowed in this creative endeavor, and excellence was required; issues were surfaced and addressed directly, honestly, and openly. The newspaper became faster-moving, more creative, and people felt valued, involved, and informed. It took time, but new revenues were created. Suddenly the newspaper was transformed. It was still a newspaper but everything but its deepest identity had changed. The newspaper was alive and next time would understand that the time to transform again would be at the peak of their success.

“Easy to say, impossible to do,” you say? “Grow or die,” I reply.

What is the future of the newspaper industry? No one knows for sure. It’s late; maybe too late, and it is reasonable to believe that the cataclysm of the Internet and other threats combined with fainthearted leadership will destroy newspapers as we’ve know them, and that history will debate why the newspaper industry died.

Perhaps the industry will find the improbable will, creativity, and leadership to still transform and renew the industry in new forms.  Maybe Amazon founder Jeff Bezos who recently purchased the Washington Post can bring new energy into the tired industry. Or perhaps newspapers will muddle along—alive but never again what they used to be. Most likely, some will thrive, more will die, and many will muddle.

What might have been if the newspaper industry had heeded the voices of the future?

Excerpted from my e-book, Value Driven Leadership: A Story of Personal and Organizational Transformation.

Advice on How to Find Your Purpose and Live a Meaningful Life

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Twenty year old Hunter S. Thompson:

“To be, or not to be: that is the question: Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take arms against a sea of troubles…”

And indeed, that IS the question: whether to float with the tide, or to swim for a goal. It is a choice we must all make consciously or unconsciously at one time in our lives. So few people understand this! Think of any decision you’ve ever made which had a bearing on your future: I may be wrong, but I don’t see how it could have been anything but a choice however indirect — between the two things I’ve mentioned: the floating or the swimming.