Category: Proactive Leaders

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Today’s Attention Gap, Tomorrow’s Leadership Gap?

Every year the Aspen Ideas Festival gathers leading thinkers from around the globe to discuss the latest ideas of what makes a good society. This year, Harvard sociologist Robert Putnam along with his team, presented new data about a starkly widening opportunity gap, as well as some unexpected education and lifestyle trends associated with it.

Most people are broadly aware of the wealth divide between families who live in poverty and those who come from a culture of affluence. The correlation between classes that have less money and their restricted access to educational and work opportunities is generally understood and implicitly accepted as natural.

However, Putnam’s new findings add a psychological dimension to current knowledge of inequality. More than race and poverty, he examines the increasing gap in class and social mobility, which stem from attitude differences of lower strata parents and higher strata parents. These behavioral trends imply disturbing implications for the future.

In a recent New York Times article (The Opportunity Gap), David Brooks discusses some of Putnam’s principle findings. Looking back at the investments that parents make in their children’s earliest years, Brooks highlights the amount of time affluent parents invest in their children’s futures through activities such as reading to them when they are toddlers, explaining their jobs to them, and cheering them on during extracurricular activities.

Then there is the monetary investment that affluent parents make in “enrichment activities.” Compared to children of less-affluent parents, children of wealthy parents are much more likely to partake in tutoring, after-school sports, activities such as music and community service, and religious services that their parents are readily willing to invest in.

In lower strata communities, more children are born out of wedlock. Single parents are unable to find the time and resources to make similar investments in their children’s futures, and their children feel more pessimistic, detached, and uninspired to push themselves to their full potential.

Naturally, children who feel limited by their parents and major social institutions have a diminished sense of purpose and responsibility. It is no wonder that as a consequence, these children’s test scores lag and more doors begin to close for them.

However, as Putnam and Brooks both indicate, if we want more leadership that is representative of our entire society, it is important that we encourage individuals from all rungs of society to reach their highest potential. This means that reformers may need to embrace some uncomfortable changes to ensure that less-affluent kids have a better shot at making it to the top.

While Brooks points to policies such as banning childrearing before marriage and tax cuts for the wealthy, certain educationalists feel that he neglects to address central changes that need to be enacted in the public school systems. For example, some suggest greater implementation of “no excuse” learning models that place high expectations and ambitious academics on low income students, access to digital learning opportunities, performance-based funding that is driven towards kids with more risk factors, and more structural support systems built into communities that need them.

Certainly it will require a combination of sociopolitical changes as well as education reform to truly address the bleak prospects for bottom-quartile children. Putnam’s new data provides an ominous prediction of society’s future if no changes are enacted. So unless we want today’s opportunity gap to become tomorrow’s ambition gap and develop into a continual leadership gap, maybe we ought to start brainstorming some creative solutions.

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BLG Leadership Insights Features Proactive Leaders

Leaders in Science: Are we Forgetting Them?

Every year, when Time compiles its list of the “100 Most Influential People,” of the year, recipients are categorized as a Mogul, a Breakout, an Icon, a Pioneer, or a Leader. What is perplexing is that by categorizing them, there seems to be a degree mutual exclusivity. But does it hold that if a prominent scientist is categorized as a Pioneer, he is unable to be an Icon, a Breakout, or a Leader?

Is there something about the way that we define leadership that prevents us from viewing masterminds of scientific discoveries as leaders unless they found a company or run for election? Or is there a personality we expect a leader to embody, perhaps a way of dressing, communicating, and presenting ideas that we do not typically find from those individuals used to running experiments or publishing textbooks?

Certainly, it is unlikely that a leader of science would ever lead troops onto battlefield or run for public office, but don’t leaders of science perform many of the actions that effective business and political leaders do? Scientists create new and innovative ideas, work relentlessly at gathering support for them so that they can further their development, and when there is a breakthrough, they often shape the entire direction of an industry.

Scientists, such as Edward Jenner who invented the Smallpox vaccine, Robert Edwards who developed the process of in vitro fertilization, or Louis S. Goodman and Alfred Gilman who developed the basis of chemotherapy revolutionized the field of science and the magnitude of human health.  Despite eradicating disease and changing the destiny of infertility and cancer, their names are probably not the first that spring to mind when thinking about “great leaders.”

If our modern concept of leadership is contingent upon the ability for an individual to portray a charismatic personality, communicate vocally, or run a company, then perhaps we ought to challenge how we define the concept, or else create an effort to equip these great scientific minds with the tools and techniques they need so that they too can be recognized as public leaders.

There does seem to be observable effort in the field of leadership training to target leaders of Science. A recent article in Seed magazine describes a group that provides additional training in communication and leadership for scientists by launching programs such as the Science and Public Leadership Fellows program. While many of the candidates of the program are already recognized as leaders in sciences and hold distinctions such as being MacArthur Award winners, NSF Career winners, and PECASE winners, the program focuses on trying to build their reputation as credible general public leaders.

There is promise that the emergence of similar programs can help us to increase public recognition of influential individuals who transformed society and were revolutionaries of a different type. If the individuals who invented the atomic bomb, created vaccinations, allowed test tube conceptions, and developed chemotherapy treatment are not publicly recognized, then we may be at fault for continuing to forget some of the world’s most powerful leaders.

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BLG Leadership Insights Managerial Competence Political Competence Proactive Leaders

Why Can’t Good People Get Jobs?

A recent interview between the Wall Street Journal and Wharton Business School’s Director of Management Peter Cappelli discussed his new book Why Good People Can’t Get Jobs. Over the scope of this short interview, he discussed his take on the perceived gap between employers who claim there is a lack of qualified candidates for jobs, and candidates who question why they have been struggling to land jobs they’ve applied to.

His main take on the disconnect underlying this issue is a lack of employers wanting to train prospective job candidates. Presumably, employers are having more difficulty in hiring candidates not because there are less academically qualified people in the market, but because companies are seeking to fill open job roles only with candidates who already have highly similar work experience in very similar companies. Essentially, companies want to do what he describes as “plug and play.”

Additionally, as companies add elaborate prerequisites that they expect candidates to already have, they render it vastly difficult for candidates who have only the academic background or have been unemployed for some time from getting a fair chance at being considered. Coupled with increased reliance on Human Resources application systems that filter out candidates based on resume terminology and selective filters, many capable candidates feel kicked to the curb.

To hear more about what Peter Cappelli thinks are the main three problems that companies and candidates should address to diminish the hiring gap, check out the interview.

Is their good news if we buy into Mr. Cappelli’s view? At least then we can be relieved that the symptom is not the diagnoses. Not facing a true “talent shortage” crisis, we can hope that a better matching of good candidates with open jobs will be efficiently achieved with a bit of targeted restructuring of the hiring process!

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Managerial Competence Political Competence Proactive Leaders

The Secret To Leading Teams: Balance

Yesterday, Professor Sam Bacharach wrote an article for Inc.’s blog, Leading Teams: Find the Right Balance Between Hands-on and Hands-off.

Teams are capable of executing large agendas–but they aren’t always productive. Too many voices can distract and one strongly worded opinion can lead to groupthink. Team leaders need to allow flexibilty, provide rewards, and encourage creativy while setting goals, meeting schedules, and getting things done.

It’s a delicate balancing act that requires careful thought. In the article Professor Bacharach mentions four ways leaders can strike the right leadership balance.

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Features Leadership On the Edge Managerial Competence Political Competence Proactive Leaders

Have You Re-Read Giants of Enterprise?

In a recent class at Cornell I heard a group of students demythologize famous leaders as part of an exercise. One of my students concluded, “I wouldn’t have wanted to work for Steve Jobs, he seemed like an S.O.B.”

Another student even took Washington down a peg and questioned how bright our founding father really was. He asked weather or not Washington’s silence hinted at tactical stoicism or if his quiet demeanor implied that he often missed the point?

Richard S. Tedlow’s book, Giants of Enterprise, is an exercise in demythologizing leadership.

“Look kiddy,” said Charles Revson, president of the Revlon Corporation, “I built this business by being a bastard. I run it by being a bastard. I’ll always be a bastard…don’t try to change me.”

Revson was speaking to a talented brand manager who he had brought to tears after he demolished a pitch she’d spent months working on.

If Revson was so cruel, then how did he manage to bring the Revlon Corporation to such great heights?

Thomas J. Watson Sr., founder of IBM, didn’t know much about computing. He could understand how a cash register worked, but he didn’t know the mechanics behind building one.

If he didn’t have the technical skill, how did Watson turn IBM into a global force?

No one demythologizes leadership better than Richard S. Tedlow in his still enlightening, entertaining, and engrossing book. It’s a work that must be kept on the shelves of all high potential leaders, current leaders, and those who hope to train leaders.

Tedlow, professor at the Harvard Business School, profiles seven American business innovators and explores what made them successful, what made them tick, and what made them work so hard.

With a keen eye Tedlow writes about, Andrew Carnegie, George Eastman, Thomas J. Watson Sr., Henry Ford, Charles Revson, Sam Walton, Sam Noyce and all the periphery  characters that made these men’s businesses so successful.

It’s easy to look at these business titans and assume they are endowed with something special, something rarefied, that the normal person can’t quite put his finger on.

But Tedlow doesn’t portray these giants of enterprise as larger-than-life men who stomp around palatial offices having nothing but brilliant ideas. He presents these leaders as human beings who, more often than not, had to pick themselves off the floor and brush the dirt off their knees.

The underlying lesson in Tedlow’s book is that leaders aren’t figures that descend from the heavens, but rise through the ranks and make just as many mistakes as the next guy.

And it’s not like each of these men had brilliant, ground-breaking, ideas. They were each knee-deep in competition, surrounded my players who were doing exactly what they were—and in some cases, doing it better. Sam Walton wasn’t the only retailer that discounted–he had to compete with Kmart, Woolworths, and Target. Andrew Carnegie had to compete with other rivals in the steel business—and had to work aggressively to buy them out.  The list goes on. The difference maker for the men illustrated by Tedlow was their leadership ability and how they managed teams, campaigns, agendas, and moments of great upheaval and change.

What Tedlow excels in doing is showing the micro-skills of execution these leaders employed. In many ways he is a biographer of tactics. He shows us how each of these leaders succeeded because they knew how to get things done, push agendas, and politically survive. And, yes, even manage.