The Speed of Information

I was sitting in a classroom a few weeks ago listening to teams of students make brief presentations. The class was Social Entrepreneurship (eShip for short.) They were talking about their impending half-term projects with nonprofits. I was helping one of the teams who were looking at how to better leverage technology for small nonprofits in the Upper Valley of New Hampshire and Vermont.

The professor and guest advisor were giving the teams tips on who to contact. During the tech team presentation, I was watching what the students were doing on their laptops. The advisor recommended the team contact a major foundation, who had a technology-related funding program. As he was making his comments, one of the students browsed to the foundation web site and found the relevant program page. Before he finished, she had sent the link via email to the rest of the team, who in turn were clicking to the site. The entire flow of verbal and electronic information happened real-time.[1]

Before you get in a huff about students not paying attention, and the rudeness of multi-tasking, let me tell you a pre-Internet story.

I remember sitting in my field manager’s office twenty years ago. I asked if he would check on something at headquarters for me and let me know what he heard. He said, “Why wait?” He picked up the phone, dialed his contact and got the info. I left his office with the answer and an important lesson: don’t make a to-do item of something you can do on the spot.

Do you see the parallel between what my manager did and what the students did? If you can get the information now, why wait?

My fourteen year-old takes pride in multi-tasking. I’ve seen him carrying on five Instant Messenger (IM) conversations, playing a video game with someone from Australia, and researching a paper for school at the same time. I wondered when he had time to think. The more I thought about it, the more I asked myself if the way students think today may be changing. Was problem solving changing from individual synthesis to communal answers? I decided to try an experiment with him.

I asked him how he would go about finding the answer to a problem.
“What problem,” he asked.
“One your teacher gave you, for homework.”
“Which teacher? (He is a teenager, after all.)
“How about history. What are you studying?
“The French Revolution.”
“OK. How would you go about finding the answer to this question: How many famous people were executed by the guillotine during French revolution?" (Remember, he’s fourteen.)

We were on the phone, so I asked him to describe what he was doing. His first stop was to go to Wikipedia and look up guillotine. (If you’d like to read along, click here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guillotine ) He read the first paragraph, but didn’t find what he wanted.

His next stop was Yahoo Questions. He entered “guillotine famous people.” (See http://answers.yahoo.com/ ). The first answer was about a wax museum (Anyone can post answers.) He didn’t see anything else on that page that was better.

Next, he went back to Wikipedia, paged-down a couple of times and read about the Reign of Terror. Listed there were Robespierre, Marie Antoinette and King Louis XVI, each victim of the guillotine. He then informed me that Joseph Guillotin was not the inventor, nor did he die by its blade. Guillotin died of natural causes. Bonus points.

Total time browsing, about three minutes. Fast. But very much a solo performance.
“What if you couldn’t find the answer on-line?
“Never happened.”
“But if it did?”
“I’d email my teacher.”
“What about essay assignments?”
“If it’s boring, I write a paragraph, take a break and IM my friends; then write another paragraph, etc.”
“If you’re not bored?”
“Then I space out on it.” He blocks out everything else and focuses on the mission.

So it’s not very different than when I learned how to do assignments. At least for the engaging stuff. Notice that the multi-tasking parts are about socializing and entertainment, not the work itself. What is different is how fast it happens. Whether in the class or on the home PC, finding and using the information is lightening quick. So why don’t we have more answers?

_________________________________
[1] For an entertaining look at laptops in the classroom, read the Doonesbury comic for April 27, here: http://www.doonesbury.com/strip/dailydose/index.html?uc_full_date=20080427

A Sense of Play

I was on the MIT Campus for a CIO Summit and One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) conference. It was if the two were held on different planets.

The OLPC event began at the MIT Media Labs. During the reception, I managed to join a small tour of the "Lifelong Kindergarten" room in the lab. Along one wall are bins of Lego blocks and sundry parts for making small robots. There are couches and tables casually arranged for ad hoc discussions, with posters and paraphernalia hanging out throughout the space. A mock-up of a car chassis is in one corner. Blocks and crayons are on a table in another corner. The place exudes a sense of play.

The “Lifelong Kindergarten” project is the brainchild of Mitch Resnick, an MIT Professor. When he talks, you can hear the child’s sense of play at work in a scientist’s mind. You want to take off your shoes, roll up your sleeves and join him in the sandbox. Just look at their web site, here: http://llk.media.mit.edu/

I first saw what I called the “Lego room” five years ago. I remember looking into the room and seeing a bunch of Lego-bots running around the floor and desktops, controlled by what looked like AI (artificial intelligence) programs transmitting wirelessly from PCs. It was heaven! My overwhelming sense was that this was where I wanted to come play when I “retired.” I had that same feeling standing in the room this week.

The OLPC offices were a similar hotbed of creativity. XO laptops were everywhere, literally hanging from the ceiling, crowded on desktops, on credenzas in various states of disassembly. My favorite line from a volunteer demonstrating the mesh networking was that the warranty was only activated when you took the laptop apart! Everyone was encouraged to play with the components and wield a Phillips-head screwdriver. The place was humming with activity.

Contrast all this creative energy with the CIO Summit on balancing innovation and cost leadership. It was also held on the MIT Campus. Here in the center of one of the hotbeds of technology inventiveness, was the most stale, one-dimensional conference I’ve ever attended. There were no videos, no demonstrations of cool technology, no engaging slides, no play, period. There were only speeches and panels of very qualified people talking, one after the other. If ever there was an example of Marshall McLuhan’s maxim that "the medium is the message" this was it.

This is not to say that the content was not interesting, or that I didn’t have a number of valuable take-aways from the session. The speakers, panelists and moderators were among the brightest, most accomplished academic and business leaders in our field of IT. But their creativeness was overcast by the dull context of an outdated venue. How can you talk about web 2.0 and not be immersed in the technology instead of the commentary?

There is a message here for those of us who seek increasing innovation in our organizations. Context matters. A story may help. When I worked in NY I collected wind-up toys. My favorite store uptown was a little shop called The Last Wound Up. I had dozens of two-inch figures and animals in assorted colors that I kept on a round meeting table in my office. This was my interview space. I was a consultant manager for a Wall Street data and applications company. I remember a consultant candidate sitting at the table with me ignoring the toys. At one point I bumped the table by accident, and one of the pink mice did a back-flip. The candidate ignored it and droned on about his qualifications. He didn't get the job.

A few weeks later, I was introduced to Anna, the latest applicant. She had an equally impressive resume. Before she shook my hand she immediately went to the round table, exclaimed "look at these" and began winding a few up to see what they did. I was so impressed with her sense of wonder and play, willingness to step outside the typical interview box, and confidence that what she was doing was OK. It was an authentic moment. She got the job and went on to replace me as manager a few years later. The office with the toys created the context for something new and different to happen.

I’ll leave you with a related reference from a gem of a book by Gordon MacKenzie, the former head of creative at Hallmark: “To enhance the illusion of my emerging, indefinable (nonexistent) power [as the shaman of creative ideas], I set about to transform my little office into a corporate version of Merlin’s Den.” (p. 148). Pick up a copy of Orbiting the Giant Hairball (http://www.amazon.com/Orbiting-Giant-Hairball-Corporate-Surviving/dp/0670879835), read his chapter on "The Power of Paradox" and let the games begin.

A Short Story

Last week's NetHope Summit in San Jose was a memorable whirlwind immersion in new technology. Our left-brain technology loving side was well fed. In the right-brain column were all the relationships that formed and deepened, both among our members, and with our corporate partners; and a bit of storytelling introduced at the outset.

I retold a story I heard In March at a gathering of NGO managers. I think it tells us something about leadership. It also tells us about the heart of strategy. I'll let the story speak for itself:


A Tree in Zaire

Four Peace Corps volunteers were making their way in a large Land Rover to a village in what was then Zaire. There was a single dirt road through a forest. A few kilometers from the village they discovered a large tree that had fallen, blocking the road. A villager was on top of the log chopping away with a hand-held axe. Wood chips were flying in every direction, but he was making little progress. The volunteers asked him to step aside. They pulled a cable from the winch in front of the truck and wrapped it around the tree. They tried the winch first, without success. Putting the truck in reverse, with all four wheels engaged, they attempted to drag the tree from the road. The wheels spun in the dirt. They made little progress. Villagers had begun to arrive down the dirt road, from the other side. As the volunteers gave up, restoring the cable to the winch, the villagers gathered around the tree murmuring. The man with the axe resumed his chopping. Off to one side, at the edge of field, the volunteers saw an old man smiling. He walked slowly up to the villagers at the tree and began to sing. The villagers joined him in one of those African songs that rises and falls with a cadence of call and response. As the song rose, the villagers all lifted. The tree moved a few inches. As the song fell, they put the tree down. Again and again, they sang and moved, sang and moved. In less than an hour, the tree was removed from the road. The volunteers got in their Land Rover and drove on to the village, with the people following in the dust. [1]


When I first heard this story, it was about overcoming obstacles. It is certainly about that. But it is also rich with possibilities for leadership. I've included some question below for you to think about and debate with your teams. Who are we in this story? That's a question worth spending time with. I leave you with a stanza from Robert Frost's famous poem to stimulate your right-brain thinking:

The tree the tempest with a crash of wood
Throws down in front of us is not to bar
Our passage to our journey's end for good,
But just to ask us who we think we are.[2]

Discussion Questions

1) Who are we in this story and why?
a) Are we the man with the axe?
b) The Land Rover with the winch?
c) The village with the song?
d) The old man with the vision?

2) Who do we want to become?


[1] This story was told by David Young, chief strategist at World Vision and a former BCG senior partner, at a workshop at Capgemini facilities in Herndon, VA in March 2008.
[2] Robert Frost, “On a Tree Fallen Across the Road,” http://www.americanpoems.com/poets/robertfrost/12119

Left Brain, Right Brain

Three events last week led to some interesting discussions about "left brain" and "right brain" thinking. Left Brain thinking is logical, detail oriented, facts-based and analytical. Right Brain thinking is more intuitive, sensory, "big picture" oriented and imagination-based. Mathematicians live more on the left and artists more on the right. You get the idea?

Let’s look at the three events.

The final class in Comparative Leadership focused on the case of the Antarctic explorer Ernest Shackleton. This was the case that brought together all of the elements of the leadership framework developed in the class. We read and watched. A week before the class we gathered one evening to see the documentary, “The Endurance” narrated by Liam Neeson (See http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0264578/ ). It was a moving film. How Shakleton and his crew survived almost two years in the harshest conditions and one enormous obstacle after another was staggering.

During the class, the professor had us complete an individual exercise. We each drew a slip of paper from a hat that had one of the scenes from the story on it. We then had to write what we would say to the men as a result, and share it with the class when called on. My question was the following, which two other students also drew:

“You are Shackleton and it's Nov. 21, 1915. You have just watched the Endurance sink below the ice. What will you decide to do next? How will you communicate this to the men?”

The first student talked about the need for goals and planning, and sharing these with the men. This was a good answer. It was also very Left Brain. I volunteered a more Right Brain answer: “I’d hold a funeral,” I said, “for the ship.” "It is important for the men to face the reality, and have some time to grieve.” This was a significant loss. After the service—using the ship’s name—I would say, "and this is how we will honor her name: by enduring!"

This alternative sparked an interesting debate. It was obvious that the students were having difficulty wrapping their minds around this as a reasonable leadership action. Reasonable is the key word.

The second event was an announcement I received from the Academy of American Poets in celebration of National Poetry Month. The academy had designated April 17 as “Poem In Your Pocket Day,” encouraging readers to pick a poem and share it with friends and colleagues during the day. (See www.poets.org/pocket ).

Since email is a virtual pocket of sorts, and since good things come in threes, I shared three of my favorite authors’ work—all by poet laureates—in an attachment to an email, which I sent to everyone I knew at Tuck/Dartmouth with a note to “enjoy.” This was a very Right Brain email, which I used for the subject line. I included about 30 names on my distribution list.

Here’s what happened: only one recipient responded, saying they were looking forward to reading the poems during lunch. I presume the rest did not know what to do with this, or chalked it up as another bulk email at worst, or something weird from that Save the Children guy at best.

The third event was a discussion about stories over coffee with some Tuck colleagues. We were brainstorming how storytelling could be a part of business school education. Imagine that? We agreed that the most memorable political and business leaders were very good at telling stories. The rise in personal videos is perhaps related to this. Stories provide a way to communicate that draws the listener in and invites her to become part of the story, to make it her own. Steve Denning and others have written about this. You can find their work in that most Left Brain of publications, the Harvard Business Review.

So what’s my point? We need more Right Brain in our education. It's true that business school cases are a form of story. They are dissected before and during each class. But it is the “soft” aspects—the Right Brain stuff—that is often missed. Analysis is the bastion of a business school education. It’s important; I don’t want to denigrate that—after all, I’ve been accused of dreaming in spreadsheet cells. But analysis does not motivate change; it does not win the hearts and minds of people. And leadership is more often about winning hearts and minds.

Footnote: For a fun test on which side of the brain you are using, see the Herald Sun’s article and Left Brain, Right brain visual test, here http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/story/0,21985,22556281-661,00.html . Are you able to focus and make the figure reverse direction? Try reading a poem and looking again :-)

I’m headed to the NetHope Summit in San Jose, CA on the Cisco Campus this coming week. The theme is the power of collaboration. I’m excited about this event and the rich agenda we have set for ourselves. More on this as the week unfolds.

International Food Day

Nature cavorted with the calendar today. Students accepted for the class of 2010 at Tuck were visiting for the annual Admitted Students Weekend (ASW for acronym fans). And the temperature hit 80 degrees. What still looks like winter to the camera's eye, suddenly felt like spring. The Frisbees and footballs abounded. Even the volleyball net made an appearance.



One of the annual rituals for the ASW is the International Lunch. Students from a variety of countries cook and bring a cornucopia of food. The aroma of barbecue was wafting through the halls all day. Lunch time could not come soon enough! I listened to a professor's advice, and started at the Argentina table for roasted beef. Wonderful! I moved on to the Chinese table for a selection of delicacies, and finished at the Italian table for tiramisu. Delicious! Needless to say, a salad was in my future for dinner :)

We have a similar tradition in the IT group at Save the Children. We have eight nationalities represented in our small team, and a balance of genders--unusual for an IT department, but something in which we take pride. An international food day is a fun celebration of diversity, but it's also an important one. It reminds us that we are members of a small planet, a global community in a room, around a table, sharing a meal.

Diversity is important to an organization that works in many countries. This is so because we want our business to reflect who we are and where we work. But there's something more important that we value. It's the diversity of opinion.

Being in a university community, I am reminded of the time-honored Socratic method. One of my most memorable teachers would start a sentence and then look to us to complete it. If we faltered, he supplied the answer. As the semester unwound, we answered more, debated more, and began to have a honest dialog of different opinions. I learned that often the truth comes through the discussion of opposites. Inviting the debate led to richer answers. This is what diversity brings to a business. It is the invitation to hear perspectives different from your own and appreciate the bits of the answers that come from a symphony of voices.

It is the kiss of death for a manager and leader if all of her team thinks like she does. It is the end of a conversation if no one challenges an idea. Indeed, it is a ultimately a monologue. And that means you need to always be right. What leader can afford this burden?

Microfinance and Cell Phones

I attended an interesting talk on Microfinance last week. It was given by Joyce Lehman who managed a large microfinance program in Afghanistan for the past four years. She recently joined the Global Development team at the Gates Foundation as a program officer for microfinance.

Joyce started her talk with a story about a recent presentation she gave to students. She asked her young audience whether anyone knew what microfinance was. A young lady raised her hand. She said microfinance is when you go on-line select a project and give a $100 loan to fund it. This was not the definition Joyce was expecting, but she clearly recognized that it was the wave of the future.

Three things she said about her short tenure at the Gates Foundation stood out. First, was that everyone she met spoke about working for "the boss." The boss was not who you may expect. It was a child in Africa. Joyce held up her picture. Second, the Foundation cares deeply about impact. They support many projects, but they want to make sure you can prove it made a difference. Finally, as you may expect, they are looking for ways to leverage technology to solve the big, strategic problems. "Thinking big" is an important corollary, and is a strong part of the Microsoft and Foundation culture.

After the talk, I asked Joyce about cell phones in Afghanistan. "Oh they're everywhere!" she said immediately. "What about Internet cafes?" "They're everywhere also." "So that's the basic technology for reaching people in emerging countries," I asked. "Yes."

I want to contrast that with two observations on campus. One was seeing two coeds standing on either side of the road talking on a cell phone to each other as I walked by. They were no more than 30 feet apart. "Cross now; there are no cars," said the one on my side indignantly. I could hear her friend laugh on the other side of the road. For the new generation, the cell phone is conversation.

At a reception, I was talking with a colleague about cell phones. "I don't own one," she confessed. "Do you have electricity," I obnoxiously asked? After an expletive, she said, "I don't need to be reached 24-7."

I point to these two stories to contrast the generation gap in our understanding about communications technology. For one generation, it's conversation like any other conversation--it may even be the dominant form of conversation for today's students. For another generation it's a convenience. How we reach out to the world and leverage technology will largely be shaped by how we view the medium. We should not take this lightly, but rather approach it with "beginners mind" and be open to the student educating the teacher.

Leadership: Four Ways of looking at a Blackbird

I gave a mini-presentation this week to the Comparative Leadership Models class that I'm auditing. Here's a narrative rerun. A copy of the slide deck is on my web site (under Presentations...) at http://www.fairfieldreview.org/hpmd/eghprofile.nsf

Leadership is something you learn from the masters, from experience and from imagination. But you also increasingly learn about what you don't know. So you need to approach it with humility. That is what I hear in this stanza from Wallace Stevens' famous poem:

I know noble accents
And lucid, inescapable rhythms;
But I know, too,
That the blackbird is involved
In what I know.

I'd like to talk about four perspectives on leadership that I've experienced:

1. An Investment Bank: First Boston Corp (FBC) in the 70’s (before the big-bang deregulation)
2. A small Management Consulting Firm: HPMD in the 90’s
3. An International Nonprofit: Save the Children (STC) in the 00’s
4. And a Board of Directors: NetHope currently

I'm going to talk about these four chapters by telling some stories. Stories are what we tend to remember, anchoring ideas and concepts to them. It's why the case studies are so powerful for learning in an MBA context.

FBC - Power and Decisiveness

Two FBC executives are riding down in the elevator. It is mid January. 10 degrees out. Joe is wearing a long, herringbone wool coat. John has on a dark gray pinstripe suit, no coat. Joe is the head of Mergers and Acquisitions. John is one of the managing directors. Each is obnoxious in their own way. Joe rides in the front of cabs and immediately takes over the two way radio. Dispatchers love him. John has a copy of the New York Social Register on a table outside his door, opened to the page where he and his wife are listed. Joe turns to John.
"Where's you coat?"
"I don't wear a coat."
"You don't wear a coat? It's 10 degrees out!"
"I f you noticed, only two people in the firm don't wear coats: the president… and me!"
Whereupon Joe takes off his coat, throws it on the floor, jumps up and down on it and says:
"Why didn't you tell me!!"

It's a funny scene, and though 30 years later, I can still hear and see Joe tell this story. What it says is that the context from investment banking in the 1970s was very much about position and power. In groups, people deferred to the most senior person. Decisions were made by a decision-maker, and after listening to the data or other evidence, made the decision, quickly and decisively.

This is evident in the second scene from FBC. We are having an early morning meeting in the corporate finance department to decide the final pricing for an equity deal. A managing director is presiding. A small group of analysts are presenting their weighty report. I'm sitting in as the token IT guy because I created all the charts. Ten minutes into the presentation, the MD takes the 100-page blue book, drops it on the table, and takes off his glasses.
"You don't need to walk me through every damn detail in this report," he says
"Your job is to lead me to the decision."

Aside from being good advice to aspiring consultants, this reinforces the leadership model at FBC: decisions were made by the senior person. Period. They often took opportunities like this one to remind us that this was their job.

A final note before we leave Wall Street. Decisions were fast, especially if an M&A deal hung in the balance. The analysis may have been thorough, and weighty, taking a week of round-the-clock work, but the "here's what we're going to do" came quickly on its heels.

HPMD - Influence and Analysis

In the 1990s I co-founded a small management consultancy. We provided services to IT executives, and specialized in balanced scorecards and IT processes. Many of our customers were the Wall Street colleagues that were my customers during the prior 13 years. The relationships you form in one setting often carryover into another.

Moving from a line position with P&L responsibility to a consulting position is a culture change, to say the least. While the thought processes and analysis approaches are the same, the decision-making changes radically. In short, you are no longer a person who makes decisions. You are advising, prodding, and cajoling the person who does make the decision. To use a sports analogy, I moved from being a captain on the field to being a coach on the sidelines--a coach with very little power. Coaches may design the plays, but they don't play the game.

In a one project for a Wall Street data provider, we developed a detailed project list of all active and planned product development activities. Projects were classified into five categories, such as "revenue projects," "infrastructure projects," and "custom client requests." Product and Engineering managers were then asked to estimate the time and people needed to complete each step within the projects. From these estimates, we developed a model to forecast the implied people resources required on a quarter-by-quarter basis to complete each project within its expected timeframe.

We then held a full day meeting with senior managers and the product managers to complete a "Post-It Note Exercise." The objective of this exercise was to (a) gain a clear sense of the magnitude and timing of the product development activities, and (b) to "re-sequence" projects so that the higher priority items could be completed near-term with the available resources. Different color Post-It notes were used for each project to indicate the originating department (Marketing or Engineering) and type of project (revenue generating, cost savings, revenue retention and longer-term bets). The Post-It notes were arranged on flip-charts where each one represented a different calendar quarter, extending out three years.

It was immediately apparent that an inordinate number of the projects were clustered in the first quarter. In addition, our model suggested that a doubling of the Engineering and Marketing staffs would be required to complete them. The next step involved managers negotiating with each other to move projects out to future quarters. At each juncture, we recalculated the implied resources, and encouraged managers to make the tough decisions on delaying more projects in order to live within their allotted budgets. At the end of the day, the group had reached consensus about the priority of the projects and their timing. The exercise allowed them to reschedule the project list without losing any, so that the probability of completing near-term projects was vastly improved. As important, a skeptical president of the firm, was won over to the result, and heartily endorsed it.

The important points of this story are that the results depended heavily on thorough analysis. We presented a raft of information, and "let the data talk." The process was arduous, but in the end a consensus was reached, the senior executive ratified the decision. Here's the kicker: we knew the answer going into the process. The analysis and exercises confirmed it. But we needed to lead the decision-makers to the decision.

Save the Children - Consensus and Death by Consensus

When I joined Save the Children, one of my consulting clients, the president in the story above, gave me a year at best before I'd throw in the towel. He was on the Board of Outward Bound in Maine and was fully committed to the mission of this nonprofit. So I wanted to know why he would say that. "You'll be too frustrated with the pace and process of decision-making," he said. He was right about the frustration, but not about the year.

Before I give you some examples, I want to say how committed I am to the Save mission. Working at Save is incredibly rewarding. The opportunities to have impact on children's lives and on how the organization operates are the highest of anything I've experienced. In addition, the degree to which I am valued as a contributor to the organization is unsurpassed. So when I offer critique, it is as a member of the family, and from the heart.

The management groups at Save like to meet. Incessantly meet. It is telling how each manager that joins Save notices this and laments it within the first thirty days. Things are discussed, opinions gathered, again and again; decisions often take months to make and are frequently tweaked for months following. We held a World Summit in October 2007 to work on our strategy and 160 managers attended. The planning for the Summit took months to develop. The strategic planning process took 14 months to develop a five year plan and another 6 months to roll-out to the organization. To say that decision-making is a participant sport with triple overtime at Save is an understatement.

Participation is important for a mission-driven organization. People are passionate about our mission. Having their hearts and minds aligned with our strategy is paramount. But along the way, we've lost sight of what consensus is. It came as a shock when I heard that some senior managers thought consensus was unanimous agreement. Consensus is universal hearing, not universal agreement. Consensus asks that those who don't agree, to agree to go along with the decision. It is telling that a country manager stood up at the World Summit and said to the senior management team, "OK, you've heard our feedback and gathered our input, now we need you to make a decision so we can move forward." Many in the room nodded in agreement. Even a consensus run organization hungers for decisiveness.

One final story. When the Tsunami destroyed Banda Aceh, there was an unprecedented outpouring of concern and support from Americans. In the months that followed this tragedy, the workload at Save more than tripled. People worked around the clock. Decisions had to be made on the spot. Individuals had to act. There was no time for lengthy discussions or meetings. Action was needed. And we responded. The organization survived on the sheer will and talent of the employees. Near the end of the disaster response work, many of us noticed how well we did without the drawn out decision processes we had followed for years. And we asked why we couldn't continue in this fashion going forward.

NetHope - Town Hall to Parliament

When NetHope began as a consortium of seven in 2001, we did everything as a team. Our monthly conference calls and semi-annual Summits were a poster child for the traditional town hall meeting approach to making decisions. Everybody participated in everything. And it worked.

Over the next seven years, we tripled in size, incorporated, and became our own 501(c)3 nonprofit. As part of this growth and change in our organization, we needed to move from a town hall approach to a representative form of governance. We elected a Board of Directors, hired a CEO, and appointed committees to handle the business of the organization. This is how corporations work.

There's a famous photo of a cabinet meeting in the White House in the early sixties. John F. Kennedy was president. Lyndon Johnson was Vice President and Robert McNamara was Secretary of Defense. In the photo, you can see them seated about the conference table. In addition to the players at-the-table, you can also see the senior advisors seated along either wall, behind the presidents' men. This is a strong image of representative decision-making. Everyone doesn't have a seat at the table. Putting aside our form of democratic government for a minute, the broader organization trusts the representative leaders to carry out the business of the organization, to make decisions on behalf of the stakeholders.

Themes in Leadership

For each of the contexts we talked about, we can see different degrees of decision-making power, participation and speed. One size does not fit all. Using the typical consulting matrix approach (what consultant can think without a matrix?) the following diagram is one way to summarize this. You may quibble with which organization goes in which box. That's OK. Truth comes through debate.

In each of these four cases, and a half a dozen stories, you probably have noticed the prominence of decision-making . At the bottom of this is a strong belief that I hold about leadership. At its core, leadership is about being decisive. A fundamental responsibility of all managers is to make informed decisions ... for leaders, it is decisiveness.