When the Italian government announced that all villages with fewer than 1000 residents would be forced to merge with nearby villages to save money, they expected compliance. Bureaucrats can assume obedience, and if not obedience, then submission.

Mayor Luca Sellari did not see compliance as necessary. Instead, he and the village declared independence from Italy, printed its own currency, announced a new coat of arms and invited a member of the deposed royal family to become the Prince of Filettino!

Many small towns were unhappy but only this group of 544 people tried something non-obvious. Yet obvious actions – like complaining or writing letters – would have been anticipated by the same bureaucracies who have adapted in such unimaginative (and damaging) ways to the financial crisis.

Reversing the obvious adaptation opens up possibilities. Even just speaking against prevailing wisdom out loud can create opportunities. Saying the opposite can free people from never seriously considering alternatives. It takes considerable imagination – and for unacceptable wisdom to be embraced. Progress so often depends on obsessive creativity.

 

At Levi Strauss & Co, Carl Chiara wasn’t happy about the arms race in jean manufacturing. He wasn’t willing to accept the 42 litres of water used in the finishing process to give jeans the designer tucks, creases, and wear marks.

“We went down to the laundry”, he explained. “And told them we wanted to do the most incredible finishing you’ve ever seen, but we didn’t want to use any water. They thought we were crazy because you go to a laundry to use water. But we got really stubborn. And we figured it out.”

They invented stone washes without stones. They found a way of rinsing with resin instead of with water. And as a result of all the changes made, the water used in the most efficient production processes went down by 96%.

The obvious adaptation would be to hide the facts their customers, or at least to not go looking for inconvenient truths. The less obvious adaptation to customer and environmental concerns is to find out how much water was used and then advertise that information. The less obvious adaptation is accepting responsibility for water wastage and doing something about it.

Many innovative solutions came from creating a problem (by rebelling against the status quo) instead of waiting for a problem to solve. Rebellion can create problems where none existed. It can resist acceptance – the enemy of transcendent adaptability. A rebellious nature fights against constraints, tilts at windmills, stands up when it should lie down, it fights when it should quit. It refuses the will of the crowd. It rejects easy conformity.

If you want better solutions, you need better problems. There is a place in adaptability heaven for those people who set their standards above what exists. Their desire to improve what is around them comes from a deep sense of self; it is innate rather than externally imposed. And as a result, cannot be stopped by external opposition or satisfaction. So, if you want to learn, listen to the other side of the argument. If you want to new wisdom, embrace unacceptable wisdom.

Heidi Grant Halvorson is Associate Director of the Motivation Science Center at the Columbia Business School. She is co-author (with E. Tory Higgins) of Focus: Use Different Ways of Seeing the World for Success and Influence. In this interview, we talk about the two different motivational focuses people can have on the world, how it affects their behavior, and how mastering these two perspectives can make you a better teammate, leader and even spouse.

Listen below or subscribe via iTunes.

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[Editor's Note: This is a guest post from Eric Lowitt. Eric is the author of The Collaboration Economy: How to Meet Business, Social, and Environmental Needs and Gain Competitive Advantage.]

Today, companies that will last understand that business is no longer about money-grabbing at any cost. Our economy is in the middle of an undeniable shift, and the corporations that will succeed need leaders who understand the necessity of collaboration.

But for boards, it’s crucial to balance concerns about sustainability with those about the bottom line. Where do the two meet, and how can you tell if a leader understands this balance? These seven questions can help you figure out whether a CEO candidate is truly right for the job.

1. Does the CEO view his position as his right or his privilege?

Here’s how John Replogle, CEO of consumer goods company Seventh Generation, illustrated the link between CEO mindset and corporate behavior to me: “Understanding how you view your position as CEO informs where you put your emphasis. I approach my role as CEO as one of privilege, responsibility and stewardship. My view leads me to emphasize actions and investments that further Seventh Generation’s mission.”

2. Is the CEO shareholder or stakeholder value-creation driven?

Most corporate mission statements fail a critical 21st-century leadership test: the purpose test. What is the purpose of the company? For most CEOs, the purpose starts and ends with shareholder value creation.

Unilever’s Paul Polman, one exemplar of the collaboration-minded CEO, believes his company must “play our part in improving lives, enabling a more sustainable way of living by consumers and providing shareholder growth. This is our purpose.”

3. Is the CEO serving as a CEO-as-activist in order to create stakeholder value?

How a CEO uses his privileged platform influences his company’s success. Consider Karl-Johan Persson, CEO of H&M. His company buys nearly $1.5 billion of ready-made garment products from Bangladesh. It is in H&M’s best interest to ensure that local workers are treated with dignity and are paid fair wages.

What makes Persson rare is that he acts on this civic-minded interest. Last year he met with Bangladesh’s prime minister to make the case for increasing worker wages. Persson’s action suggests that he understands that his platform brings with it responsibility for furthering stakeholders’ interests.

4. Does the CEO prefer to maximize her legacy or her ego?

Solving our vexing challenges requires leaders to set goals that will postdate their time in their leadership position. We will not solve our global water, energy, or food challenges in the next three to five years. Leaders need the courage to look beyond any innate desire for personal glory. Otherwise, their resolve to start in motion the wheels of long-term progress might be choked off. The 21st-century leader understands that accomplishing goals is a team effort.

5. Is the CEO staking his career on enterprise-wide collaborations with rivals, NGOs and public entities?

Few would dispute that collaboration across the private, public and civil sectors is the most likely path to securing our common future. Unilever CEO Paul Polman did well to note this view recently when he said: “Individually both governments and business have already mobilized significant resources to address the challenge of deforestation, but we all recognize that much more can be achieved if we align our efforts and work in partnership.”

6. Would you partner with your company if your career and wealth was on the line?

At best, an unethical CEO only saps employees’ energy. At worst, a great company rots from the core as employees learn that it’s okay to use their company as their personal bank account. The ethical CEO’s company is more likely to operate with little to hide. Transparent companies will find it easier to nurture and maintain a vibrant network of private, public and civil sector partners.

7. Is the CEO actively protecting the company against complacency?

Only 13 percent of the companies that appeared on the original Fortune 500 list in 1955 also appeared on the 2011 list. Coca-Cola is one of these companies. Muhtar Kent, Coca-Cola’s CEO, demystified the secrets of the company’s long-term success thusly:

“My greatest legacy at Coca-Cola could be helping our company, our system and our people remain constructively discontent. Because any time anyone begins to think they’ve got it all figured out, that’s when they get wiped out. By a competitor. A new environment. Or some other meteor, right out of the blue.”

Our world, our society, and our economic system are changing. As the pressures mount on your company to adapt, one thing is clear: yesterday’s ego-driven leadership traits will not yield tomorrow’s legacy-driven success.

Co-Created Leadership

Guest —  June 10, 2013 — 2 Comments

[Editor’s Note: This is a guest post by Morgen Witzel. Morgen is a Fellow of the Centre for Leadership Studies, University of Exeter, UK.]

We all know the conventional view of leadership; leaders are the people with authority, power and control. They are beings of superior intelligence and intellect. Their vision and their example inspire the rest of us. We act because our leaders tell us to act. Leaders lead, and followers follow.

That view has of course been challenged. For example, the idea of servant leadership, as described by Ronald Greenleaf and others, to some extent turns this model on its head. Here the leader puts the interests of the organisation first, and subordinates his own desires to the needs of the organisation. While this is an interesting model, it still puts the emphasis squarely on the leader. Success – or failure – continues to depend on the skills, attributes and competencies of the leader as individual.

Now, leadership theorists are questioning whether it is only the individual that matters. In their book Exploring Leadership, published late last year, Richard Bolden, Beverly Hawkins and Jonathan Gosling from the Centre for Leadership Studies at the University of Exeter and Scott Taylor from the University of Birmingham argue for quite a different picture of leadership. They see leadership as ‘social process’, something that happens in the interaction between people, rather than the simple exercise of authority by one person over others. In other words, leadership is something that you do with people, not to people.

The more we think about this concept, the more it makes sense. After all, a leader on his or her own is pretty much powerless; without ‘followers’, nothing can be done. The whole concept of leadership, as John Adair said, is ‘getting things done through other people’. But people are not robots. They have their own views, their own ideas, their own thoughts about how things should be done. When our leaders tell us what they want us to do, we react. Sometimes we react positively, agree with the leader as to what should be done, and do it. Sometimes we react negatively, and either refuse the task or modify it to suit ourselves.

In turn, leaders react to what we do. They modify their own behaviour in accordance with what is going on in the organisation around them. So, say Bolden and his colleagues, the process of leadership is actually a process of interaction, between leaders and others. Whether leadership succeeds depends on the quality of that interaction, and it could be argued that competencies and traits of the ‘followers’ are just as important as those of the leader.

And, we can extend this idea further. There are strong similarities with the concept that marketers call ‘co-creation’, the notion that brands are created jointly by the company and its customers and the views and attitudes of the latter contribute greatly to brand value. We also know that the interactions between customers, the stories they tell each other in person and on-line, quite independently of the company also serve to reinforce – or detract from – brand value. It is the same with leadership. The effectiveness of a leader depends on how well ‘followers’ interact with each other, not just with the leader himself or herself.

A Roman senator looked out of his window one day to see a mob of people go down the street, waving banners and chanting. He rushed out of the house and ran after them. ‘Where you are going?’ asked a friend. ‘There go my people’, said the senator. ‘I must go after them, so that I may find out where they want me to lead them.’ The story may or may not be true. Either way, it is an excellent example of co-created leadership.

[Editor’s Note: John Gerzema and Michael D’Antonio are the authors of The New York Times Best Selling Book, Athena Doctrine: How Women (And the Men Who Think Like Them) Will Rule The Future. All stories are first hand-accounts through interviews. All proceeds from the book support The United Nations Foundations’ Girl Up Campaign (www.girlup.org).]

As economists debate the lingering effects of the Great Recession, businesspeople worldwide are reflecting on the experience of surviving and thriving despite the downturn. Those we met on a post-recession, worldwide tour of enterprises great and small, say that growth now depends on satisfying customers who want to do business with companies that demonstrate qualities and virtues that were rarely discussed in capitalist circles. Until now.

Whether we talked with an insurance executive in Germany, a chef in Peru, or a fish processor in Japan, the message was the same. The consumer marketplace wants a human connection with businesses, a relationship that requires empathy, trust, communication, and transparency. “We ask the person who is sharing our food [the customer] to try something new – alpaca, sea urchin – and because they trust, they do, and they like it,” explained Gaston Acurio, who built a global restaurant business in Lima despite the recession. “We want to conquer the world, emotionally.”

Half artist, half entrepreneur, Acurio has opened outlets in seven countries., emphasizing authentic Peruvian cuisine at a range of prices. He seeks influence as much as he seeks profit, and insists that as he tries to “seduce other worlds with [our] food” business growth will come naturally.

Acurio’s leadership style, which he traces to his mother and grandmother, fits the ideal expressed by 64,000 men and women we surveyed to discover consumer preferences around the world. We consistently heard praise for businesses that demonstrate empathy, loyalty and flexibility and found global rejection for businesses perceived to be aggressive, stubborn, or selfish.

Remarkably, when we asked people to tell us which leadership qualities they considered “traditionally feminine” and which once they considered “traditionally masculine” the alignments were the same around the world.  In every country the “Ten Best Traits” were dominated by those most associated with women. Indeed eight of the top ten traits are rated “feminine” and only two are termed “masculine.”

Top Ten Traits for Effective Leaders*


Feminine Masculine
1.  Expressive
2.  Plans for future
 3. Decisive
4.  Reasonable
5.  Loyal
6.  Flexible
7.  Patient
  8. Resilient
9.   Intuitive
10.  Collaborative

(*Thirteen country survey of 64,000 people in nationally-representative samples November 2012. Survey conducted by John Gerzema, BAV Consulting, WPP Group PLC. Countries represent 65% of global GDP and include Brazil, Canada, China, Chile, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Japan, Mexico, South Korea, United Kingdom and The United States)

Not surprisingly, respondents were negative about the men who run things and eager for women to get a chance. A little more than 57% percent agreed with the statement, “I’m dissatisfied with the conduct of men in my country.” Yet nearly the same number disagreed with the notion, “The role of men in society is in decline.”

That masculinity is criticized and seen as inescapable — poses a challenge from the marketplace: To lead successfully, men need to act less like men and more like fathers in the workplace. The values of fatherhood can be learned and applied by any man, yet are undervalued as ‘soft’ and not applied to the workplace.  Nurturing, selflessness and patience are leadership competencies that are in demand: In our surveys, 81% of people said that ‘today’s times require that we be more kind and empathetic to others’, while 81% of people said that ‘power is now influence rather than control.”

These sentiments were strongest among the young, in more mature consumer economies such as Japan, Western Europe, and North America. Combined with hundreds of interviews with leaders worldwide, the data told us that the hyper-competitive masculine energy that built companies in the past might not lead to success in the future. Our data shows that consumers trust one in four companies on average, and people now prefer to work with, support, and purchase from companies that engage them openly, honestly, and cooperatively.

The most unexpected story of this dynamic comes from the world of insurance, where a German entrepreneur invited friends and neighbors to create buying pools that would become self-monitoring and share in refunds when they kept claims low.  Tim Kunde’s company, Friendsurance, emphasizes relationships, social virtue, and accountability. Founded three years ago, it has double-digit growth every year, while providing home, health, and auto coverage. This has been accomplished on the basis of trust and friendship rather than an adversarial contest between an insurer desperate to limit claims and policyholders determined to maximum benefits. Key to it all has been Kunde’s empathy for consumers and his ability to trust them with insider information on his rates, payouts, profits, and refunds.

We found the ultimate example of the value of openhearted business practices in Kyodo, Japan where the empathy of customers saved a corporation from disaster. Nagato Kimura’s Kinoya fish company was destroyed by a devastating earthquake and Tsunami in 2011. His customers, hearing of the tragedy, flocked to rescue his remaining stock and then conducted fundraisers to help Kinoya rebuild. This effort grew out of a longstanding relationship based on a high quality product, low prices, and Kimura’s loyalty to Kyodo. Kinoya re-opened last November.

The lessons for the future are clear. Leadership that applies the lessons of fatherhood is the key to success in the post recession economy, where the world is increasingly open, fragile and transparent. In Jerusalem we met with President Shimon Peres, who told us ‘We are in a new world with many old minds. The challenge is to adapt yourself. A leader is here to serve’.

Fathers understand this better than anyone.