Read this inspirational personal account of one of our key thought leaders of today, Otto Scharmer, and how he is finding courage and will within him to drive towards a dream he has had for a long time. More on Otto’s blog.
Category Archives: Leadership
Give your 67 minutes on Mandela Day
Here is a message I received from The B Team and would like to share with all of you. Let’s celebrate the Nelson Mandela International Day together, wherever you are right now!
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July 18 is known around the globe as Mandela Day – a celebration of the wonderful Nelson Mandela, his tireless struggle for human dignity and his lifelong commitment to pursue the greater good. His compassion, moral courage and vision of selfless leadership have been an inspiration to so many of us.
As people everywhere keep Madiba in their thoughts and prayers these days, The B Team, alongside Virgin Unite, is supporting the Nelson Mandela Centre of Memory in South Africa to honour his extraordinary life and values.
The premise of Mandela Day is a simple one: each and every one of us has the ability to make a positive impact in the lives of others. It doesn’t take much to make every day a Mandela Day: if we were all to give just 67 minutes, one minute for every year of Madiba’s fight for human rights and social justice, we can make a huge difference.
I for my part, will spend 67 minutes on July 18th mentoring a group of young entrepreneurs. But there is so much that we all can do. Visit www.mandeladay.com for further inspiration. You can make your pledge to give your 67 minutes at http://www.pledge4mandeladay.org/.
Of course there are other ways in which you can help. If you wish to make a donation from anywhere in the world, to honour Nelson Mandela’s legacy, please visit: www.virginmoneygiving.com/nelsonmandela.
Alternatively, from UK mobiles, you can also text MANDELA to 70107 to make a £5 donation. If you are in the US, text MANDELA to 20222 and $10 will be added to your mobile phone bill or deducted from your prepaid balance.
All funds donated via text messaging, and all funds collected by Virgin Unite through the website will go directly to the Nelson Mandela Centre of Memory. Inaugurated by Nelson Mandela in 2004, the Centre focuses on three areas of work: the Life and Time of Nelson Mandela, Dialogue for Social Justice and Nelson Mandela International Day. For more information, please visit www.nelsonmandela.org.
Join The B Team and Virgin Unite to support the Nelson Mandela Centre of Memory in honouring this exceptional leader, elder and wonderful human being. Make sure to give your 67 minutes on Mandela Day, or make a donation today.
Enkosi kakhulu! Baie Dankie! Thank you!
Richard Branson
Co-Chair, The B Team
Walking Up the Stairs
With reference to my friend Benjamin Akande, Dean of Webster University, who recently shared the following very impactful story.
Walking Up the Stairs
This is a story about the importance of empowering others. John T. Quinlivan, a retired executive at Boeing Corporation, shared this wonderful story with me. It’s a story about a simple act we all take for granted. A few years back John was the person in charge of delivering Boeing commercial jets to countries around the world. This particular delivery was to the nation of Kenya. The Boeing 767-400 plane landed at the Kenyatta International Airport with much fanfare and celebration.
The day began with great pomp and ceremony, as Boeing entertained airline executives and top government dignitaries with a demonstration flight in the new 767 over the beautiful landscape of Kenya. Later that day, the aerospace giant opened the airplane up for what is generally referred as static display, where people are invited to walk through the plane, sit on the seats, and get an up-close look of the plane.
More than two thousand Kenya Airways employees and invited VIPs showed up to get a glimpse of the country’s new acquisition that afternoon. At the completion of the static display, the plane was cleaned and secured for the night. But then, the unaccepted happened, a group of children from a nearby orphanage showed up. they came to see the big bird that had landed near their home close to the airport. Despite protestation from the hosts, John Quinlivan insisted that they too should get a tour of the brand-new plane. When they finally made it on the tarmac, they stood transfixed at the bottom of the stairway looking up at the massive bird. From the top, John motioned to them to come up, but nobody responded to him. “They just stood there,” John told me, and then he asked one of the Kenyan hosts to tell the children and adults who were with them in Swahili to walk up the stairs. again, there was no reaction.
It became clear to John that he had a small problem. The problem? The children and their handlers had never walked up stairs before. They didn’t know how, and so with the help of the Boeing staff and Kenyan hosts, they assisted the children, as they made their way up to the plane. It took a while, but they finally made it to the top of the stairway and into the place. They stretched out on the large seats in first class, checked out the cockpit, sat in the pilot’s seat, and looked in the restrooms!
At the end of the tour, it was a sight to see the kids attempting to walk down the stairway. A few found it more comforting and assuring to just sit on the steps, slid their way down as carefully as they could.
This is a story about a simple act that we take for granted. My friends, walking up stairs is enabling others to reach their goals. Walking up stairs is overcoming insurmountable odds and doing the impossible. When we walk up stairs, we are enabling others to participate in the American Dream. It begs the question: what stairs are you helping others to climb?
According to John, “the people of Kenya were thrilled to be a part of the Boeing 767-400 tour. But it was more than that. They were so proud of their new plane. You see, we must always remember the radical changes that products/services bring to people’s lives and the transformational capacity to an organization or even to a nation and to its people.” For John, it’s about access, connectivity, opportunity, inclusion and education. These are defining attributes that are to be part of DNA of any organization.
Which begs the question: are you enabling these attributes in your organization?
John T. Quinlivan with Kenyan children at the airport
The Community Leads
Sanjeeb Kakoty, a dear friend of mine at the IIM Shillong business school, who has also contributed to our 50+20 initiative shares an impressive account of how a community comes about to join in a shared effort to construct together a community center – with every family contributing at least 1 member for a free days of labor to make this happen.
A wonderful account of one of the many miracles that are happening around the world every day and that we know nothing about. Watch this 7 min. video to get a feel for it:
An illustration of continuous leadership education: the executive monastery
Executives have different needs at different times. These include traditional executive training in leadership, management or business skills. A relatively under-estimated need is the possibility to retreat from the day-to-day demands and action and to reflect on the past to crystallize lessons learned and critical considerations and adaptations for the future. We call it the Executive Monastery!
The Executive Monastery forms an integral part of the management school of the future. It offers a space to reflect on professional and personal achievements and challenges with the possibility to digest and integrate experiences and to prepare for new challenges. Imagine a place, not unlike a real monastery, a safe and sacred space with archways providing shade for walks and reflection, with emptiness in the middle, often enriched with elements of nature, surrounded by a building that offers amenities (rooms and food) and inspiration (libraries) integrated into the surrounding walls. As such, it welcomes professionals for retreats of a duration of their choice, offering them a powerful and safe space of emptiness that is held for them by a variety of supporting services around them: coaches and facilitators are available when necessary, there are personal development workshops, a library with inspirational material in all current media forms, spaces for silent retreats, as well as common moments of yoga, meditation, sports, singing, working, cooking, eating and sharing in general.
From top to bottom: Sanahin Monastery, Armenia, Sucevita Monastery, Romania
Business and management schools must educate leaders in any organization
While business remains a key focus of future management education, we must embrace leaders in any other organization as well. Borders between for-profit and not-for-profit organizations are blurring, the emergence of “social entrepreneurship” is a good example of this. Government and non-government organizations are challenged to become a lot more professional in their strategies and operational implementation.
More to the point, enabling managers and leaders to understand and embrace the idea of serving the Common Good requires an inclusive approach to education, involving stakeholders beyond business to allow dialogues that have not yet taken place. Developing such leaders is a high order and requires a fundamental paradigm shift in the goal of management education: from assuring that graduates know about leadership to ensure that they are being leaders. Awakening and developing the human being in the leader and the leader in the human being becomes the central purpose and starting point of management education.
How to become a leader?
I have always been fascinated how leaders are “brought forth” by circumstance. Something out of the ordinary occurs – an accident, a coincidence, a conflict, an opportunity – and you see people step up and start doing what needs to be done. Such leaders who hold no formal power or authority express what I believe true leadership is about: the courage to fully engage with all we have – our acquired and dormant skills, competencies, fears and uncertainties – if and when the situation requires it. It may well be that such leadership makes the headlines once in a lifetime only, but I have noticed that there are countless opportunities every day before, during and after work that invite us to practice this kind of leadership that I call “personal responsibility”. This makes all of us potential leaders.
Imagine if each of us would dare to engage fully if and when the situation requires it! Daring to make a mistake, to shake things up and maybe to step on some toes; not to show off or to manipulate, but simply because you know what is required to happen and, since you are there, it is up to you to step up. And this is where it gets interesting: how do you know what to do, how to be and whether to engage in a situation or not?
Is it indeed possible to learn such kind of a enlightened courage? I believe, you can! You can learn to be connected to your inner quiet voice, you can learn to sense what is right and what feels wrong, you can learn to differentiate between your own subconscious autopiloted fear mechanisms and your true values-based intuition, you can learn to find that voice and speak up. Such learning resembles more of a journey than a 3-day executive course. It requires practice and reflection.
It is possible to create powerful and safe learning environments to develop not only your courage to step up but to develop your full potential so that you can engage with a maximum of resources that you have. And if we as business schools were doing what is required of us right now, this is – in my humble view – what we should be doing: developing globally responsible leaders equiped to deal with the emerging societal, economic and environmental challenges so that all of us can live well and within the limits of out planet.
Patrick Awuah on educating leaders
Sharing an astonishing example of a business school and shaping the next generation of leaders. Hope you enjoy watching as much as I did!
The importance of field work
Stakeholder research[1] indicates that organizational leaders and business managers cannot be developed without a solid foundation of work experience. In the prevailing North American educational system, it is typical for high school graduates to launch directly into undergraduate education, which is often directly followed with graduate education. Europe and North America differ in the definition of post graduate education, and in particular in the entry requirements of MBA candidates. While in the U.S. work experience is often optional and desirable only, the traditional two-year North American MBA program provides graduates with a very limited first-hand exposure to business and management combined with a significant theoretical experience of business problems. In Europe, the majority of MBA programs are for executives with significant work experience including management experience. They are able to reflect what they learn in the program with their real-life experience at work. The level of discussion and the learning mechanisms are dramatically different with the teacher being much more of a facilitator than a lecturer and with highly innovative program elements that immerse participants into hands on field work across the world, often in developing countries and often as consulting projects for entrepreneurial ventures.
The importance of field work is grounded in the very well established Germanic apprenticeship model. Switzerland, which is highly appreciated for its highly skilled workforce, is still very much relying on this model with more than 75% of its young generation of today choosing to pursue an apprenticeship rather than entering university for studies.
The future management school integrates work experience through reflected field work into its curriculum. Most importantly it foresees creating an experiential year in the second year of undergraduate education, following the historic German model of the “Wanderjahr” (the year of wandering around that forms an integral part of the traditional trade apprenticeship. Chapter 5 provides a detailed example of how undergraduate business and management education could look like at the management school of the future.
[1] The 50+20 project undertook a stakeholder survey in August 2011 (add reference)
Trans-disciplinary learning
The common thread among all of these learning environments is the way a subject is approached and therefore what skills are being developed. The innovative thought lies in fundamentally transforming single discipline teaching into trans-disciplinary learning. Rather than teaching marketing, finance, strategy, human resources separately, students will be looking at finding solutions to existing and emerging environmental, societal and economic challenges. Such dilemmas include water scarcity, pandemics, hunger, migration, social support for the elders, climate change, ocean acidification, CO2 emission control, etc.
This approach is fundamentally different than adding a bit of ethics and sustainability into an existing curriculum. Such approaches merely bolt-on responsible and sustainable considerations to a single discipline foundation; what we need is a full transformation of the curriculum to build-in these notions, turning around education by 180 degrees. As a consequence, subject knowledge is acquired predominantly in the context of a real problem, enabling students to anchor it in real stories.
Trans-disciplinary learning is based on the idea that critical competences such as holistic and divergent thinking, systemic understanding, consideration of multiple perspectives and integral decision-making, are critical for future leaders and need to be trained and developed above and beyond transmitting subject expertise. More explicitly, we believe that teaching disciplinary expertise in isolation may well have been the cause for numerous problems the economic system is currently facing. Developing an understanding for unintended side-effects and consequences in the larger system of any given decision in a specific domain requires fluency with systemic thinking and ability to dismantling complexity.
Rising to the challenge of effectively addressing and resolving global and societal challenges requires an understanding of human and societal developmental stages (i.e. from what perspective do stakeholders look at a problem?) and an ease to navigate between the most diverse fields of expertise (hi-tech, sociology, gen-tech, philosophy, psychology, neuro-science, medicine, architecture, engineering, bio-tech, etc.). Leaders for a sustainable future have learned to work with experts of these fields and are able to build bridges and lead a group of subject experts towards sustainable solutions for the world.
An important element of trans-disciplinary learning is the inclusion of relevant stakeholders in the class discussion and practical field work on global issues. This approach assumes that problems can no longer be resolved by applying single-disciplinary perspective. Such a collaborative approach ensures one of the most critical leadership skills for a sustainable future: fluency and ease in considering and shifting between multiple perspectives.