The Inspiring Invincibles! Chuck Prince (Citigroup, formerly head of)! Stan O'Neal (Merrill Lynch, formerly head of)! Angelo Mozilo (Countrywide, formerly head of)! Tough cookies, each one. And yet, somehow, on their watches, The Three Geniuses allowed their firms, through grotesque negligence—maybe silliness or Theaters of the Absurd would be better words if the stakes weren't so high—to get into positions in which tens upon tens of BILLIONS of greenbacks had to be written off from their books of account. Dodger, my 5-year-old Aussie, could have done a better job. (He could have bitten anybody who tried to make a $500K loan to someone who had never had a job or paid a bill and signed his name with an "X"; and peed on the pants of any 22-year-old University of Chicago PhD who said, "With my clever algorithm I've designed what's called a 'derivative'—it'll make risk a thing of the past." Yes, had Dodger bitten and peed on schedule, the likes of Citigroup would be ten or twenty billion ahead of their current position.) But, since the demand is so strong for the 500 different-from-mere-vice-presidents- Monumental-Management-Marvels, and the supply is so short, The Three Geniuses, on the basis of "Upside Potential," were able to chalk up about a half BILLION buckaroos on their pay stubs over the last five years, while busily installing the tools necessary for Global Economic Meltdown. Well, I guess that means they're "excellent" at something. Isn't there some line about wool & eyes & pulling? (In most cases, their pay deals, especially the parts about "if you turn out to be an idiot, we'll pay you a king's ransom to clean out your desk," were effectively set before they set foot in the executive suite. Wow, I wanna piece of that action!)

Then, across the sea from our Miracle 'Merican Marvelous 500 uber-Managers (demand waaaay exceeds supply, remember), sits the chief of France's Société Générale, or SocGen. (How about "sock shareholders"?) Somehow or other, yup, "somehow or other," on his continuing watch, a 31-year-old trader with a penchant for math and a knack for writing code managed to evade "controls" and "sneak" $74 BILLION worth of exposure onto SocGen's balance sheet; it has taken an almost $10 BILLION loss to clean up the mess—for now. But in the future, the Big Boss, a/k/a "the genius," promises "tighter controls." (The saving grace here is that the laddie who scored the seventy-four bil is named Kerviel. I keep thinking "Evil Kerviel," after the late lamented Evil Knievel. Unfair! Evil Knievel had a far, far better sense of "risk assessment" than our superduperstar Banker Bigwigs—may I not be damned for in any way besmirching Mr Knievel's name and spirit.)

More on the topic of "genius," the short supply thereof: Big mergers and acquisitions, negotiated by Big People, have a pretty much guaranteed habit of Going South, destroying value, statistically, perhaps 80% of the time—give or take a bit, depends on whose research you read. But in that Rarified Air of the 500 Top Talents, ever-short-in-supply-because- they're-so-so-much-better-than-you-or-me-or-even-their- #2-in-command, it is clear (to the 500, that is) that through their Unique Genius (they can see Farther Ahead than you or me), they can move beyond others' mistakes and consummate marriages that make money. No worries. But then there was the headline, the most recent of the many of its kind, on 29 February as I recall, that reported Sprint's taking a $29.5 BILLION write-down following its Ingenious Acquisition (had to be, made by one of the 500 Horsemen—of the apocalypse?) of Nextel. Thirty BILLION later, we learn from the CEO that there will be "significant change" and that he intends to "improve execution." Dodger-the-dog could have told him that—smart dogs can attain a vocabulary of 200 or so understood words, and that's about 190 more than the "genius" who made the Sprint-Nextel deal. In fact Mr Big's vocabulary was but a single word, as far as I can make out, uttered over and over (and over) again: "Synergies, synergies, synergies, I smell synergies. My synergies in and of themselves are majestically synergistic." I suspect he said that when announcing the deal—c'mon, Tom, you know he said that without reading the transcript. Well, I smell something, but I will spare you because this is a family-friendly Blog. And while on the subject of odor, there's absolutely no need to go back in history two years (but I will, as I'm in that sort of mood at the moment) and remind one and all that, in pursuit of "synergy, synergy, synergistic synergy," the Fabled Bosses of DaimlerChrysler (one, Jürgen Schrempp, was considered Europe's Jack Welch!) managed, after their "merger of equals," to lose market cap at the rate of $10,000,000 per ... DAY ... for nine years.

Speaking of Mr Welch, his boy Bob Nardelli, given his GE birthright and thence Automatic Excellence, decided he belonged in the "Top One" in pay package ranks—his board demurred, demand didn't exceed supply quite that much. So Bob took his couple hundred mil "getoutttahere" "separation pay" packet from Home Depot right before the home improvement market tanked, and ran off to save Chrysler, post-demerger. (Wanna buy a bridge in Brooklyn ...) And while on the topic of high-profile, always Excellent GE alums: Airbus was a bunch of "big dream" idiots—delay after delay after delay in getting the A380 launched. (Launched it now is, and a helluva sight to see, as I did in Sydney about 10 days ago.) But with a former GE superduperstar in control, James McNerney, fresh from messing up 3M's innovation machine with an imagination-free six-sigma diet, Airbus rival Boeing's systems would be go. No worries. Genius in charge. Whoops. Boeing's Dreamliner, the 787, has, like a flash, or sinking rock is more like it, gone from almost fit-to-fly, not like the damn French-German machines that are now flying, to Nightmareliner, suffering delay after delay after delay after delay. (With further delays promised.) And then there was the one last week about Boeing losing the hundred bil or so Air Force tanker order—that one might be reversed, not by that old "GE [free market] magic," but by a bunch of irate Dobbsean (as in Lou) Congresspersons determined to put brakes on this "free trade crap."

Well, perhaps I should cry "uncle." Maybe those headhunters have got it right. I suspect the supply of guys capable of the likes of losing $10,000,000 per day, nine years running, while simultaneously giving sold-out lectures on "the DaimlerChrysler Way," is indeed pretty short.

Give me a break. These 500 "perfect fits," "unique beings" are doubtless pretty swell fellas, but they are also as mortal as you and me, and clearly less savvy about the Real World than the taxi driver who took me across Boston yesterday. "Stupid loans," he declared, unbidden, summing up the Trillion Dollar (or so) sub-prime mess in two words. Chuckie (Prince, recall), Angie (Mozilo) ... hear that? (And the cabbie didn't charge me the $100 million plus that Countrywide's Angie is scheduled to nick if and when Bank of America closes the deal to buy his company—the B of A, fresh from its own write-down, is, of course, pursuing "synergies, synergies, synergistic synergies.")

I shall say no more. For example, I shall not mention the billionaire next door, here at the bottom of Beacon Hill in Boston. Come on, Peter! (Lynch, Fidelity.) The gazillionnaire really needed free event tickets from the people whose portfolios he evaluated? (He and Fidelity were just fined for so doing.) I coulda directed him to a legit ticket broker, from SF, who's been taking good care of me for decades.

I am ... still ... a dyed-in-the-wool-capitalist-pig-free-trader. I don't want The Law to muzzle exec pay. But I would like common sense to prevail, or at least make the occasional appearance. The 500 Fortune 500 CEOs are no more flawless, genius, etc., than my dog Dodger, who, trust me, via his own sort of Excellence, can reverse the tide and part the waters by producing a fart that carries on the wind from Tinmouth VT all the way to Wall Street.

Dodger is my inspiration!
It's good to be back on the farm!
(Whoops, off to Johannesburg in a few hours!)

"DNK" is a new addition to the intelligence family, apparently following the Iraq WMD "intelligence" fiasco.

DNK?
Do Not Know.

In the past, the intelligence services were loath to admit that they didn't know something; their remit is to know things, not to not know things.

But now, if you DNK and say you DK, well, you end up in DDD (deep doo-doo).
(FYI, "all this" and more led to the recent re-assessment of Iran's nuclear program—but the DNK bit was apparently a big part of the new approach.)

My post, however, is not about national intelligence collection. Instead it is about you and me and our frequent "intelligence failures." And a plea that we enter "DNK" into our language. Bosses and "brilliant" staffers are very prone to falling into this trap. The boss thinks "I'm supposed to know that"—and is loath to admit that he doesn't. He seldom lies outright, but he is very inclined to obfuscate his ignorance. So, too, those "brilliant" staffers who are paid large sums to be brilliant, not to not know.

Tip of the day: When you "don't know," add this to your vocabulary: "I don't know." Maybe as enlightened bosses we can add, "What are our DNKs here?" We can, and should, make it a positive, worthy of praise, to say "DNK" when we DNK.

It made me think of how many of my clients want to attack their business problems as if they were playing checkers, when in reality, their business is more like a three-dimensional chess game. Every move at the executive level has implications throughout the organization and, eventually, the marketplace. The impact of these moves can be subtle and often take a significant period of time before they surface. By then, the cause and effect relationship is often not recognized.

Many of the executives I deal with are linear thinkers.

Continued reading Embrace the Mess?...

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The underlying discussion comes from the wonderful (I'm a regular reader) Blog of U.S. judge Richard Posner and Nobel Laureate Gary Becker. Among other things, Posner writes, the super-smart don't know "when to defer to the superior knowledge of more experienced but less mentally agile subordinates." I'm well disposed to this as I have observed it time and again—especially in my McKinsey days.

Here are a couple of related quotes from my Master slide deck:

"Intelligent people can always come up with intelligent reasons to do nothing."—Scott Simon

"Andrew Higgins, who built landing craft in WWII, refused to hire graduates of engineering schools. He believed that they only teach you what you can't do in engineering school. He started off with 20 employees, and by the middle of the war had 30,000 working for him. He turned out 20,000 landing craft. D.D. Eisenhower told me, 'Andrew Higgins won the war for us. He did it without engineers.'"—Historian Stephen Ambrose/Fast Company

More followed, and the New York Times yesterday proclaimed that HP had hit the $100 billion mark, and the final nudge had been great design! ("Design Helps H.P. Profit More on PCs.") The genius who replaced "ditzy" Carly Fiorina, Mark Hurd, brought home the bacon, and on the design side it had happened when he poached some dude from Palm. A few weeks before, the Wall Street Journal had been equally breathless in praise of Hurd as the guy who scaled (scale, that is size) computerworld's Mt Everest.

I have no doubt Hurd is a fine operating exec. Moreover he did reestablish much of the decentralization that had slipped under Ms Fiorina. (She had good reason to centralize, but I am a congenital decentralizer who can never excuse moves, no matter how apparently legit, toward central control.)

But, as I said in my title to this Post, "Enough, for God's Sake."

Consider two questions:

Q: Why is HP "enormous"?
A: Carly's much contested Compaq acquisition. I supported it then, as I couldn't see HP prospering as essentially Xerox Lite, and I support it now. Carly poured heart and soul and guts and reputation into pushing the merger, including overcoming the shameful tactics of Hewlett Jr and Packard Jr. If HP is the "biggest guy on the block" in 2007, benefiting from PC sales, the "first 98%" of the credit goes to Fiorina, not Hurd. PERIOD.

Q: Why is HP a nouveau design star?
A: Good God, it ain't the Palm guy, who may be very good, and it sure as hell ain't dreary Mr Hurd. Carly brought, again with deafening criticism by the engineers, style to a previously 100% style-free HP. PERIOD.

I am not taking away from Mr Hurd's operating performance, which probably exceeds Fiorina's. But if we are primarily celebrating HP's megabulk, as the heavy in computerworld, and its fashion consciousness as engine of soaring PC margins and profits, then we are celebrating Carly Fiorina. As I said ... PERIOD.

Enough!

"It's the team, folks." That's the conventional wisdom, and usually true. Probably in Turkey, too, way back when. But make no mistake, one determined person can move a nation—dramatically and in a short period of time. There's no "I" in "team," but there's an "A," as in Atatürk, in both "dramatic" and "change."

(I'll offer you a couple of quotes when I get a free minute or two.)

NB: You know me on the topic of effective leadership—I have a longstanding split with Jim Collins over the attributes of the best leaders:

JC: "Quiet, workmanlike, stoic leaders bring about the big transformations."

Here's Time (0507.07) on Captain John Smith & Jamestown: "He was a bully, a braggart, and a rebel with a big chip on his shoulder. They would never have made it without him."

I don't consider myself to be soft on performance demands. It is a highly competitive world, which does demand that performance, and the accompanying workloads, be increased. But I wonder how organizations are determining when enough is enough? In my more cynical moments, I have come to believe they push it until it breaks. In my days of manufacturing management, we could study a machine and produce a pretty reasonable and predictable capacity factor. My question for this group of bloggers is simple. How does your organization determine a human being's "capacity"? Do you also see the effectiveness of leaders changing under high workload pressures? I would love to hear from any of you that have responsibility for determining optimal employment numbers. How do you do it? Are we at a place where too much on the plate is leading to leadership's virtues being tested?

LaVonn Schlegel: "Indifference is a horrible, insidious disease that can destroy."

Wow!

Darci, here's the way I look at it. We all "fail" in the end. "Fail" as in finish, finito, die. (I am not talking religion here—we may indeed go to a better world, or a worse one, but we will not be amidst this one.) So if, to quote an old joke, "We might as well go for it, boys, none of us is going to get out alive": Well, then, to me, the only ... TRUE FAILURE ... is a failure to ... Engage Fully, 100% of the time.

(My casual reading of Aristotle, and I'm no student of philosophy, is that, for instance, "happiness" is complete engagement, not some bemused state; "leisure" is an opportunity to grow in new ways, not a chance to veg out; etc.)

And another thing: Indifference makes you sloppy, sloppy in general. You can call it "studied indifference," or "purposeful indifference," or whatever you want, but if your goal is stupefaction on the job, it'll spread like a virus—even to home life.

And another thing: Jerks.* Jerks, as we see it, are all around us! Always have been, always will be. Get over it! I think it was Tip O'Neill who said, "Politics is the art of the possible." (Hint: Politics = Getting things done. Period!!!) When I talked to my wonderful new friends at Johns Hopkins last week, I applauded their idealism, and I told them that I prayed they'd never lose it. On the other hand, to bring about social change, I reminded them, meant politics in the morning, politics at lunchtime, and dreaming about politics at night. Getting things done means engaging in the fray, and every serious change is despised by the regnant majority—both sides often see the other as jerks. (Of course, there are simply awful human beings at work—so deal with it positively/make it or them your ally in change ... or quit. One mark of a "jerk" is self-interest taken to an extreme. Whoops, that's true of everyone who succeeds; I don't mean they are unable to build a team, but think of the Presidential race: To enter it is all about self interest in equal measure with a desire to change the world.) (*Re "jerks," consider, perhaps, the words of Philo of Alexandria, quoted in this space before: "Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a great battle." TP: "Everyone, as in everyone, deserves an equal measure of respect." Credo, anon. organization change consultant: "Don't belittle.")

NB: A.C. Grayling, The Meaning of Things: Applying Philosophy to Life

ARISTOTLE ON HAPPINESS: Eudaimonia ... well-doing, living flourishingly. Megalopsychos ... "great-souled," "magnanimous." More: respect and concern for others; duty to improve oneself; using one's gifts to the fullest extent possible; fully aware; making one's own choices.

ARISTOTLE ON LEISURE: pursue excellence; reflect; deepen understanding; opportunity to work for higher ends. ["Rest" vs. "leisure."]

Engage.
Fully.
Energize others.
Respect others.
(Decency rules.)

Live in the moment.
This moment.
(There is no other.)
Excellence.
Always.

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world. The unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends upon the unreasonable man.”—George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman: The Revolutionists' Handbook

I never did buy Bob Sutton's "be realistic" act. Now I see exactly why.

Of course "Life's a bitch and then you die." But last week I reported on two experiences that make a mockery of Sutton's "Great God of Endured Indifference" routine. AGAINST ALLLLL ODDDDs, and after 72 years (1848-1920) of brutal & demeaning struggle, women won the right to vote. And at Johns Hopkins' Bloomberg School of Public Health I bathed in the stories of alum who ... AGAINST ALL ODDS ... AND MOCKING "REASONABLE" EXPECTATIONS ... AND BELITTLED BY PYGMYS ... had saved millions of theretofore un-cared-about lives. Muhammad Yunus won a Nobel Peace Prize for his microlending miracles—powered by women in a strict Muslim (Bangladesh) society.

Get the hell out of an "impossible" situation? Sometimes it's the only answer. (Been there, done that—McKinsey, circa 1981.) "Practice indifference"? Bullshit. Bullshit. And ... BULLSHIT. Speaking as an about-to-be-65-year-old: LIFE IS TOO BLOODY SHORT TO SPEND ONE DAMN MOMENT OF INDIFFERENCE!!!! (And you'd better believe I've worked for my full share of certified nincompoops.)

A woman from England, for example, lamented, "I endeavor to lead by positive example, raise issues to the powers that be and provide constructive help to the people who work under me on how to deal with the jerks in our midst. The problem in my organization, however, is that jerkdom is so institutionalized and rewarded I can't see any way out." My answer was that if senior management is unwilling to change, and some kind of internal political action is impossible, her options were to keep treating the symptoms in herself and others—or perhaps best of all, to look for another job.

As I think about it now, I would also add that, although thousands of books offer breathless prose about the virtues of having deep commitment to, and passion about, your workplace, there are times when self-preservation requires the opposite response. There are times when the answer is indifference, when the wisest course is to go through the motions, learn not to care, and just get through the day until something changes on your job, or something better comes along. Yes, it is better if you have the power to change a bad situation, or leave it. But we all face bad situations we must endure; none of us have complete power. Indeed, I am starting to believe that, as a management professor, part of my job is to teach people when indifference is more useful than passion.

My colleague Chris Nel recently posted a blog "Purpose beyond Profit," which addresses the idea that people in large corporations too often aren't inspired and have no sense of purpose.

Continued reading Passion or Indifference ... You Choose...

Posted by Darci Riesenhuber | Comments?

Key words (very powerful per se, per me):

Servant.
Decency.

Now, in Utrecht, I have bumped into another pea from the pod: "hostmanship." I shared the stage with Swedish management guru Jan Gunnarsson. And he gave me his two most recent books (co-written with Olle Blohm):

Hostmanship: The Art of Making People Feel Welcome.
The Welcoming Leader: The Art of Creating Hostmanship.

Once again, I am enamored, even mesmerized, by this "simple" idea. Here are the authors speaking from the dust jacket of The Welcoming Leader: "Welcoming leadership is about inspiring people to want to achieve common goals. For a welcoming leader, the emphasis is on the person. ... It requires an honesty and authenticity from you as a leader that has been lacking in many of our bosses in the past. In a world where everything looks similar—products and places, companies and countries—a guest or employee makes his decision to participate and commit based on how welcome he feels. To provide hostmanship ... we have to rejoice in serving others and provide leadership that reflects this."

Add to the Key Words list:

Host.
Hostmanship.
Welcoming leader.

Jan performed a wonderful little riff on stage about the person in charge walking into a meeting:

The "boss" brings a PowerPoint presentation.
The "leader" brings a polished Vision Statement.
The "host" brings a box of chocolates. (Hey, we were in Holland.)

If the point is to engage and seek the voluntary commitment of others in pursuit of a worthy goal, this strikes me as spot on.

We have, then, added to our for-profit, experience-obsessed enterprise:

Leader as Servant.
Decency as the bedrock of effective corporate culture.
Host, hostmanship, and Welcoming leader as metaphor for those who would seek the wholehearted engagement of others.

I like all that a lot. I suppose I naturally would, as the inventor, with Bob Waterman, of: "Hard is soft. Soft is hard."

The numbers turn out to be the "soft" stuff, abstract and subject to fudging. The "tangible," "hard stuff" of infinite importance for performance is the depth and breadth of our relationships with others within or outside the firm.

I rest my case.

Are you working on a doomed project? Can you tell your boss? What are your thoughts on how to save a doomed project?

One area where Charles & Warren have got me dead to rights is the critical axiom that in order to lead effectively one must know oneself—not navel gazing, but the idea that your core values must not be left unexamined and that you simply must understand how you are understood by others. This is fully half of Charles's presentation. (And will become a larger part of mine.)

(I flatter myself, or resort to wishful thinking, when I say that Bennis & Handy & I might be called "three peas from the same pod.") (The only hole in their humanistic thinking, to my mind, is their failure to vocally focus on the women's issues—both are true believers as I am—but neither choose to make their beliefs on this subject a centerpiece of their writing or presenting.)

At any rate it was a lovely day, and feedback suggests that it worked for our "customers." It sure as hell worked for me.

It seems to me then, that a leader or manager's first job is to pull out that discretionary effort. This starts with clearly identifying the ambition of the organization and helping each and every employee see their part in realizing that ambition. I still believe that one thing we want from our talent is the sense that they make a difference. In my years as a first-line supervisor, I was always amazed at my weakest performers on the job who did amazing volunteer work after hours. Clearly they had the work ethic; we just didn't define an ambition for them worthy of their best efforts.

Then, there's the Lions. In recent years we have witnessed round one draft picks missing practices, reporting overweight, battling off-field demons, engaging in various criminal behaviors, etc. It seems a little push is in order here. Creating a culture of engagement does not mean letting everyone do their own thing. There is a need for discipline and standards, and for strong management efforts to insure everybody lives up to them. For many of us, our best performance has benefited by a friendly push now and then. Tony Dungy doesn't yell at his players, but he does instill a performance culture. Play your best, or you won't play at all.

So, I would argue for balance. Our talent has to be engaged in a cause, and we must manage performance closely to move in the quickest and straightest line towards our ultimate ambition.

What do you think? Push, pull, or both? Examples? Advice for the Lions?

Tom talks about the paradox of leadership. (And he talks about sand flies, too.) 6 minutes, 58 seconds.

MP3 File

I am on board with "the new world of work," with vision, with engaging talent, with the need to obliterate past ways of working, with a customer experience beyond compare. I think everyone contributing to this blog site is, too. So ... why isn't it a done deal yet??? Not the believing it to be true—but the DOING it??

Here are some reflections from my perspective (ex-corporate, team worker, mum, wife, woman in the workplace, forty-something ...)

What we are trying to do in our world of work is to change human habit. How hard is that?? (An ideal thing to reflect on at the end of January, the month of resolutions, et al. Have you kept yours? If so, why, how? If not, why not?)

As I reflect on this, and I apply it to the work aspects of my life, all becomes clear. The way we work, the way business is run, all is based in habits from a bygone (Industrial/Command and Control) era. Globalisation, Technology, etc., removed the need for all those operating systems. Yet as humans in the workplace, we haven't managed to break our long-learned habits yet. And the pace of business means we are always more likely to respond as we always have, rather than in a new and (to us) unfamiliar way.

Old habits die hard: I once moved my waste bin from one place in my office to another, yet it took me a full month to stop habitually walking to the old position with my rubbish ... and how simple is that? Our workplaces are far more complex. We can't often allow ourselves 30 days of getting it wrong in action—though the brain has the desire—before our action finally matches the intent!

So in addition to "getting" the new world of work with its terminology, technology, and new fundamental operating system, we must "get" the core drivers of human behaviour—our own first, and then, those of everyone around us.

Do the leaders in your organisation "get" human behaviour?

Earlier this month I had a bit of a rant about "Servant Leadership" (follow this link if you're interested). The gist of it was: Military Officers and Business Leaders have the same role ... to ensure that all members of the value-creating community are the best they can be. That's an enabling service worth paying for. Today, as a leader, you serve those who choose to bring their talent to you/your organisation. They decide if you are doing a good job or not. They decide if you are worth your management package. They choose to stay or go. They determine if you/the company will succeed or not. Control ... forget it!

Some of my clients/colleagues over here think I've gone soft. Quite the contrary, actually. I think servant leadership is much harder than command & control/micromanagement/authoritarianism. Why bother taking the harder route? Here's the disquieting logic—if you think I'm wrong, please tell me:

Traditional Command & Control logic is based on the world as it used to be, rational, predictable, and stable. A world where well-defined processes produced predictably good results, and refining processes produced better results. It was a world where there was little scope for discretionary human value added to the execution of process. As a consequence, engaging people was unnecessary in a management culture conceived in the blast furnaces and assembly lines of the 19th Century. Unfortunately, relative to the social and technological changes in the last century, little has changed in management culture.

Future winners are turning the old logic on its head by making the value creators the heroes. (Think sports teams!) The future losers are those companies where doing well is about getting out of a customer value creation role and into management (Think Fortune/FTSE500). How many talented value creators will stay in a company where management fat cats out-earn people like themselves by ratios of 4/5/6/7:1? No—they'll leave and go somewhere more rewarding to work their magic and make their money.

I'd propose that our role as managers is to ensure that each member of our value creating (read org successes ensuring) community is contributing to the maximum of their potential. If we are doing anything other than that, we should STOP IT NOW or fire ourselves for dereliction of duty. We are no longer process policemen but talent coaches. It's 100% a trust thing. We're in BIG trouble.

As the personal implications of this scare me half to death, I'd love to be convinced by you that I'm wrong on this. Please try (hard)!

On the other hand, there is an other hand. That is, oddly, a bizarre technology-driven revolution calls for far, far better "people skills," cultural awareness, and a certain looseness that allows you to go with-adapt to-get off on the weird flow. That is, the Age of the Web is for leaders the Age of EQ.* (*Emotional intelligence.) Quite simply, the old command and control styles and idea of dispassionate, order-barking "architect" or "conductor" of an orderly, hierarchical enterprise is dead, kaput—outta here.

Addenda on this topic/Leadership's eternal verities: Want to read perhaps the Best Management Book Ever? Try the Federalist Papers—recall my wife gave me an exquisite first edition for Christmas. The fellas—Hamilton, Madison, et a few alia —are trying to define a wholly new organizational approach based on a brand new conception of citizenry which will be slightly manageable and perpetually innovative and conducive to the pursuit of happiness. They are primarily wrestling with the eternal "centralization [Hamilton] versus decentralization [Jefferson]" conundrum—and, equally important, the inherently unsolvable tension between the two. (Extreme centralization = King or Dictator—and a dim view of citizens' self-management skills. Extreme decentralization = Anarchy—Brand You run amok.) This "battle"—centralization v. decentralization—is the leader's primary strategic task—and it will be ever thus.