Lead Differently

Every week, we publish an exciting summary of the best articles, videos, events, and posts that relate to innovative management. This week, check out these 7 articles that inspire better management. Enjoy! 

Lead Differently 

Change This 
"Leaders and leadership are often thought of in a poor light. Leadership is often viewed as a necessary evil. There is even a growing voice to the idea of leaderless organizations. I’m not sure where that is headed, but I do know I don’t want to be a part of a leaderless organization.

People and organizations are much more likely to thrive if the leader subscribes to what Robert Greenleaf called Servant Leadership. It is not a new idea—Greenleaf didn’t invent it nor did I. However, it is an idea whose time has come… It is time to Lead Differently!”
Blog

IT Management should not begin and end with a spreadsheet 

Enterprise CIO Forum
 …every person in each room was measuring and managing the old fashion way—after the fact by manual manipulation of Excel spreadsheets. This is problematic at multiple levels.

According to Derek Abell, “control is different than ‘reporting’ in that it implies the possibility for management intervention if things go out of control. Control implies feedback in which management is actively involved. Reporting, on the contrary, is passive. For control to be effective, therefore, data must be timely and provided at intervals that are effective for intervention.” (Derek Abell, Managing with Dual Strategies, pg. 275). At the very least, this means the IT companies participating in the roundtables are not controlling their IT environments the way they should. And apparently this is true across industries as participants came from commercial banking, healthcare insurance, entertainment, property and casualty insurance, and local government and public sector.

The Hard Science of Teamwork 

HBR 
Like many people, I've encountered teams that are "clicking." I've experienced the "buzz" of a group that's blazing away with new ideas in a way that makes it seem they can read each others' minds. We think of building teams that operate on this plane as an art, or even magic. It's not something you can plan; it's lightning-in-a-bottle stuff that you just embrace when you're lucky enough to come across it.

My feature article in HBR's April Spotlight on teams describes in detail the new science of building great teams. We can summarize those points here. Our data show that great teams:

Communicate frequently. In a typical project team a dozen or so communication exchanges per working hour may turn out to be optimum; but more or less than that and team performance can decline.  

Talk and listen in equal measure, equally among members. Lower performing teams have dominant members, teams within teams, and members who talk or listen but don't do both.  

Engage in frequent informal communication. The best teams spend about half their time communicating outside of formal meetings or as "asides" during team meetings, and increasing opportunities for informal communication tends to increase team performance. 

Explore for ideas and information outside the group. The best teams periodically connect with many different outside sources and bring what they learn back to the team. 

6 Warning Signs That You Are Not Ready to Lead 

Harvest Performance
Here are some warning signs that you are just not ready (though you will be on the right path once you read this post!):

1. You have never heard of Servant Leadership 
2. Focusing on people seems too soft for your work environment 
3. The thought of providing authentic feedback makes you hide in fear 
4. Empowerment is an individual sport 
5. You don’t have time to reflect and work on yourself 
6. Your “Trust Dial” is set to mistrust 

Listening to Shame 

TED
Shame is an unspoken epidemic, the secret behind many forms of broken behavior. Brené Brown, whose earlier talk on vulnerability became a viral hit, explores what can happen when people confront their shame head-on. Her own humor, humanity and vulnerability shine through every word.

How Convergent and Divergent Thinking Foster Creativity

Psychology Today
The relationship between intelligence and creativity has long been debated and studied.

One of the hallmark tests of "general intelligence" is the Raven's Progressive Matrices Test. This test gives you a matrix of figures and you have to figure out the missing piece that completes the pattern.

Here's an example...

6 ways to get shy employees to speak up 

CBS 
Some people are born introverts and some, extroverts. Neither personality type makes someone inherently good or bad at their job, but shy employees may have trouble expressing their ideas in a group setting. Younger worker may be particularly reticent.

A good manager knows how to draw these employees out, making them feel comfortable enough to contribute. Here are 6 tips if you suspect someone on your team has something to say, but is hesitant to say it:

Finding a New Sense of Wonder and Other Keys to Better Management

Every week, we publish an exciting summary of the best articles, videos, events, and posts that relate to innovative management. This week, check out these 10 articles that inspire better management. Enjoy!

How simple ideas lead to scientific discoveries

TED

Adam Savage walks through two spectacular examples of profound scientific discoveries that came from simple, creative methods anyone could have followed -- Eratosthenes' calculation of the Earth's circumference around 200 BC and Hippolyte Fizeau's measurement of the speed of light in 1849.

It’s time for a new definition of big data

InfoDrivenBusiness

Two words seemingly on every technologist’s lips are “big data”. The Wikipedia definition for big data is: “In information technology, big data consists of datasets that grow so large that they become awkward to work with using on-hand database management tools”. This approach to describing the term constrains the discussion of big data to scale and fails to realise the key difference between regular data and big data. The blog posts and books which cover the topic seem to converge on the same approach to defining big data and describe the challenges with extracting value from this resource in terms of its size.

Big data can really be very small and not all large datasets are big! It’s time to find a new definition for big data.

Finding a Sense of Wonder

Kevin Eikenberry

Often we look at kids and wish we could recapture some of that magic of childhood. One of the many things that make children magical is that complete willingness to have a sense of wonder.

“We need a renaissance of wonder. We need to renew, in our hearts and in our souls, the deathless dream, the eternal poetry, the perennial sense that life is miracle and magic.”
- E. Merrill Root, educator and poet

Kelli Anderson: Design to Challenge Reality

TED

Kelli Anderson shatters our expectations about reality by injecting humor and surprise into everyday objects. At TEDxPhoenix she shares her disruptive and clever designs.

3 Steps To Pursuing Your Ideal Career

Fast Company

There's often a gap between identifying what you naturally gravitate toward and gain energy from and how that translates into your full-time work. Take a deep breath and dive in with these three steps that'll start closing it.

Here are three steps that will help you gain internal clarity so you can plan toward your ideal future.

1. Gain clarity around what to focus on. 
2. Define the world you imagine. 
3. Replace old thoughts with new ones. 

IDEO: Big Innovation Lives Right on the Edge of Ridiculous Ideas

The 99 Percent

Imagine for a second if you could somehow wrap up the creative chaos of a kindergartner's life and apply it at work. You'd go on field trips, make stuff, hatch crazy ideas, and be awed by the world on a daily basis. Sound ridiculous? At the renowned international design consultancy IDEO, it's how work gets done every day.Psychologists tell us that as we age, we become self-conscious in classroom and other public settings, and quietly begin to suppress our playful tendencies for fear of being childish or breaking with social norms. Creativity requires that we fight against this trajectory.

At IDEO, being playful is almost an obsession. The company believes that great, innovative work cannot happen without trial-and-error, experimentation, and maybe even a little tomfoolery. Few know this better than Brendan Boyle and Joe Wilcox of IDEO's Toy Lab.

Building Babel: Lost in Machine Translation

BBC

Automatic language translation is a long way off, given the overwhelming complexity of language. University of Edinburgh's Philipp Koehn says there are so many possible language rules that they cannot all be written down, and there also are too many exceptions to those rules. The statistical approach to translation currently is the chief focus of most machine translation research. "Essentially, we are translating using probabilities to find the best solution," says University of Oxford's Phil Blunsom. "The computer doesn't understand the languages or know any grammar, but might use statistics to determine that 'dog the' is not as likely as 'the dog.'" 


Vast numbers of source texts are required to improve computers' ability to make such decisions, with Blunsom noting that at least 30 million words or 1 million sentences are typically needed. Automatic spoken language translation is even more challenging than text translation because of a multitude of factors that include false starts, references to things that were said earlier, or the lack of a written form.

Software Translates Your Voice Into Another Language

Technology Review

Microsoft researchers have developed speech recognition software that can learn the sound of a user's voice and translate it into a new language. The researchers say the system that could be used to make language learning more personal or make traveling easier. "For a monolingual speaker traveling in a foreign country, we'll do speech recognition followed by translation, followed by the final text to speech output [in] a different language, but still in his own voice," says Microsoft's Frank Soong. The researchers also note that providing sample foreign phrases in a person's own voice can make learning a new language easier for users. 


The system requires about an hour of training to develop a model able to read out any text in a user's own voice. The model is converted into one that can read text in another language by comparing it with a stock text-to-speech model for the desired language. The software can convert between any pair of 26 supported languages, including Mandarin Chinese, Spanish, and Italian. University of Southern California professor Shrikanth Narayanan says using a person's own voice for speech translations could make interactions that rely on translations more reassuring for users, particularly in situations such as doctor-patient consultations.

12-Year-Old Speaks The Truth About Plain Doughnuts

BuzzFeed

A bit random - but I suspect you’ll get this from somewhere else too :)

Visualization Technologies for Human-Environment Interactions

CCC Blog

The National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center (SESYNC), a national fusion center funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation, has invited computational and domain scientists to participate in a workshop on visualization technologies that support research on human-environment interactions. The workshop will focus on the visualization and use of spatial datasets from the social and environmental sciences. Domain scientists will have an opportunity to learn about visualization tools and resources available for their work, and computational scientists will get a chance to learn about the as-yet unmet visualization needs in the domain sciences. The workshop will address some of the visualization challenges in using spatio-temporal datasets, recommend possible collaborative information technology efforts that could be supported by SESYNC's programs or through other funding mechanisms, and establish a network of researchers to share information and exchange ideas on a regular basis. SESYNC will accept abstracts related to the main topics of the workshop until April 20. The workshop is scheduled for July 23-24 in Annapolis, Maryland.

12 Ways Leaders Can Use Twitter, and Other Innovate Management Techniques

Every week, we publish an exciting summary of the best articles, videos, events, and posts that relate to innovative management. This week, check out these 6 articles that inspire better management. Enjoy! 

12 Ways Leaders Can Use Twitter

Leadership & Learning

How can leaders best use Twitter?

1. Share thoughts 
2. Share reflections 
3. Share an inspirational quotation 
4. Share a lesson 
5. Help people focus on their goals 
6. Ask a great reflective question 
7. Help build community 
8. Stay connected with your team
9. Ask for and receive feedback 
10. Watch competition and be aware of environment 
11. Practice concise thinking and communication 
12. Stimulate creativity – by trying new things

All of the things on this list are the stuff of great leadership! Perhaps the biggest aha from this list for me comes not the items themselves; but that thought these suggestions, Twitter can become a leadership development tool, or a part of a leadership development program.

Diego Rodriguez: This is What Leadership Should Look Like at IDEO

BobSutton

Diego's IDEO colleague, Tatyana Mamut, stopped by Stanford last week to serve as judge for the final project in our course on scaling-up excellence. Somehow, we got to talking about leadership and she told me about a video that Diego had shown people and told them "This is what leadership should look like at IDEO." Watch it here. You have to see it, I won't tell you anything else.

P.S. As a bonus, if you click on the link for Tatyana, you get a great short talk on how tools, rules, and norms and how they explain the spread of deodorant use in Russia. It reminds of when my dissertation adviser -- Bob Kahn, half jokingly -- defined organizations as "rules, tools, and fools."

Climbing the Great Wall of Trust

HBR

In recent conversations with US executives doing business in China, Harvard Business School Assistant Professor Roy Y.J. Chua heard about a new trend. In an East Asian version of cutting deals on the golf course, Chinese executives often take partners to teahouses to discuss business and negotiate deals. The problem, according to these executives, is that foreigners are rarely invited.

Building on past research, Chua and his colleagues investigate two types of trust: cognitive trust, which is based on confidence in a partner's technical competency, and affective trust, which is based on a shared concern for a partner's welfare and personal interests. "Cognitive trust is trust from the head; it's a very rational way of assessing ability and reliability," says Chua. "Affective trust is trust that comes from the 'heart.' This type of trust involves considerable emotional investments."

Finding a Sense of Wonder

Kevin Eikenberry

Often we look at kids and wish we could recapture some of that magic of childhood. One of the many things that make children magical is that complete willingness to have a sense of wonder.

“We need a renaissance of wonder. We need to renew, in our hearts and in our souls, the deathless dream, the eternal poetry, the perennial sense that life is miracle and magic.”

- E. Merrill Root, educator and poet

3 Steps To Pursuing Your Ideal Career

Fast Company

There's often a gap between identifying what you naturally gravitate toward and gain energy from and how that translates into your full-time work. Take a deep breath and dive in with these three steps that'll start closing it.

Here are three steps that will help you gain internal clarity so you can plan toward your ideal future.

1.     Gain clarity around what to focus on.

2.     Define the world you imagine.

3.     Replace old thoughts with new ones.

How to completely, utterly destroy an employee’s work life

Washington Post

Recall your worst day at work, when events of the day left you frustrated, unmotivated by the job, and brimming with disdain for your boss and your organization. That day is probably unforgettable. But do you know exactly how your boss was able to make it so horrible for you? Our research provides insight into the precise levers you can use to re-create that sort of memorable experience for your own underlings.

Over the past 15 years, we have studied what makes people happy and engaged at work. In discovering the answer, we also learned a lot about misery at work. Our research method was pretty straightforward. We collected confidential electronic diaries from 238 professionals in seven companies, each day for several months. All told, those diaries described nearly 12,000 days – how people felt, and the events that stood out in their minds. Systematically analyzing those diaries, we compared the events occurring on the best days with those on the worst.