In October 2009, US President Barack Obama became the third President to win the Nobel Peace Prize while in office.  What surprised everyone is that President Obama had only been in office for less than ten months.  All Politics aside, this shows that Mr. Obama is indeed the type of leader I discussed in this August 2009 paper.  To find out how your business can apply twenty first century leadership skills, please check out www.tamianassociates.com or e-mail Jeff at info@tamianassociates.com

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Twenty First Century Leadership

          Twentieth Century leadership techniques will not work in the Twenty-first Century. In the twentieth century a leader could be successful just by being a good technician and knowing his or her product line.  He or she could take care of any situation by promising a reward or threatening a punishment. These rules served business since the days of Adam Smith in the eighteenth century In the twenty first century, a new millennia brings us new rules to apply.  There is a certain technology of leadership, a leader must lead by context and a leader must always inspire others.  These new rules are collectively what is referred to as Transformational Leadership.   We are about to embark upon a discussion about how the how the paradigm of leadership in the twenty first century must be transformational and how the act of doing business is transformational in itself.

          One of the greatest philosophers of the 20^th Century was R. Buckminster Fuller.  (1898-1983) Fuller stated:

"Think of it. We are blessed with technology that would be indescribable to our forefathers. We have the wherewithal, the know-it-all to feed everybody, clothe everybody, and give every human on Earth a chance. We know now what we could never have known before-that we now have the option for all humanity to "make it" successfully on this planet in this lifetime. Whether it is to be Utopia or Oblivion will be a touch-and-go relay race right up to the final moment." (R. Buckminster Fuller (1980)

          There are essentially two styles of leadership, transformational and transactional.  We are all familiar with transactional leadership.  This is leadership that concentrates on doing the tasks; ordering your subordinates to do certain things and rewarding and punishing each transaction.  If you do a good job you get raises and promotions.  If you do a bad job you get fired.  Transactional leadership no longer works in the 21^st century, The speed of communications in the twenty first century requires that workers can think on the ball.  It requires that they understand the vision and mission of the company.  The old style of transactional leadership creates a culture of robots who don’t take charge themselves but rather wait for instructions from above them.  On the other hand transformational leadership is where the leader leads by inspiring his or her team.  The transformational leader must inspire his or her team by making them aware of the importance of the task at hand, appealing to their higher order needs and convincing them to give up their own self interest.  (Yukl, 2006)

           Any discussion on leadership requires a discussion of integrity.  Integrity is a subject that a lot of people cringe when they hear about it.  This is because they have integrity confused with morality and success and failure.  To quote Robert F. Kennedy, (1927-1968) “Only those who fare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly.”  We have it that having integrity is good and being out of integrity is bad Integrity has nothing to do with being right or being wrong, it has to do with workability.  In their 2007 article, Integrity: Where Leadership Begins, A New Model of Integrity Werner Erhard and Michael Jenson define integrity as being whole and complete.  They further define it practically as honoring ones word.  Erhard and Jenson further state that it is integrity that determines workability and workability is a factor in performance.  The next question is what constitutes a persons word.  Per Erhard and Jenson, what constitutes a person’s word is:

-          What you say you will do (or not do), and by when you said you would do it.

-          What you know to do.

-          What you are expected to do (or not do) unless you have declined it.

-          When you assert you have evidence that the other would find valid for themselves

-          The moral, ethical and legal standards respectively of your society, group and organization and state unless you have declined them.

Erhard & Jenson (2007)

          Erhard and Jenson then distinguish that unless you give your word to very little, it is impossible to always keep one’s word which is why integrity is honoring ones word.  An interesting paradox is that if one were to do a cost analysis on honoring their word, they would be an untrustworthy person.  The way that you honor your word is that when it becomes apparent that you cannot keep your word, let the person that you gave your word to know and take responsibility for the consequences of not keeping ones word

          Jim Collins, in his 2001 Book, Good to Great discusses what it takes for a company to make that quantum leap of being a good company to being a great company.  His group conducted studies of 11 companies that he considered to be great to see how they made the leap from just being good to being great. (Please note however, he must have missed something because one of the companies on the list was Fannie Mae and another was Circuit City.  Fannie Mae was bailed out by the government and Circuit City declared bankruptcy. I understand Collins is writing another book to tell why.)  He discusses the concept of a Level 5 Executive who combines the characteristics of humility with a will to win.  These two factors, when combined can be highly inspiring to the team.  The leader is willing to give all but not for him or her.  Because of this we rarely hear about the Level 5 Executive.  The Level 5 is willing to give all for the team; he or she when things go wrong will take the blame and when things go right give the credit to others.  We haven’t heard of very many level 5 leaders because they do not crave the spotlight.  When it is time for a level 5 leader to move on, their successor is empowered to succeed.

          So what does Collins say what the first step of a Level 5 leader should be?  The first thing on the agenda should be putting together your team.  He claims that the Level 5 leader is going to want to bring in the people that they want to work with, get rid of the people that they don’t want to work with and then put everyone in the correct positions.  When a new coach takes over a team the first thing they do is get the players and then put them where they are supposed to be.  Then once everyone is in place, the coach then starts to work on the play book.  The Level 5 leader knows he or she cannot be successful when there are people on the team who are not up to it or are playing at an incorrect position.  I happen to disagree with Collins.  How will the Level 5 inspire people if they don’t know his or her vision? How is that leader going to enroll people to work with him or her when they have no idea what the vision of the company is.  Surely with a Level 5 it won’t be by reputation since by very nature the level 5 would not have a reputation. Therefore, I assert that a leader has to have a vision as a first step.

          A vision statement “is a clear vision of what an organization can accomplish, it helps people understand the objectives, purpose and priorities of the organization and fosters a sense of common purpose.” (Yukl 2006 p274)  It is the vision statement that must inspire fellow team members, venture capitalist, customers and government officials so they come on board with you and put out their stake in the company.  The company I have started is named Tamian Associates.  I named it after an Indian Village that used to sit less than a mile from my residence. My vision for Tamian Associates is that within five years it be the premier business development and marketing firm in the San Francisco Bay Area, bringing in revenues of over 5 million dollars a year by working with small businesses and entrepreneurs, allowing them to make a difference in the world by doing what they do best while Tamian Associates builds the networks and partnerships needed for them to prosper.

          Once the leader has a vision and a team in place it is then time to get to work on the mission statement.  A  Mission Statement is what tells the world what the company is doing and what its purpose is.  If you look at the Be Do Have paradigm as described below, a vision statement is what you are going to have and mission statement is the  Do.   What is the most important part of the mission statement is that it INSPIRES.  The leader herself must be inspired from it and the leader must be able to inspire others with the mission of the business.  Inspiration is the name of the game.  The leaders must be inspiring as the company itself must be inspiring as the product must be inspiring.  There is an old song that goes “what the world needs now is love sweet love, that’s the only thing, that there is just too little of.”  Change the word “love” to the word “inspiration” and you can begin to get the idea of the job of the transformational leader.

          The Business Plan is another tool the leader can use to inspire; in this case investors. A well prepared business plan is a powerful tool for inspiring key stake holders such as investers, lenders, suppliers that one is fully set up to be in business (Kuriloff et al. 1993) One can create a business that will cure cancer but if you do not show how it is going to make a profit and you do not show it in a credible manner, no investor will care.  Investors invest so that their money will grow, they do not like to lose money.  So a leader should write a business plan that will show not only that the business can make a difference in the world but also show a profit.

          I cannot stress the importance of leaders practicing their leadership skills by leading in a volunteer organization. For the past ten years, I have been a member of MDI, Men’s Divisions International, a volunteer organization.  For the past year, I have led a team of 8 to 10 men in various different volunteer activities.  In leading in a volunteer organization, there are no financial rewards or punishments; if someone made a bad mistake I could not fire them as they did not work for me nor were they getting paid for their efforts.  If someone did a really good job, I could not give them a raise, they were not getting paid.  If someone didn’t want to do a task, I could not force them to do so.  If I wanted my team to do something I had to INSPIRE them to do that.  The tool I used to inspire them is called a CPR where CPR stands for Context, Purpose, and Results.

         Before I discuss the tool of the CPR, I will discuss the Be Do Have paradigm.  In America today, we mostly operate on a Do Have Be paradigm, “If I work really hard, (Do) I will have a lot of money (Have) and I will be happy (Be)” How often do people think this, they work hard and never have the money.  Or they work hard, have a lot of money and are miserable.  Per   Be, Do, Have, this is not in the correct order.  What if you were to be happy, Do what you love and then have abundance in your life? (“Jaime, a Day in the Life Coach 6/14/09)  For a project, you can map the context, purpose and result to Be, Do and Have.

 

Context = Be

Purpose = Do

Results = Have

 

          Generally when you are starting a project, you have some idea of what your results should be, so results is where you want to start.  Results should be S.M.A.R.T.  SMART is an acronym for Specific, Measurable, Attainable Realistic and Timely.   To increase revenue is not a SMART result.   To increase revenue from the servicing unit 50% by January first is a SMART result as it is specific, measurable, attainable, realistic and timely.  There will probably be more than one result that you want to attain; write down all of them and if they are not SMART make them SMART.  One of the results can be a purely selfish result such as At the end of the project on June 1^st, I get a 20% pay raise.

          The next step in writing your CPR is to determine the purpose of the activity.  The purpose of the activity is essentially why you are doing the activity.  The purpose is broken down into four different parts; the immediate action to take, the supporting action, the short term direction and the long term direction, here is an example:  To establish our presence in the new social media by developing a fan page on Facebook so that we have better reach to our prospects and with that become “the example” of an internet marketing business. The To is the immediate action, the by is the supporting action, the  so that  the short term direction and the and with that the long term direction.

          That brings us to context.   Context is where one is coming from; it is who one is being that does the purpose and has the results.  When a project is not getting the results the leader should look at the context and check to see if he or she is being that context.  The context is always a being; it is never a doing or never a having.  In my current project of consulting in the area of social networking, my context is Ruthless Compassion.   I love the people who I am consulting but I am also ruthless with them.  If I tell them to do something I expect them to get it done but I do it in the context of Ruthless Compassion.

          Once you have established your context, purpose and results,  the next thing to do is make sure that they align with each other so that the Have  is generated by the  being and doing. Once you believe you have the CPR in full alignment you are going to want to show it to someone else, not on your team, who understands this technology to have them check out the CPR to make sure that they see that it is aligned.  We as human beings have blind spots in our thinking and having another person, who has different blind spots than you, look over and give their feedback makes this technology extremely powerful!

Example of a CPR:

You can CPR any activity, group and individual.  Here is an example of a CPR I wrote on making myself lunch:

Results:

-          The sandwich tastes good to me

-          The sandwich contains less than 200 calories

-          The sandwich as 5 gms of fibre in the bread

-          I am satisfied after eating the sandwich

Purpose:  To make lunch by building a sandwich that is healthy so that I can concentrate on my capstone project and with that presence the world with my ideas.

Context: World’s Greatest Sandwich Chef.

          In his book,  The E-Myth Revisited,  Michael E. Gerber discusses the three different people that you run into in business; they are the technician, manager and entrepreneur.  The e-myth is the myth that states, “ that small businesses are started by entrepreneurs, risking capital to make a profit. This is simply not so. . . “According to Gerber, “Understanding the E-Myth and applying that understanding to the development of a small business, can be the secret to any business’s success.” (Gerber, 1995 p3) Gerber goes on to state how a technician has an entrepreneurial moment where her or she has an idea.  They then start their business and go back to being technicians.  They then hire managers and eventually fire them because they don’t like them, don’t know how to manage themselves so they try to do everything themselves.

          In the last job I had, the company I worked for was owned by a technician.  He was a master in the technology of the product that we were selling but he was not an entrepreneur.  Our product was a high tech product that had not been updated in ten years.  When I would point this out he would tell me that he didn’t need to update it, that it still worked fine.  He would not accept that all the competitors were upgrading because everyone wanted the next best thing and our product still looked like it came off of the set of the 1960’s science fiction show, Dr. Who. He would not allow me to use the internet for marketing as he thought that I could possibly look at pornography on the internet and insisted I market the product using telemarketing which did not work.  This resulted in a situation where no new products were being sold, with the owner of the company blaming everyone but himself.

          According to Gerber, the solution is for the entrepreneur to stay in that entrepreneur zone.  He or she does that by using turn-key systems to run the business.  A turn-key system is one that you just turn a key and it goes.  This is set up by having written procedures for everything that is done in the business and by the reporting of the results, so the manager can see how it is going without rumor or personalities getting into the way.

          Gerber uses the restaurant McDonalds as a paradigm of a turn-key system. If you go to McDonalds in Tokyo you get the same Big Mac as you get if you go into a McDonalds in London or Los Angeles.  McDonald managers get trained at Hamburger University in Illinois to learn every aspect of the system and every aspect is defined.  The fries are fried the same way in any McDonalds that you go into in the world and if someone new starts work they learn the same procedure that is used in McDonalds everywhere.  According to Gerber, any business can be made a turnkey operation freeing the entrepreneur of supervisorial duties so he or she can work on coming up with new ideas.

Case Study: Fredrick Terman, Hewlett, Packard and the Silicon Valley:

         Dr. Fredrick Terman was a professor in Radio Phenomena at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California.  Stanford was located in California’s Santa Clara Valley, a valley that was nick-named the Valley of the Heart’s Desire because every type of fruit imaginable grew there. Terman had a great vision, he envisioned that surround Stanford there would be a swarm of high tech firms with Stanford getting funding from these companies for its research and the companies would have lots of talent to choose from at Stanford.  Two of his students were William Hewlett and David Packard whom he had inspired to start a company in Packard’s garage.  Today Hewlett-Packard is a huge multi-national company with thousands of employees worldwide and there is a historic landmark in front of Packard’s old garage that says, “Birthplace of Silicon Valley.”

          How did these three transform Hewlett Packard from a garage into a multinational company and an agricultural valley into the greatest producer of technology on earth?  Terman was what Jim Collins would call a Level 5 Leader.  He was devoted to his cause and he did not care for the accolades himself.  If you were to ask 100 High Tech workers in The Valley who Frederick Terman was maybe one would be able to give the correct answer.  Terman was also able to inspire his successors, Hewlett and Packard to be great.  David Packard also found, from his tenure as a QA Engineer at General Electric that workers were more productive when he was out on the floor talking to them rather than just sitting in his office.  He called this Management by Walking Around.  He also considered each of his employees his personal friend; in the 1950’s HP had a layoff and both he and Bill Hewlett were so upset over the devastation it caused for the laid off workers and their families that they swore they would never have another lay off, and they did not during the remainder of Hewlett’s and Packard’s lifetime.

Summary:

They ten keys to leading in the twenty first century are:

1)      This millennia requires new styles of leadership

2)      Transformational Leadership = Leadership by Inspiration

3)      To inspire you must have a vision

4)      You must have a team you can rely on

5)      Use a business plan to inspire stake holders

6)      Use a CPR to know what context to be for your project

7)      Make sure your results are SMART

8)      Lead in volunteer organizations to make a difference and practice your leadership skills

9)      Systemize and automate your business to make it turn-key

10)  If you want to be well-known and famous, leadership may not be for you.

          We have discussed how leadership in the twenty first century must follow a totally different paradigm than in times past; Transactional leadership, in use since the days of Adam Smith is being replaced by transformational leadership Inspiration and context are more vital to leadership than rewards and punishment.  The most important factor of leadership is inspiration. In November of 2008, Barack Obama was elected President of the United States.  His ability to inspire transcended our countries deep prejudices and superstitions around race; that is the power of inspiration.

           

 

References

Ashford University, 2008 Leadership, Priorities and Practice New York, McGraw Hill

Basic Books, 2004  The Ultimate Small Business Guide Cambridge, MA Pereus Books

www.bfi.org

Collins, Jim, 2001 Good to Great New York, Harper Collins

 Datner A, Resuscitate Your Creative Heartbeat with a CPR; downloaded 7/31/09 from   

          http://www.creativeheartcoaching.com/2008/08/quick-get-your.html

 Erhardt & Jenson (2007) Integrity: Where Leadership Begins, A New Model of Integrity

          retrieved 8/27/09 from http://ssrn.com/abstract=983401

Gerber M, (1995)  The E-Myth Revisited New York, Harper Collins

Jamie, (2009) A New Paradigm retrieved from  

          http://adayinthelifecoach.blogspot.com/2009/07/new-paradigm.html 8/27/09

Kennedy, Robert F Unknown, quote retrieved 8/28/09 from www.ask.com

Kuriloff, Hemphill & Cloud  Starting and Managing the Small Business San Francisco, McGraw   

           Hill

Packard, D (1995) The HP Way, How Bill Hewlett and I Built Our Company, New York:   HarperCollins

Yukl, G (2006)  Leadership in Organizations Upper Saddle River New Jersey: Pearson

 

Note: The information on CPRs was attained over a ten year period, from 1999 to 2009 from my interactions with the men of Men’s Division International and women with its sister organization The Family of women. Many thanks are given to the men and the women who freely teach this information daily