The Hedgehog Effect by Manfred F.R. Kets de Vries

Manfred F.R. Kets de Vries has written over 35 books on the subject of leadership and the dynamics of both individuals and teams during periods of organisational change. A clinical professor of leadership development, he has been rated by The Financial Times and The Economist as one of the worlds leading leadership theorists and among the world’s top 50 leading management thinkers. More than this though, he has over 20 years of hands on experience of running CEO leadership team coaching programmes entitled ‘The Challenge of Leadership: Creating Effective Leaders’ and his book draws on many personal ‘real-life’ experiences.

Don’t let his academic standing put you off. His book is full of easy to understand concepts that I found really resonated with me from my days of working in medium to large corporations. If you are a CEO, senior manager or aspiring leader, this leadership book is a must read.

It provides real insights into the ‘human’ intricacies of working in teams; the dysfunctional overt and covert behaviour that can marginalise individuals and hinder team productivity. Manfred goes on to examine the benefits of leadership coaching and the positive impact this has had through his own experiences of building high performing teams.

He provides a wonderful story which for me sums up the culture that managers can create, without even realising it:

“A group of frogs was hopping contentedly through a swamp, doing whatever it is frogs do, when two of them fell into a deep hole. The other frogs gathered around to see what they could do to help their friends. When they saw how deep the hole was, they gave up. They told the two poor frogs in the hole that they should abandon hope and prepare themselves for death.
Unwilling to accept their fate, the two frogs tried with all their might to jump out of the hole. The frogs in the marsh kept calling down to them, insisting that their situation was hopeless and that the best they could do was save their energy and wait patiently for death. They did not hesitate to add that the frogs would not be in this unfortunate situation if they had been more careful, and listened to their elders.
But the two frogs continued jumping as high as they could. Gradually, they grew tired. Finally, one of the frogs took heed of his friends’ words. Spent and disheartened, he quietly accepted his fate, lay down at the bottom of the hole, and died as the others looked on in grief.
But the other frog was more persistent. He continued to jump with every ounce of energy he head, although his body was wracked with pain. Once again, the crowds of frogs, hanging over the hole, yelled at him to stop this nonsense, accept his fate, and just die. Undaunted, the weary frog jumped harder and harder and – wonder of wonders – finally leapt so high that he got out of the hole. Amazed, the other frogs celebrated his miraculous return to freedom and then, gathering around him asked, “Why did you carry on jumping when we told you to give up?”
The poor frog stared at them in astonishment. “But, my friends,” he said, “I am rather deaf. At that distance I could not read your lips. When I saw you waving and shouting, I thought you were encouraging me not to give up. That’s why I kept on trying.”

As the paradoxical tale illustrates, having your team-mates on your side, cheering you on, motivating and encouraging you, can be very powerful. This level of support may stimulate you to perform beyond expectations. Equally, where the opposite culture exists, team members are doomed to fail. Your future as leaders will rest on your ability to recognise the often invisible undercurrent of group dynamics within your organisation as these can either create a group effect that is more powerful than the sum of its parts, or quickly destroy the purpose and performance of the team. This book will enable you to explore team-based distributive leadership skills, enabling you to get the best from your people.

‘The Hedgehog Effect’ goes on to explore the need for the organisations of tomorrow to have executives who can deal with the advantages and disadvantages of teamwork and know how to be an effective member of a team themselves.

The book focuses heavily on self-awareness, culture and group dynamics. It is very well written and I found myself highlighting whole pages of ‘golden nuggets’ of practical tasks I could undertake as a coach, leader and team member with everyone I interact with. This is one of the most powerful, up-to-date leadership books I have read recently and one well work adding to the arsenal of tools to help you learn some of ‘the secrets of building high performance teams’. It will be well worth quoting from in forthcoming practical articles on coaching and team work.

If you like this article, subscribe here , LIKE us on facebook, leave a comment, or to get your own personal copy of The Hedgehog Effect to enable you to become a more effective leader, coach and team member. After all, I’ve told you about the frogs…wait till you read about the hedgehogs!

Steve Jobs by Walter Issacson

 

What is good leadership?

 

Based on more than forty interviews with the late Steve Jobs, conducted over two years, as well as interviews with more than a hundred family members, friends, adversaries, competitors and colleagues, this book chronicles the roller-coaster life and searingly intense personality of a creative entrepreneur whose passion for perfection and a ferocious drive revolutionised six industries: personal computers; animated movies; music; phones; tablet computing and digital publishing.

At a time when societies around the world are trying to build digital-age economies, Jobs stands as the ultimate icon of inventiveness and applied imagination. He knew that the best way to create value in the twenty-first century was to connect creativity with technology, so he built a company where heaps of imagination were combined with remarkable feats of engineering.

He could drive those people around him to fury and despair, but his personality and products were interrelated, just as Apple’s hardware and software tended to be. As a leader he was charismatic and energetic, pushing people beyond the limits of what they believed they could accomplish and producing remarkable work as a result.

To save you hours reading the book – all 630 pages – here is a fantastic video outlining the full story and giving you useful ‘golden nuggets’ to help you improve your entrepreneurial leadership skills.

 

 The Steve Jobs Story Video – click to watch via Readitforme

 

If you like this post, subscribe here or leave a comment below. Or you may want your own personal copy of the book for the full low-down.  Steve Jobs: The Exclusive Biography

Who needs leaders?

Live Q&A with John Adair

The latest CMI Management Book Club Q&A session sees CMI welcome management legend John Adair to the book club.

John has written over 40 books, translated into many languages. Recent titles include ‘How to Grow Leaders’ and ‘Effective Leadership Development’. Apart from being an author he is also a teacher and consultant.

His Q&A session will happen on the 6th October (Thursday) at 2.30pm. It should be a good one so if you’d like to quiz Mr Adair add it to your diary today.

Q&A provided by the Chartered Management Institute

Creatively Ever After: An Author’s Inspiration

In some ways, the inspiration for my book, Creatively Ever After: A Path to Innovation, came from too many years of text-heavy PowerPoint slides. Readers say the most resonating aspect of Creatively Ever After is how it immerses you into the creative process through the use of storytelling and nursery rhymes. The use of nursery rhymes surprises readers, especially corporate leaders, in an unexpected and valuable way.

Growing up, I watched Sesame Street. I loved the way the television show taught the alphabet by putting letters into song. Decades later, I rejoice in seeing 30, 40 and 50-year olds singing “C is for Cookie” to their own children/grandchildren. Recalling the vivid memories of learning the alphabet through entertaining Sesame Street clips, I knew just what to do.

Though I’m not a lyricist, I am good with words. I decided to tackle the much talked about creativity crisis and worldwide Chief Executive Officer call for creativity by writing a how-to book teaching creativity skills.  And, in case you’re wondering – yes, creativity can be taught! I hypothesized I could make creativity approachable and help readers internalize and apply creativity techniques by weaving a fable around the creative problem solving process.

This gave birth to musings about what the “Jack and Jill” nursery rhyme might be like if the two had applied creative problem solving to help fetch the water. Could they stop falling down the hill? How? Who might help? All these questions ran through my mind as I stitched together the story.

It took four years, but now that the book is published I am ecstatic when readers share their delight in the fable format and how it helped them relate to creativity in a simple and inviting way. From time to time I get emails and tweets from readers telling me how the book helped them build creative leadership skills, close sales, improve client relationships, think up new product offerings, and more.

I am grateful to learn the value Creatively Ever After brings to readers. To me, leadership is about connecting with the heart, as well as, the mind. The fact readers see themselves in the story means they are more apt to reflect upon what they’ve learned and apply creativity principles to their everyday situations. More so than the process of writing, and far more so than selling, I am happy to have written a tale that helps solve the creativity crisis by showing readers how to explicitly tap into their personal creativity skills.

Thank you to Sesame Street for serving as my inspiration and to PowerPoint for serving as my foe during the writing process. Without the two, Creatively Ever After would not be what it is today.

 

Alicia Arnold is the author of Creatively Ever After. She holds a Master of Science in Creative Studies from the International Center for Studies in Creativity. She has written over 100 articles on creativity at http://alicia-arnold.com and can be reached on Twitter at http://twitter.com/alicarnold

 

Introducing Financial Expert

I’m excited to announce the unveiling of Financial-Expert.co.uk, a web property of a good friend of mine, Simon Oates, that he has been developing for the past few months. Outside of management and leadership, the world of personal finance is a topic that interests me immensely. I worked in the financial services industry and have had my head in the financial papers my whole life. I’m also an avid investor and I’m eager to share  knowledge and sensible investing principles with the world. This is why I remain committed to keeping you up to date on financial issues through this link to Financial Expert.

The site will have 6 broad categories; Borrowing, Career, Cost Cutting, Making Income Online, Investing and Saving. Simon will be creating content for these topics in a modular fashion, so for instance he will create 10 articles surrounding investing in commodities, and then perhaps 5 articles specialising in mortgages. And after a year or so, he will have created a semi-complete library of financial information.

His first major piece of content is ‘How to Invest in Commodities‘, which addresses the world of commodity investing from a private investors point of view. Hedge funds and derivatives that are out of reach of the average investor will not be relevant. Commodities have almost taken centre stage in the investment community, as overwhelming flows of capital are chasing returns across asset classes and around the globe. This has led to a potentially disastrous situation which resembles a commodity bubble.

For those investors brave enough to make a call and jump on the bandwagon, the routes into commodities for a private individual are surprisingly varied. One can use betting companies, mutual funds, ETFs, shares of companies, as well as buying a lump of the commodity itself. To read more about the advantages of these options, as well as their drawbacks visit the article for full details.

Unlike leadership, financial content is prone to suffering from jargon overload, so Simon will also be creating a giant financial glossary where he will give an overview of each financial term. This will allow his articles to be accessible to beginners, without slowing down the pace too much and boring the veteran investors.

 

 

Creative Genius by Peter Fisk

Creative Genius by Peter Fisk is a book of ideas and stories of the many breakthroughs that innovative individuals have achieved in the past 2000 years. Creative Genius describes itself as an ‘innovation guide’, a ‘genius lab’ and also an ‘inspirational’ set of tools. With the format of the book actually being rather peculiar, I think the term ‘scrapbook’ is probably the best way to capture the essence of this work.

Rather than delivering the always ironic lecture of ‘how to be original and innovative’, Creative Genius attempts a different path – education by induction. Much like the science experiment of it’s namesake, I found that this book takes great pain in telling you one thing, but secretly hopes that while reading and processing, you’ll learn much more. Innovation is of course, an intra-personal thing, and a book cannot be innovative on your behalf. A book won’t craft a business model or develop a new design. Creative Genius may however shift your paradigm and inspire you to take action.

It strikes me that traditional education and training equips you with a standard perspective, a generally accepted view of the world. This view is logical, reasonable and held by most educated individuals. However in the competitive economy of today, how is one to generate a market-leading idea while thinking within the same realm as everyone else?

This paradox can be illustrated in my favourite economist joke:

An economist and his friend are walking down the street when the friend sees a ten dollar bill on the sidewalk.

“Look,” he says, “it’s a ten dollar bill”.

“Nonsense,” says the economist. “If that was a ten dollar bill, someone would have picked it up by now.”

If this book preaches anything, it’s that genuinely groundbreaking ideas in history came from outside the generally accepted truths. Within the ‘safe zone’, as referenced in the joke above; everything that can be thought of has been thought of. Your ability to produce something truly revolutionary or commercially advantageous is unlikely at best.

Enter the 20+ case studies that Creative Genius details and features within it’s pages. These include the exciting story of Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic, as well as the rise of Nintendo (which originally was a mere trading card company). Reaching further into the past, you’ll read about Burt Rutan and Da Vinci.

But to describe Creative Genius as a short story book would be a discredit. Among the interesting exerpts from history’s brightest and boldest, you’ll find basic concepts of good design, modern marketing the product development process. The larger socio-economic trends are boldly highlighted. These serve as a gentle nudge into progressive thinking. The median age of someone in the developed world was 37 in 2000, but will be 46 in 2050. How will this change your business?

Creative Genius is a ‘different’ kind of read to the standard leadership and management fare I review on Leadership Expert. A book filled with facts and stories and smaller pockets of ‘knowledge’ is different to the direct and instructive management titles such as Traction: Get a Grip on your Business. Creative Genius (Amazon Link, £9.51) serves as a perfect addition to the well-rounded businessperson’s library of knowledge.

Traction: Get a Grip on Your Business by Gino Wickman

As Gino Wickes writes; entrepreneurs usually face at least one of five common frustrations with their business. These are; A Lack of Control, Unresponsive Staff, A Growth Plateau, Unprofitability and a Change-Avoidant Culture. Essentially these are the five factors that hold back ‘good’ businesses from being ‘great’ businesses, and we all suffer from these problems from time to time.

Now, in Traction, Gino presents his view of a successful company that has managed to mitigate, or completely avoid the five common frustrations. The rest of the text aims to provide a practical roadmap to guide an entrepreneur to improving various components of his business incrementally in order to improve the system. Gino uses a computer metaphor – in that if the business is a computer, then this book provides the operating system. Gino’s strategy is coined the Entreprenerial Operating System™.

Titles aside, does the substance of Traction fulfill its purpose? Not just as a start-up guide, but also as a ‘rescue’ strategy?

Home Truths & My Thoughts

Traction opens with a frank principle that you won’t hear in conversation often. It’s the crazy notion that entrepreneurs with successful companies are sometimes risk evasive, and that their risk aversion actually holds back the company. Let’s just think about that for a moment.

What’s crazier than that notion is that I completely see the logic here! Entrepreneurs often talk of starting their business ‘from nothing’. In fact, on TV shows these days you’ll be hard pressed to find a businesman or woman who remains modest about their humble beginnings. The important point to note is that with ‘nothing’ in the bag, these entrepreneurs had absolutely nothing to lose to begin with.

5 years later, sitting on a private shareholding in a company worth £50,000,000 – the entrepreneur has clearly succeeded, but this is where the problem kicks in. Now the entrepreneur’s comforts, prosperity, and even social status depend on the continuation of the business. In this position, I would not be surprised if the entrepreneur was very frightened about taking any further steps. I’m talking around this small point in detail for a book review, I realise, and this is one of the reasons why I like this book. Traction contains plenty of interlectually challenging ideas and methods. But at the same time, it isn’t a leadership theory book at all!

An Entrepreneurs Manual

You will find Traction to be quite different from the other leadership books I have reviewed on Leadership Expert. The main difference is that Traction is very specific and hands-on in approaching management skills. Rather than just focusing on the ‘soft’ skills such as communication, motivation and culture, Traction details a handful of ‘this is what you need to do, and this is how you do it’ projects, including:

• Which performance metrics and data you will want to look at on a weekly basis
• How to draw up an organisational hierachy
• How to deliver an effective meeting.

In short, this is good stuff that owner/managers want to know. While this content certainly has a heavy slant towards the entrepreneurial type, I don’t see why this ideas couldn’t be used by a mid to senior level manager in a corporate environment either. The title makes for an easy-to-dip-into read that I believe will find a happy home on your desk.

Traction: Get a Grip on Your Business by Gino Wickman can be purchased from Amazon today.

 

 

CMI Announces Management Book of the Year

The Chartered Management Institute has announced the results of its long search for the best of management texts made available in 2010. Launched in March 2010, in association with the British Library, the Insitute aimed to seek out the books that were really making an impact on british business people, as well as raise awareness of how management theory can be used in the workplace.

And the winner is…

The winner of the overall category for best management book of the year 2010 was Henry Mintzberg’s ‘Managing‘. Winner of Digital category was ‘The Future of Work’ by Richard Donkin. Winner of Innovation and Entrepreneurship category was ‘rEvolution: How to Thrive in Crazy Times‘. All of these titles are available for sale on the ever-cheap Amazon.co.uk through those links.

A hearty congratulations to all the winning leadership and management authors, but also to the other nominated works, which included no less than 13 titles. I’ve appended a list below for your perusal. As always, the titles are catchy, and the topics they convey appear as important and modern as you would expect from such a forward thinking industry.

The leadership illusion: the importance of context and connections by T. Hall and K. Janman

Fast track to success: project management ebook by Patrick Harper-Smith

Meet the new boss: the management book that comes with a soundtrack by Philip Whitely

How to lead by Jo Owen

ReWork: change the way you work forever by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson

Leadership of Muhammad by John Adair

The world’s business cultures and how to unlock them by Barry Tomalin and Mike Nicks

The intuitive mind: profiting from the power of your sixth sense by Eugene Sadler-Smith

Brilliant business creativity: what the best creatives know, do and say by Richard Hall

Design driven innovation: changing the rules of competition by radically innovating what things mean by Roberto Verganti

Glimmer: how design can transform your business, your life and maybe even the world by Warren Berger

Supercorp: how vanguard companies create innovation, profits, growth and social good by Rosabeth Moss Kanter

I recommend you check out any of the above that you like the sound of. As nominees, these books were shortlisted out of the 100s of management titles that are produced each year, and therefore are probably very worthy  of your time as they are of mine!

Perform Like a Rock Star And Still Have Time for Lunch! By Orna Drawas

‘Perform Like a Rock Star and Still Have Time for Lunch’ by Orna Drawas carries time management guidance with a shiny ‘rock star’ gloss. Being a ‘Rock Star’ is being recognised as a high performing, efficient worker. As the title also suggests, a ‘Rock Star’ also achieves that perfect work life balance between the daily grind and family/social life.

I believe a worker’s lunch is a very sacred thing. I think lunchtime is not only important for de-stressing and relaxing, but also for making friends and establishing a wider network within your company. In recent times, the average lunch break for a British office worker has shortened to 29 minutes, with 7% of workers not even taking one. This will naturally be caused by an increase in workload and pressure upon employees (working hours have increased alsoo over the same period), but it is also due to our bad habits in managing our time.

The highlights that distractions such as emails, and the often innocently-appearing queries and catch-ups with friends, take a large chunk out of our day. And for the remainder of the day, we often choose to do the wrong tasks, such as the unimportant but easy-win actvities that allow us to cross out multiple lines on our to-do list. Worst of all perhaps, is our bad habit of using our ‘prime time’ (the hours in which we are most alert and effective) to perform procrastinating tasks!

‘Perform Like a Rock Star and Still Have Time for Lunch’ was an enjoyable read that highlights many of our personal time management dillemmas. I recognised many of the key traps to fall into, as behaviours I exhibited myself, and I’m sure you’ll find the same. It comes as a relief (albeit predictable) relief then, to learn that Perform like a Rock Star delivers several great ideas and principles that allow us to correct our silliness, and get on track to saving time, making time and having a good time!

Book Review by Simon Oates

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