A couple of weeks ago he sent a piece called “Leadership and Solitude” by William Deresiewicz that was published two years ago in The American Scholar, and had originated as a speech the author gave to the first year students at the United States Military Academy in 2009.

Are you interested in leadership, your own or anyone else’s?  If so, read it.

Deresiewicz blasts a Grand Canyon size hole in the common conflation of exercising leadership and exercising authority, with the illusion that having a big job has anything to do with being a leader. 

Deresiewicz points out that the route to achievement is by being what he terms “first class hoop jumpers.”  He means that the way to get ahead in organizational life and in society in general is to figure out what people, particularly authority figures, expect and deliver it at a high level of competence. We are socialized very early.  We learn as infants the wonderful benefits of performing the way our parents want us to:  food, shelter, and love. Not a bad deal.

For most of us, myself included, the rewards of first-class hoop jumping have been compelling: applause, more income, another prestigious diploma on the wall, a big office, whatever. In fact, one way we reward the very best of the hoop jumpers, one way we make sure they will never exercise leadership, is by calling them “leaders.” It’s just another bribe.

In the past month I have worked with two groups of accomplished young people, young at least from my perspective, accomplished by anyone’s objective measures. They all thought of themselves as “leaders” because they had been told so again and again after performing like puppets dancing on the end of a string.

As Deresiewicz writes:

“….for too long we have been training leaders who only know how to keep the routine going. Who can answer questions, but don’t know how to ask them. Who can fulfill goals, but don’t know how to set them. Who think about how to get things done, but not whether they’re worth doing.”

Maybe it is consequence of undergoing the distasteful quadrennial United States spectacle of a Presidential campaign, the antithesis of leadership, where the candidates seem to be more vying for the title of pandering-in-chief than leader of the free world.

Maybe it is simply so many people trying to survive and thrive in a world that seems so unfamiliar.

Case in point. Read Robert Safian’s cover story in last month’s Fast Company, “This is Generation Flux.” The piece is all about those entrepreneurs and businesspeople, mostly young but always who not only can stand but welcome and thrive in chaos, disruption, and uncertainty.

Organizations and especially people at the top of them are all about predictability, consistency, survival, and reducing uncertainty.  Leadership, on the other hand, is an inherently disruptive force.  That’s why no one in organizational life is authorized to exercise leadership.

In a time of uncertainty and rapid change, the qualities required to lead are different than what most of us have experienced for most of our lives.

As Safian points out: “Organizations have structures and processes built for an industrial age, where efficiency is paramount but adaptability is terribly difficult.”

Why is adaptation such a challenge?

Here’s a thought, or two.

Think about the process of adaptation in animal and plant species. When a species adapts, it gives up a small portion of its DNA, usually only about 5%. However, giving up the DNA that is hindering adaptation and survival not only gets rid of what is getting in the way, but also makes room for new DNA than can survive in the changing reality.

It’s easier for animals and plants than it is for people and companies.  Even though adaptation is mostly a process of conserving the 95% that is still useful, humans and organizations love all of their DNA.

Which finger would you sacrifice to make progress? Which long-treasured function, service, product…or employee would your organization be willing to jettison in order to move forward? 

Not surprisingly, we focus on what is being left behind. The behavioral economists are teaching us that we fear loss more than we value gain. Adaptation and the leadership it requires are about the distribution of loss.  And in an organization, for some people that 5% is the most important 5% of all the DNA, it’s what keeps them coming to work in the morning, it’s what makes them proud of what they do, it’s a core part of their identity, it may even be them. When the organization adapts to new realities, what is left behind may be real people, not just particular services, products, or norms.

Adaptation is a challenge for individuals as well as for organizations.

In his article in Fast Company, Safian shows that adaptability has enabled members of “Generation Flux” to give new meaning to the idea of career development. How adaptable are you? How ready are you to think of your career as endlessly unfolding?

Notwithstanding what has happened so far, the hard work of leadership has not yet begun.

It is relatively easy to get disempowered, angry, frustrated people together to rail against a wide range of enemies and scapegoats. It is quite another to effect change.

Like it or not, the values and processes that have created the Occupy Wall Street phenomenon are inadequate and ill-suited to taking the next steps and creating real impact.

The democratic, inclusive, and consensus-driven norms that have guided OWS up to this point will not get it to the next level—that is, if there is real interest in changing the current reality rather than just complaining about it and speaking out against it.

Continue reading here.

I never expected the movie to be anything more than cinematic eye candy. It turns out to be as good an example I’ve ever seen of adaptive leadership at work. Thanks to an alert from my colleague Mary Hekl, I was looking for the connections.

You probably know the outlines of the story. In late 2001, Billy Beane (played by Brad Pitt, who appears to be trying hard to be Robert Redford at this stage of his career) is the General Manager of the Oakland Athletics, who had just lost in the fifth game of the first round of the playoffs to the Yankees. Not long after the season ended, three of the team’s stars, all free agents, had signed with other teams. 

Beane meets with his crew of player scouts who are focused on replacing the lost talent. Beane realizes that doing business the way they have always done business is not going to produce a different result, especially for a small market team that cannot compete with the big market and big spending teams like the Red Sox and Yankees, who can pay whatever it takes to attract the players they want. Beane decides he is going to use sophisticated statistical analysis to identify unheralded and underrated players who can be signed on the cheap. 

If you haven’t seen the film, here are five snippets to whet your appetite for the adaptive leadership lessons it embodies.

First, early on he re-frames the challenge. “We are asking the wrong question,” he says to the scouts. The challenge, he argues, is not to replace the lost talent, but to win more games. That’s a very different way of thinking about the problem because it focuses attention on how games are won, not on players who can re-produce the particular production of the players who left.

Second, the veteran scouts determinedly hold on to past practices that have worked for them for years. Sitting around a table, they cite over and over the qualities they look for and cling to the skills and insights that they have honed and that have made them successful as if those ways of judging talent were the only way to do their work.  (Tip of the cap to my friend Reggie Feltman for this one.)

Third, “Adapt or die!” In one dramatic moment, Beane screams this mantra, which says it all.

Fourth, interpret the resistance as a sign of progress.  Late in the film, Boston Red Sox owner John Henry invites Beane to Fenway Park in Boston to offer him the position of General Manager of the team. In the course of the conversation, Henry does a monologue about how people cling to the status quo because it is familiar and tries to convince Beane that the pushback he has received so many of baseball’s establishment is a predictable consequence of leading deep change. 

Fifth, distinguish technical problems from adaptive challenges. Beane repeatedly talks about his goal not as winning the World Series, but as, in his words, “doing something meaningful” by “changing the game.” Beane knows that there are many ways to create a terrific baseball team, but that is primarily a technical problem and that if his focus on new statistics can affect the way talent is assessed, he can change the nature of the way the game is played, an adaptive challenge if there ever was one.

Billy Beane, practitioner of adaptive leadership. Hats off to you, even if my beloved Red Sox stole your ideas and won two World Series with them, while your beloved Oakland A’s have yet to make it to the Series during your time at the helm.

Romney’s well documented ability to slip and slide to wherever his political ambitions require him to be is well understood. There are some advantages to that. The country needs people in high office who are not committed to positions they will later regret when they come face-to-face with reality instead of campaigns. We need politicians who have the courage to learn and adapt, not hold on rigidly to positions and promises and pledges that sounded good on the campaign trail but get in the way of governing.

Their problem, of course, is that we don’t want our politicians to learn. We’d rather have them stick to their positions, and be predictable and consistent, rather than learn and adapt.

What do we call politicians who learn? Wishy-washy.

The good news about Romney is that no one knows what he really believes, or whether he really believes in anything except his ambition. The bad news is that he doesn’t understand is that being smarter than the average pol is not enough to get elected, or to lead.  Barack Obama is learning that lesson now.

Mitt Romney is the 2004 John Kerry:  smart, educated, articulate, strategic and appropriately ambitious. What Kerry learned in his run for the Presidency is that an intellectual connection is not enough to get elected or to lead. To lead a complex, diverse nation through a myriad of never-seen-before challenges requires an emotional connection as well.  George W. Bush made that connection, so did Bill Clinton, and Ronald Reagan.  In order to take on the toughest issues, endure necessary sacrifices, make hard choices, we need to believe in someone, not just agree with them.

Leadership requires competence both above and below the neck in order to succeed. 

Nevertheless, not only did the system work, but it worked the way it was designed to work.

With its two year terms, the House of Representatives is designed to be, well, representative, and to reflect popular will. The Senate is designed to be a little more statesmanlike, to take a somewhat longer view. Both performed as scripted.

The deadlock and stalemate that was so painful to watch was reflective of the country as a whole. These are tough issues. Everyone is making their best guess. The country has never been in this spot before and no one knows the right answer. The new debt agreement is just an experiment, not a solution, at best a step forward in addressing the myriad of problems challenging the US and global economies. 

The good news is that the extreme wings of both parties do not like it. The bipartisan centrist majority must have done something right. 

There will always be the know-it-alls, like the New York Times’ Paul Krugman, who have the enormous advantage of no accountability.

John Boehner, on the other hand, is accountable to mutually exclusive constituencies: his caucus which elected him Speaker, the House as a whole, which he represents to the rest of the country, his district back home which elected him to Congress, and, by the way, his own values and beliefs. He is the most sympathetic character in this whole drama. He said early on that he did not become Speaker to be a “partisan hack.”  He spent untold hours cajoling, begging, convincing, bribing and doing whatever he could to put together a majority of his caucus behind a bill, any bill that had a chance of passing the Senate. If he supported a bill that could pass the House with a coalition of a large majority of Democrats and a minority of his Republican caucus, the vote would have been understood as a repudiation of him, a vote of no confidence in his Speakership and Eric Cantor would have replaced him as Speaker.  He knew from the beginning that there was only a very small space for agreement, since he needed a majority of his caucus to stay in his job plus a significant number of Democrats to create a majority, and that would only happen if the bill was acceptable to a majority of the Democratic-controlled Senate. 

The differences were not primarily about politics, or about the facts. They reflected deeply-held values that were mirror images of the deeply-held values that are alive and well in the country as a whole. When people are faced with giving up on some belief that they care about, the feelings will run high, and the losses will seem agonizing. The far left and the far right both had to be left behind if a bargain was going to be struck.

For Boehner, as well as for Pelosi, Reid, and McConnell, this was a palpable, visible example of leadership as distributing losses and as disappointing your own people at a rate they could absorb. All the ugly foreplay that we witnessed for the past month was a necessary prelude to the harsh reality that there was no overwhelming consensus in the Congress or in the country for a way through this stalemate that would meet everyone’s needs.  The country wanted a resolution. Any resolution had to be bi-partisan. Boehner and his colleagues in leadership in the House and Senate were able to thread the needle, but only after exhausting all other possibilities and using the deadline as an action-forcing event to herd enough cats to enact a law. 

No one, not the stock market nor global big-wigs, nor ordinary folks in the US and around the world could have liked what they saw. No one can feel unqualifiedly enthusiastic about the content of what was finally produced. There will be some electoral defeats, probably mostly in primaries, on both sides of the aisle for people who voted for the bill against the most vocal sentiment in their core constituencies. 

The process was awful to watch because it was like looking in a mirror. The value conflicts that permeate the most diverse country on the face of the earth were on display. In the immortal words of Pogo, “We have met the enemy and they are us.” 

Is it possible in this media frenzy—one that so eerily parallels Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp.’s own journalistic practices—to take a dispassionate view of the man as seen through a leadership lens?

Being successful in business has nothing inherently to do with leadership, but for most people that’s where any assessment of Murdoch’s “leadership” begins. By all the typical measures, he is enormously successful and has exhibited many of the qualities such a role demands: brains, vision, persistence, focus. He took one modest newspaper that his father left him when he was 23 years old and turned it into an empire that made him No. 117 on the Forbes list of the world’s richest people (and an even more impressive No. 13 on its list of the world’s most powerful people). Not bad. Score one for Murdoch. A+ on this dimension.

How about crisis management? Crisis management is also confused with leadership, even though—like firefighters rush into a burning building to save people—it’s part of the job description. Nevertheless, people will examine Murdoch’s performance during this crisis and make judgments about his “leadership”. He seems to have done everything his shareholders and the public would want him to do: diffuse the crisis and preserve as much as possible of his reputation, News Corp.’s stock price and the corporate empire. He closed the offending newspaper, the News of the World. He fired or accepted the resignation of key lieutenants who were closer to the action than he was. He humbled himself before Parliament and allowed the politicians to display their hypocritical self-righteous anger. He certainly deserves no worse than an A-.

To read more, click on the link below.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/on-leadership/where-rupert-murdochs-blame-ends-and-ours-begins/2011/07/26/gIQAXiexaI_story.html

Cuomo had two inter-related problems. He had to secure a handful of Senate Republicans to get to the 32 votes he needed to pass the bill through the 62-member Republican-controlled Senate.  And, second, he had Catholic Senators, both Republicans and Democrats, who had both religious and political concerns about offending the Church, which was staunchly opposed.

At this point, the merits were irrelevant. Any Senator could make the most compelling arguments on either side of the bill. Many had taken positions in their campaign. Many had voted on the bill when it was defeated in 2009 by a Democratic-controlled State Senate.

First, Cuomo made enacting a gay marriage bill a public measure of his success (again, are you watching, Barack?). By putting himself on the line, he made it harder for wavering Senate Democrats to vote against the bill.  No legislator wants to embarrass a Governor of his or her own party. Governors can be too helpful politically to risk that.

Second, Cuomo needed to take the multi-headed mélange of gay rights organizations whose disorganization, fractiousness, mixed messages, and general inability to play well together had contributed significantly, in Cuomo’s view at least, to the defeat of the measure in 2009. Cuomo called them together and told them that this time the campaign to win the passage of the bill was going to be directed by him, not them. He would call the shots, define the strategy, and negotiate the details, and all of that that was the price of his making it a priority. No consensus building here. Cuomo was willing to be an authoritative bully when it was necessary to do so.

Third, Cuomo, himself a Catholic, knew he had to undermine the Church’s opposition. So he rolled up his sleeves and compromised, getting personally involved (again, Barack, pay attention!) meeting with Republican Senators to actually draft language to exempt religious institutions from the requirement that they honor gay marriages and to prevent them from getting penalized in any way for not doing so.  Meeting with the Governor himself to draft language forced the legislative participants to declare their concerns and gave Cuomo the opportunity to address them. He listened to their stories without judgment, and then gave the work back to them: “Tell us what you are worried about on the impact of this bill for religious institutions and we’ll fix it.” 

Fourth, and most artfully, Cuomo mobilized fat cat Republicans who would not only help legitimize the defecting Republicans Cuomo needed to win passage, but more importantly, would bankroll those defectors in their re-election campaigns to minimize the chances that they would be defeated as a result of their vote either in a Republican primary or by a third party insurgency in the general election. Cuomo know that it was unlikely that Republican donors, even if they supported gay marriage, would want to help the Democrat Governor win a milestone victory. So, instead of making the argument on the gay rights merits, he went first to Paul Singer, a billionaire with access to Republican donors whose son is gay.  Others came along after Singer, out of loyalty to their fellow fat cat and by Cuomo and Singer’s appealing to them on the libertarian argument rather than the gay rights argument. So the largely liberal gay rights community had to accept support that was based on an argument that was at the least uncomfortable and at the most distasteful to them.

Fifth, Cuomo needed to identify which Republicans were most likely to support the bill and to develop a distinctive strategy for each of them. Target number one was James S. Alesi, a Republican from the middle class community of Rochester, New York, representing a district that favored the bill. Alesi had voted against it in 2009, but was clearly agonized by his vote, meaning, of course, that he favored the bill personally but was worried about re-election if he voted for it. With the assurance of enough financial support to be able to wage a robust re-election campaign and knowing that his district favored the measure, Alesi was relieved to reverse his previous vote and be the first Republican Senator to publicly announce his support.  Each of the other three Republican Senators who finally supported the bill had their own stories and individual strategies customized to their particular situations.       

What are the lessons here for Obama and for you?

Leadership requires taking some risks. Exercising leadership on value-laden issues requires consorting with the enemy so you can listen hard to their story, understand the losses they fear, and address them when you can.  Third, when you ask people to take action that is going to cause them problems and make them potential casualties, then you have a responsibility to help them deal with the fallout. Fourth, when you have identified the people or factions who are not yet with you but whose support you need, you must customize your interventions with each of them to address their particular situations rather than rely on a one size fits all strategy or framing.