Creativity Central

A Field Guide to Bad Leaders

2009-07-12T21:59:29Z

"Poor leadership in good times can be hidden. But poor leadership in bad times is a recipe for disaster." These prescient words (and warnings) are from Jack Zenger and Joesph Folkman, the CEO and President of a Zenger/Folkman, leadership development consultancy.

Poor leadership appears to be an epidemic.

But every epidemic comes with a long line of saviors. Wizened professionals with advice, antidotes, and cures. Much like the cosmetic aisle at your local pharmacy, they sell formulas and hope. And somehow, people keep on coming back for a better product.

So why do we continue to mass produce bad leaders?

In a recent article in the Harvard Business Review (June 2009), Zenger and Folkman have some answers. They share the results of their research into the fatal flaws that derail leaders. They collected feedback data on more than 450 Fortune 500 executives and compared the common characteristics of the 31 that were fired over the following three years. They also analyzed 360 degree-feedback data from more than 11,000 leaders and identified the 10% who were considered the least effective.

Here are their 10 most common leadership shortcomings:

Don't learn from mistakes. They don't make more mistakes than their peers but they fail to use setbacks as opportunities for improvement. Their MO? Hiding errors and brooding or blaming others instead.

Resist new ideas. They reject new suggestions from peers and subordinates. Good ideas arent' implemented or are put on a slow track and the organization gets stuck.

Accept their own medicore performance. They overstate the difficulty of reaching targets so they will look good when they achieve them.

Fail to develop others. They focus on themselves to the exclusion of developing staff -- causing individuals and teams to disengage.

Lack interpersonal skills. They make sins of commission (they are abrasive and bullying) and omission (they're aloof, unavailable, and reluctant to praise).

Have poor judgement. They made decisions that colleagues nd subordinates consider to be not in the best interest of the organization.

Don't walk the talk. They set standards of behavior and expectations of performance and then violate them.

Lack clear vision and direction. They believe their only job is to execute. Like a hiker who sticks close to the trail, they're fine until they come to a fork.

Don't collaborate. They avoid peers, act independently, and view other leaders as competitors. As a result, they are alienate the very people whose insights and support they need.

Lack energy and enthusiasm. They see new initiatives as a burden, rarely volunteer, and fear being overwhelmed."

These sound like obvious flaws that any leader would try to fix, right? No. Zenger and Folkman discovered that the ineffective leaders they studied, were often unaware that they exhibited these behaviors. In fact, the leaders who were rated most negatively rated themselves most positively.

You could stick all the above flaws on the office bulletin board and they wouldn't recognize themselves.

So please, stick this blog entry on the office bulletin board. The message might not resonate with the person at the top, but it will be a soothing balm to the rest of the organization.

Amateur as innovator. Charles Leadbeater Presentation

2009-06-29T20:41:36Z

Last year, I wrote a entry called Innovation for the Rest of Us. http://creativitycentral.squarespace.com/creativity-central/2008/6/25/innovation-for-the-rest-of-us.html I recently found Charles Leadbeater's Talk on TED about collaborative creativity. I like his insights. His theories on innovation have compelled some of the world’s largest organizations to rethink their strategies. A financial journalist turned innovation consultant, Leadbeater noticed the rise of "pro-ams" -- passionate amateurs who act like professionals, making breakthrough discoveries in many fields, from software to astronomy to kite-surfing.

Thinking outside the box. What box?

2009-06-14T18:13:43Z

Ah, the box.

Over the past thirty years, management and creative consultants want you to think out of it.

Much like the light bulb metaphor, it’s an idea that has become so clichéd, it has become the creative equivalent of a dial tone.

The origin of the phrase is a bit murky. One writer found a citation in 1975 in Aviation Week & Space Technology. “ We must step back and see if the solutions to our problems lie outside the box."

I first learned the phrase in 1974 when a professor at Rutgers gave us the 9-dots puzzle. The puzzle itself has become a cliché because nearly every book on creativity uses it to illustrate the invisible boundaries that most of us assume are there.

(The challenge is to connect the dots by drawing four straight, continuous lines that pass through each of the dots while never lifting the pencil or pen from the paper.)

The solution was (and still is for some people) a jarring revelation. The puzzle shows just how unconsciously our thinking is filled with boundaries.

Now a few words from the other side.

The Antonym Lens. Ernie Schenk, the great creative director and writer, has written a terrific book called The Houdini Solution. Put Creativity and Innovation to Work by Thinking Inside the Box. He opens with a quotation from Michelangelo, “Art lives on constraint and dies of freedom.”

His technique, “The Antonym Lens” is about looking at the opposite of an idea and using that opposite as a catalyst for ideas. So his book is really his use of the technique to make the “box” or the imposed constraints of a creative challenge.

There are budget boxes. There are media boxes. There are brand boxes. (A company like Disney can be innovative in many ways, but the brand is always family friendly.) There are client boxes. (Some are risk takers and some are conservative). And, of course, there is a boss box.

Okay, so what?

Truth is, our mind is not in the box. The box is in our mind.

I learned this lesson from another great creative director, Nick Souter.

What companies like Inotivity, Solution People and Seriously Creative in Puerto Rico do -- is to help you identify both conscious and unconscious barriers (boxes) to developing new ideas or solutions to problems.

I don’t think you can really think out of the box, unless you create a model of what that box looks like for you or your company.

Take a mental picture of this box? What does it look like? Feel like? Does it have dimension? Is it a box or a sphere? Nick sees the box as 6-sided – each side a common barrier to creative thinking.

Fear. Knowledge. Habit. Rules. Assumption. And Complacency.

Challenge: Get a notebook, label it “our box” and start drawing your box. (Not all boxes are bad, but some may be limiting your success.)

If you email me at Inotivity@gmail.com I will send you a free question bank to help you define your box.

Notes and annotations.

A case lesson: Blockbuster.

Is the video giant doomed to go the way of Circuit City or Linen’s and Things?

Massive layoffs are in the cards at Blockbuster as revenue slid nearly 6% in the 3^rd quarter and 526 stores have been closed last year. Growing consumer familiarity with Netflix and its streaming films have proven to much for the video store icon. CEO Jim Keyes has admitted that the focus on Netflix has damaged the company.

"While we believe that...we will be in a position to close on the amended credit facility on or about May 11, 2009, there can be no assurance regarding these matters," the filing said. "The risk that we may not successfully complete this refinancing...raises substantial doubt about our ability to continue as a going concern." Report by Gina Keating. © Thomson Reuters 2009.

The reasons for Blockbuster’s downfall are many but one was a failure of imagination. They didn’t understand their box. They were committed to brick and mortar buildings and an in-store rental model.

Then came Reed Hastings and Marc Randolph, both veteran new technology entrepreneurs, with an idea called Netflix. The company would rent and sell DVDs over the Internet. Hastings, who supplied the firm's startup cash of $2.5 million, had reportedly hit upon the idea for rental-by-mail when he was forced to pay $40 in fines after returning an overdue videotape of the film Apollo 13.

The question that a creative consultant would ask isn’t how might be rent or sell more videos in store? But in what other ways might we deliver videos/or DVDs to our customers?

A simple rewording of the question. But imagine the possibilities. Blockbuster’s box was a commitment to their current prevailing business model, but not to the future or distruptive technology like broadband or even the US mail. Now Netflix has to define and imagine beyond their box.

The Myth of Multi-tasking

2009-05-07T20:56:50Z

Two days ago, the Boston Globe's lead article was "Green Line collision injures 49. Officials say trolley driver was sending text message."

The trolley operator was not named but he was described as 24 years-old and had been on the job 22 months.

The irony was that I was writing an article about the perils of multi-tasking when I read about the incident.

The accident was reminiscent of the story of Captain Robert Loft, the pilot of Eastern Airlines Flight 104. 99 people were killed when the plane crashed into the Everglades. An investigation into the accident revealed that Captain Loft and the first officer were trying to discover why a lightbulb that should have indicated that the landing gear was down was malfunctioning. The crew was so attentive to the light bulb, they forgot that no one was flying the airplane.

Like the iconic message on the cigaratte pack, there should be a warning in all offices and homes, "Multi-tasking could be dangerous to your health and sanity."

Study after study shows that the gains we make by multi-tasking are often illusory. That’s because the brain slows down when it has to juggle tasks. Workplace studies have found that it takes up to 15 minutes for us to regain a deep state of concentration after a distraction such as a phone call.

And the contents of our working memory evaporate almost immediately. After about 2 seconds, things begin to disappear. And after 15 seconds of considering a new problem, we will have forgotten the original problem. In some cases the forgetting rate can be as high as 40%.

While multi-tasking may seem to be saving time, psychologists, neuroscientists and others are finding that it puts us under a great deal of stress and actually make us less efficient.

Edward M. Hallowell, a psychiatrist and author of CrazyBusy: Overstretched, Overbooked, and About to Snap says, “Multi-tasking is shifting focus from one task to another in rapid succession. It gives the illusion that we’re simultaneously tasking, but we’re really not. It’s like playing tennis with three balls.”

You can Google all these studies, but common sense does not always translate into common practice. The ability to "multi-task" is regarded as skill set. Employers put it their job descriptions. The perils and myths of multi-tasking do not have any traction in the transcendent busyness of our lives.

Dr. Hallowell has a nice exclamation point for this story, "As our minds fill with noise -- feckless synaptic events signifying nothing -- the brain gradually loses its capacity to attend fully and gradually to anything. Desperately trying to keep up with a multitude of jobs, we feel a constant low level of panic and guilt."

I don't feel panic or guilt, but I do feel a creeping sense that a day's work has been reduced to an hour of true productivity.

It is sad that not even the death of 99 passengers on flight 104 or the injury of 49 people on the MBTA Green Line will make a dent in the pervasiveness of multi-tasking. So, let us try to make a habit of smart single tasking -- especially when the lives of others are in our hands.

Post Script:

You can read the story of flight 104 by Luisa Yanez in http://tinyurl.com/qh9kox.

The Creativity of Crowdsourcing

2009-04-28T18:24:13Z

Great short video on crowd sourcing with Jeff Howe.

The Creativity of Opportunity Maps

2009-04-16T21:22:24Z

Opportunity used to knock. Now it’s visualized.

Above. Nursing Home of the Future Opportunity Map from Business Innovation Factory.

The classic opportunity map story comes from Herb Kelleher’s infamous napkin sketch. When he was brainstorming about how to beat the traditional hub-and-spoke-airlines, he grabbed a napkin and pen. Three dots represented Dallas, Houston and San Antonio. Three arrows to show direct flights. The simple sketch made it easy to sell Southwest Airlines to investors and customers.

In a recent BusinessWeek article on opportunity maps, Alonzo Canada, a principal at Jump Associates talked about a corporate retreat for Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers – a venture capital company with offices in Menlo Park and China. “Partner Bill Joy presented what he called "the map of grand challenges." This chart of multicolored squares tracked the progress of the venerable venture capital firm in identifying and investing in key categories of green technologies, including transportation, energy efficiency, electricity generation, energy storage, and more.

Joy also left blank spots on this chart that hinted at technologies that should be possible in the near future. For Kleiner Perkins, this map has come to represent a rough outline of tomorrow's clean energy economy. The firm now uses it as its investment playbook to help identify promising startups and stimulate universities and laboratories to create technologies that don't exist yet. “

Canada talks about how Nike used a similar approach at the start of the decade. Their Explore team was given challenge of helping Nike become a sports company. The team met the challenge by creating a map to identify the richest opportunities, define a strategy for growth, and set first steps toward a future vision. The map helped the team see product beyond shoes, such as sunglasses, watches, MP3 players, and sports apparel. The data on their map included consumer needs, societal and technology trends, and Nike's chief competitors, Adidas, Puma, and Reebok

When I was at last year’s Business Innovation Factory Conference, Matt Cottam, a team member of Nursing Home of the Future presented a variety of opportunity maps – visual launching pads for innovation.

The idea for visualizing business concepts isn’t new. But every few years, it gets reinvented and rebranded so that it has the patina of an innovation. Like A SWOT matrix it goes beyond words to create a portrait of relationships and connections that enable the viewer to see beyond words.

At Solution People in Chicago, Gerald Haman will often bring in an artist to visualize the ideation sessions. I do the same at my company when there’s a need to synthesize lots of diverse information or design is a key driver for the meeting.Companies should make opportunity maps a critical part of their planning process.

Even if all you have is a napkin.

Check out BIF's opportunity and experience maps @

http://tinyurl.com/dyj3qv

http://tinyurl.com/92f2c8

Maps Courtesy of BIF. Business Innovation Factory, Providence RI

The Creativity of Brevity.

2009-03-17T20:30:48Z

Mark Twain famously described the proper proportions of a maxim: a minimum of sound to a maximum of sense. In a text-messaged and 140-character Twitterized world, brevity has enjoyed unprecedented popularity. Writer, and blogger, Seth Godin, has made a living by being both perceptive and brief.

A few months ago, I read the best-seller, "Not Quite What I Was Expecting: Six-Word Memoirs by Writers Famous and Obscure," by the editors of Smith Magazine. Legend has it that in the 1920's, Ernest Hemingwaybet colleagues that he could write a complete short story in just six words.

The result, "For Sale: Baby Shoes. Never Worn," He reportedly called it his best work.

Here's a sampling:

Cursed with cancer, blessed with friends.

Danced in fields of infinite possibilities. (Deepak Chopra)

Nobody cared. Then they did. Why? (Chuck Klosterman)

Wasted time regretted, so life reinvented. (Vicky Oppus)

I use the 6-word technique in Innovation Workshops because it's a creative way to distill an idea to its essence. For example, Melville's Moby Dick: White whale. Missing Leg. Unknowable God.Twitter: What are you doing? 140 characters.

Can you sum up your business idea or company mission in 6 words? If you can't -- maybe there isn't a minimum of sound to a maximum of sense. Try it at your next meeting. Distill the next project to six words. Express the strategy in six words.

Creativity Central. Ideas. Innovation. All in one place.

http://www.smithmag.net/sixwords/

The Window. Developing the habit of strategic receptivity.

2009-02-24T21:14:23Z

The Window.

Think of it as a graphic that illustrates your ability to absorb and evaluate new information. It is likely to be as mercurial and complicated as the Dow Jones Average.

I first noticed The Window when I gave a presentation on innovation a few years ago in to an academic committee. 50% of the group was engaged. 25% were neutral. And 25% were seemingly disengaged. Curiously, this may be a Newtonian-like constant recognized by teachers and presenters everywhere.

The presentation, no matter how provocative, simply wasn’t relevant to that 25% at that moment in time. We’ve all been there.

Contrast this to the work I’ve done with Gerald Haman at the Thinkubator in Chicago. The group was nearly 100% engaged. The difference was 1) they invested money in the accelerated innovation workshop 2) they made a commitment to the process and 3) they were highly motivated and receptive to the information.

David Allen, the creator of Getting Things Done (GTD) asks a critical question, “What do you have your attention on?” You may be physically present in a meeting, but your head may be swimming with other commitments.

He writes in his new book Making It All Work. “Time is what creates the awareness of constraint, which then forces the real issue, which includes where and when you allocate your (mental) resources.”

So how do you engage when there’s a sense of urgency of other commitments – even if they do not rise to the level of truly urgent and important?

I think The Window is a creative solution. It is a commitment to being actively present for at least 15 minutes. It is what psychotherapists attempt do everyday. When they mentally drift – it is often because the patient isn’t being emotionally authentic. As one psychologist said to me, “not every moment is an epiphany.”

15 minutes is arbitrary but it seems to be a threshold of active engagement on subjects that aren’t immediately relevant. The creative solution is to clear your mind of other commitments and to habitually open a window of receptivity. Make that the overriding commitment.

Not every presentation is going to resonate. Not every meeting is going to be engaging. Not every interaction is going to be life-altering. But if we open even the smallest of windows, the winds of receptivity may take us places we haven’t imagined before.

Creativity and the mathematics of marriage and work

2009-02-20T00:19:11Z

I wouldn’t call the book The Mathematics of Marriage a beach read. In fact, it might be a stretch to call it a Harvard study group read. You'll find such phrases like “null clines” and “Lotka-Volterra Equations” strewn about its 403 pages.

But thanks to a little literary alchemy by Malcolm Gladwell in his best-selling book Blink, we get a crash course on why John Gottman and his colleagues are mixing the hard science of math and the psychological minefield of marriage.

Gottman brought more than 3,000 married couples to a lab near the University of Washington campus. For nearly three decades, the couples have been videotaped and the results have been analyzed by something Gottman dubbed (SPAFF ) for specific affect. It is a coding system with twenty separate categories corresponding to every conceivable emotion that a married couple might express during a conversation.

Each emotion is given a number. Disgust is a 1. Stonewalling is a 13. Whining is 11. What is remarkable is that if Gottman analyzes an hour of a husband and wife talking, he can predict with 95% accuracy whether a couple will be married 15 years later. And if he watches a couple for just 15 minutes, his success rate only drops to 90%.

90% accuracy in 15 minutes. Amazing. Gladwell uses Gottman’s work as an example of “thin slicing” – the ability of our unconscious to find patterns in situations and behavior based on very narrow slices of experience.

Gottman can decipher a distinctive verbal code while observing a couple communicate. He focuses on what he calls the Four Horsemen, defensiveness,stonewalling, criticism and contempt. And according to Gladwell, “there is one emotion he considers the most important of all: contempt. If Gottman observes either partner or both partners showing contempt, he considers it single most important sign that the marriage is in trouble.”

Ultimately, Gottman has discovered a ratio of positive and negative codes in a marital interaction and can mathematically predict the future of the relationship with an incredible degree of accuracy.

I use the term creativity because Gottman has gone beyond the seeming impossibility of studying the dynamic and changing relationships of couples but has taken the estimated divorce rates (50% +) and has revealed that traditional counseling success rates are not particularly high. So, he has brought advanced math and the creativity of a variety of controlled experiments to try to understand consistent patterns that emerge from conversations between couples. That's creative use of both theory and applied science.

Which brings me to the world of work relationships. Could Gottman’s theories and techniques work in this environment? Business success is generally predicated on the ratio of income to expenses. But what about the balance sheet of human capital? In the typical day, are employee interactions mostly positive or negative?

All of Gottman’s coded categories from positive reinforcements to the Four Horsemen of contempt, criticism, stonewalling and defensiveness are equally applicable to the work environment. But while this may poison the atmosphere at work, there are some companies that appear to succeed in a dysfunctional atmosphere.

I know a particular company where the top management exhibits most of the four horsemen behaviors, yet ulcers aside, workers continue to stay and to do excellent work.

Can we get Gottman to turn his attention to the workplace? What are your experiences? I welcome comments from any perspective, even the four horsemen.

The Creativity of John Updike

2009-02-08T18:25:53Z

The last time I saw John Updike, he was seated at Charlie Rose’s massive round table; impeccably dressed in a tan suit, starched white shirt and a speckled salmon-colored tie. He was talking about his newest book, The Widows of Eastwick, and hinted that his next historical novel set in the 1st Century A.D. -- The Last Epistle --would be his last.

Updike died on January 27th from the ravages of lung cancer. Updike and Andrew Wyeth, my two most consistent muses, passed away 11 days apart and I am orphaned again. There is something about the possibility of the next that has been a bond to my literary and artistic heroes. I still tenaciously cling to the belief Mark Twain alive and well.

This past October, Updike talked with Sam Tanenhaus of the New York Times about the craft of is writing. “I don’t think of myself as writing stylishly, I think of myself as trying to write with precision, what my mind’s eye conjures up. So if out of this the sentences become shapely and vivid, that’s great, but I’m mostly concerned with trying to deliver to the reader, my images, and my sense of human behavior and landscape.”

In 1988, he echoed a similar thought with Terry Gross. “I find that the main charge, let’s call it, that I get out of writing, is when I feel that I’ve gotten something down accurately. The main bliss, whether I read Henry Green or Nabokov or Proust or Tolstoy, is the sense that they’ve described precisely a certain moment of experience, whether it’s a dress, a chair or how a person’s face looks.”

The novelist Nicholson Baker beat me the punch when he wrote U & I, a book that chronicles his magnificent obsession with Updike. Out of admiration and memory mixed with a seemingly unhealthy does of envy, Baker created a disarmingly touching look into the often unrequited relationship between readers and writers.

Much like Wyeth, Updike had the ability to breath life into the seemingly mundane. A trip to the blood bank. An underused swimming pool. A man walking his wife’s friend home while snow begins to fall. But what made Updike one of my favorite writers, is that his work always resonated with me although we were a generation apart.

There is no clearer example, than his autobiographical musings – Self-Consciousness. Updike remarked, "A writer's self-consciousness, for which he is much scorned, is really a mode of interestedness, that inevitably turns outward." I believe that a writer is always a bit schizophrenic – he or she is observing and recording and marrying images and thoughts while interacting with others. You are there and not there.

Even Mark Twain’s best friend, William Dean Howell’s said, “You were always there for him, but he wasn’t always there for you.” It was less a chide than an observation that Twain was somewhere else in his mind. This “self-consciousness” is about living a dual life, liver and observer. Updike describes those minute and intimate details that make up the fabric of the extraordinary that lies hidden in the ordinary.

Since I am an Uncle many times over, I will share one of my favorite Updike’s essays, My Uncle’s Death.

“He died while shaving; when I was told of this, I pictured him staggering back heavily, stricken, his own amazed face in the mirror the last thing he ever saw. His face flashed there for him, hung there, slipped backward; and then the mirror was full of the blank bathroom wall. I pictured this so sharply I seemed to have been there.

At his funeral, I felt, for the first time my adult height. The Manatees are not a family of breeders, and the number of relatives was small; walking up the aisle to the front pew with my parents, my aunt and my two cousins, I felt tall and prominent. Walking back down the aisle after the service, I caught from the faces of those still seated, an odd motionless, intent look, almost an odor of sympathy and curiosity and reverence for grief.

...

“I cannot reach him. I can remember nothing about him that is quite real except his death; he is like a celestial body which only an eclipse renders measurable. He was six feet, four inches tall, but his immensity was narrow-shouldered, small boned and unmuscular. He was vain of having, for so outsized a man, rather small feet. He usually wore neat black loafers, virtually slippers, of English leather, and sprawling, soddenly in a chair, he generally contrived to thrust his feet forward on the floor, or up on a stool, so they were noticed. I can remember my mother – I must have been ten or eleven – teasing him about his dainty feet. I cannot recapture her words, but she was still slim then, and her pose as she spoke – head tilted back, hands half lifted – stuck in my my mind; she so seldom struck an unmotherly attitude that it was as if a strange spirit had come for a moment and possessed her body. My uncle, presumably, responded with a dry flutter of the sheepish gallantry that he seemed to reserve for my mother and waitresses in restaurants. My mother seemed exempt from the rather lazy distaste with which uncle viewed the rest of the world, and perhaps as her son, I was included in this exemption, for he was kind to me.”

Updike’s self-consciousness reveals itself at the funeral. “I felt tall and prominent. Walking back down the aisle after the service, I caught from the faces of those still seated, an odd motionless, intent look, almost an odor of sympathy and curiosity and reverence for grief.”

His awareness at 10 or 11 of the subtle interactions between his mother and his Uncle are remarkable. While it is viewed from the prism of an older version of himself, he self-consciously remembers that “I was included in this exemption, for he was kind to me.” It is as much about Updike as it is his Uncle.

My Uncle Carl’s funeral was the first funeral I ever experienced. I was about the same age as Updike when his uncle died. I remember my Uncle’s widow wailing. It is impossible to know another’s grief, but I do remember my mother whispering to my grandmother that it was “a bit much.” I remember the chairs arranged at the grave site and how there was a kind of hierarchy of who sat where. And I remember the American Flag folded tightly and given gently to my Aunt.

But I remember nearly every detail about the service and the post-funeral gathering at my Uncle’s home. I recall the sublime taste of Ginger ale that flowed freely. I saw walls filled with porcelain figurines he collected while he was stationed as a Colonel in Germany. But mostly, I remember that it was the first sibling death for my mother. Much like Updike’s uncle, my mother and Carl had an especially close relationship and even at 16, I understood this and it was difficult to gauge her own grief.

Updike’s acute observation and his mingling of memory and detail continue to move me. He is often the catalyst to discovering what I missed in life by being equally self conscious. The creativity of John Updike is about honoring his gift of observation and dancing with the alphabet.

In Updike’s honor and with much feeling, I am opening up a bottle of ginger ale and it will flow freely. I will miss him.