A big part of our work as humans is to express this private reality, to bring into the world what only we can.

Most of us don’t have a language for this. I don’t mean the mechanics of language that we learn in school: the words and their pre-defined meanings and the rules for their proper usage. By language I mean a particular vehicle for expression, a medium through which we can manifest in the world whomever it is that we are.

The body is a means for carrying whoever it is we are around, but a language is required for us to actually bring who we are into existence. 

Some of us are fortunate enough to have found such a language: painting, a musical instrument, a particular sport, writing, cooking, teaching, etc. Each of these can of course be engaged with as a Skill, as an objective process with a particular set of rules and definitions. One can become quite technically proficient at these Skills and produce consistent, reliable results. Which is wonderful and useful…but in and of itself, it leaves the Self unexpressed. In fact, engaging with a Skill requires that the Self not be involved at all, that one focus exclusively on the efficient execution of the objective standards that define the Skill and produce the outcome that the Skill leads to. In this way, one’s Self doesn’t get expressed so much as it gets defined: “I am one who is good at ____.”

Engaging with a Language is a different thing altogether. To engage with teaching or violin playing or plumbing as a Language is to treat the components of that activity as a vehicle for ongoing, subjective expression; as a vehicle for creating – and exploring and evolving and recreating – Self in the world.

Skills leave us Authored, Language allows us to Author.

My sense is that much of the dysfunction we see in others – their equivalent of Carly’s banging her head on the ground – is a reflection of their lack of a Language with which to express/create/recreate who they are. Ultimately, I think this is much of what my work is about. Create results that are of financial and operational value to the client’s system? Sure, that’s valuable (and a price of admission that, if not met, eventually gets you fired). But I think what really keeps the phone ringing, what has clients value the work and refer it to others, is that somewhere in the process their relationship with their world changes. They discover the Language that is hidden in their Skills and they take on the work of Authoring.

And then this morning I read ‘the other side of the story’. I read that only 31% of Invisible Children’s revenues from fundraising go to their charity program, that it may be exaggerating the scope of the situation in Uganda in order to make it’s case more compelling, that it seems to ignore the inconvenient reality that the Ungandan Army that it’s trying to get military support for is itself guilty of war crimes.

I’m not interested in this post in whether or not the criticism of Invisible Children is true or not. What I’m interested in is this:

What is the source of Integrity in a post-Social world?

I’ve said that the KONY2012 video was a tipping point…perhaps it was a different tipping point than what I initially saw/felt (or perhaps there were two tipping points happening in parallel). Perhaps KONY2012 was the best example to date of how easily unexamined group-think can spread in a socially connected world. The KONY phenomena raises questions about how we filter information going forward. In a Social world, we inherently grant trust to ideas (and products/services) that have no earned trust with us; i.e., we grant an idea/product/service trust because a ‘friend’ recommended it even though it has not earned our trust through either past experience with it or through the rigorous examination of ‘objective’, 3rd-party sources. This second part is critical: the Social and Connected world moves us further and further away from the world of the Expert, the holder of secret knowledge and special training. For all of the limitations that the voice of the Expert puts on our own voice, one of the things that Expertise allows for is Rigor. In the Social world it’s not that there are no Experts, it’s that everyone is an Expert, everyone’s voice has the same potential for amplification. So what happens in a Facebook world to the rigorous examination that leads to informed decision?

The Social and Connected world holds the promise of stripping away artificial/imposed barriers and shifting the core of power to the masses. Which then raises the question: are we ready to wield such power? Do we get the responsibility inherent in ‘sharing’?

What the collective did yesterday in having KONY2012 go viral was the equivalent of the executive leadership of an organization issuing a company-wide memo about a new initiative.

How much faith would we have in those executives if they had taken as little time as we did to educate ourselves on the issues before hitting the Share button? How responsible would we see them as being if they were guided solely by a compelling emotional plea and an insanely beautiful video?

I’m NOT suggesting that you should retract your support of KONY 2012; I’m suggesting that we have to quickly learn to use the power we are receiving wisely because whether or not this particular campaign is legitimate, we will be flooded by these things in the future and many of them will be far from what they seem to be.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have some research to do about the long-term situation in Uganda

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*About six years ago, two colleagues and I launched a company called Committed Conversations with the intention of creating a platform for such a world. We failed miserably because I was more focused on the ideal than the applications of the ideal, more focused on ‘build the playing field and they will come’ versus ‘go tell people about the new game’, which is one of the many things that the folks at Invisible Children got right.

Guha was a barbarian hunter. He hunted in the forest with great skill. He was one with the tangled underbrush, cousin to the monkey and the tiger. The priests in the city thought it was their duty to bring Religion to him, so they set up a large statue of Shiva near his home and performed their rituals there. Guha, however, would have none of it. Every day, when he was finished with his hunting, he would go over to the statue and kick it. Every single day. The priests would sometimes fail to show up in bad weather or when there were tigers in the area, but Guha kicked the statue whether they were there or not.

One day a pack of wolves surrounded the statue so that he could not safely approach for his customary kick. He tried to reach it by climbing a tree, but he could not get close enough. Waiting for the wolves to leave, he stayed in the tree all night. He shivered in the cold, shaking dew and leaves from the branch onto the statue below. Hungry, he tried to eat the fruit of the tree, but it was bitter, and he spit it out. Finally in the morning the wolves left, and he got down and kicked the statue. But he still felt frustrated and miserable, and he took it out on the priests, who had arrived for their morning ritual, chasing them back to the city. When he returned to the area that night, the statue was gone, and he thought no more about it.

Some time later, he caught a fever and fell very ill. Lord Yama, king of the Underworld, sent his hound, which took Guha in its jaws and began carrying him to the land of the dead. A messenger of Shiva stopped the hound on its way. Yama, lord of the dead, objected to this intrusion in his domain, and they went before Shiva to settle the matter.

“He is dead,” Yama said, “so he is mine.”
“This is my most faithful servant,” Shiva replied. “When other priests failed occasionally in their observances, he came to me every day. He once kept watch over me all night, adorning me with leaves, sprinkling pure water upon me, and giving me food while he had none. And he chased away those who only pretended devotion. He is mine. You shall not take him.”

Shiva returned Guha to life, and he lived long years after.

You are no longer living in an economy where you can rely solely on your ‘priests’, the ones who follow your rules, the ones who carry your orthodoxies. Those people don’t know what to do when the ‘bad weather and tigers’ enter the scene – and we are in an age of bad weather and tigers, of an endless stream of disruptors to our organizational and business ecosystem.

So, who are the ‘barbarian hunters’ in your organization and your broader stakeholder ecosystem? How about in your personal life?

The reality is that these individuals are engaged with YOU…they’re just not engaged with your orthodoxies/scripts/rules. How do you see beyond your rules – as Shiva does in the story – and thereby transform your understanding of their behavior? How do you bring them into the game as an active, creative player?

This is the central paradox that managers must engage with if they are to be effective in dealing with human systems issues in the emerging economy: sources of growth an value creation will most often come from those outside of the organizational orthodoxy, those who look like ‘barbarians’ when viewed from the filters of what the organization knows is ‘right.’

The ‘weed’ I’m referring to is the Industrial Era notion that some things belong and are useful and some things…well, don’t.

[A weed is] a plant that is considered by the user of the term to be a nuisance, and normally applied to unwanted plants in human-controlled settings, especially farm fields and gardens, but also lawns, parks, woods, and other areas. More specifically, the term is often used to describe any plants that grow and reproduce aggressively. Generally, a weed is a plant in an undesired place. (from Wikipedia)

Stated more broadly: a weed is any object, behavior, thought or emotion that does not conform to the prevailing orthodoxy (in it’s original meaning, ‘Orthodoxy’ is the true or right opinions/beliefs as established by some authority).

Last week, friend and master chef Bun Lai posted a picture of a new sushi dish he’s created using Mugwort, a plant that is usually considered a weed, and therefore useless. Bun’s restaurant is in an open-ended conversation about what it is to eat in a way that is sustainable while still being enjoyable. Over the past year or so, this conversation has opened up an exploration of what is possible in terms of rethinking what can and can’t be eaten. In other words, an exploration has opened up that questions the orthodoxy of what ‘food’ is. While in a very different context, this exploration aligns with much of the exploration of what ‘work’ is that led to the Trip-Soy Era.

There is no plant that is a ‘weed’ in and of itself; it is a weed only because we can find no use for it. It is not the fault of the plant but of the gardener – and the gardener’s orthodoxy – that a particular plant exists as ‘weed’. In nature, there is no such thing as ‘weed’, everything has it’s place and even invasive species are, over a long enough time horizon, incorporated into the ecosystem – though the ecosystem may become radically transformed in the process.

The point is, in the physical world we’ve inherited, everything belongs….but in the psychological world we’ve constructed, only those things belong that fit the orthodoxy – the script if you will – that we’re working off of.

My script from my parents tells me that an adult works hard and carves out a place for himself in the material world; and so a desire in me – or anyone else – to be at ease, to enjoy the days and to give up the striving for ‘more’ is seen by me as a weed I call lazy. And this weed must be rooted out.

My script from the men who speak for my God tells me that only a man and a woman can have a loving relationship; and so homosexual desire or behavior is a weed I call sin. And this weed must be rooted out.

My script from society tells me that To Know – to be an Expert and to have every aspect of a topic thoroughly understood – is an ultimate good, a basis for authority and power; and so open-ended exploration, play and Art are a weed I call unproductive. And this weed must be rooted out.

My script from educational and business institutions tells me that Control and Predictability are not only possible, but highly desirable – in fact they are the very point of my profession, whatever my profession may be; and so ambiguity, uncertainty and complexity are weeds I call risk. And this weed must be rooted out.

 As I’ve discussed in many previous posts, we are in the very early stages of the most fundamental transformation of our social and economic lives in six centuries. Over the last 300 years of that time – the Industrial Era – we have made enormous material progress. In medicine, chemistry, engineering, economics, and every other discipline (orthodoxy), we have advanced beyond all imagination and have significantly improved the physical aspects of day-to-day life. But the path to this improved life has been littered with weeds.

Because it did not fit neatly into the scripts that we created to provide this better material life, we have excluded much of the world around us….and even more of the world within us. We have ‘weed-ified’ too much, we have left too much – and too many – out of the game, we have erred too far in the direction of structure and process and control and predictability.

But new players are in the game. There is a generation of entrepreneurs and artists and activists (and, in the case of Bun, chefs) that are reclaiming the weeds, that are inviting them back into play, that are creating economic value from what the Industrial Era called waste, that are building networks and tools for weeds to congregate and collaborate and create in ways that are wholly unpredictable and uncontrollable. The Occupy movement is a reflection of this. The Gay Rights movement is a reflection of this. Facebook/Twitter are reflections of this. Collaborative Consumption is a reflection of this. So many more are popping up each week that I can no longer keep track of them all (they’re growing like…).

My point is not to advocate for an ‘anything goes’, orthodoxy-free world; nor is it to offend the specific orthodoxies/scripts that anyone chooses to live by. What I’m looking at here is:

1. the tendency for us to treat as useless that which does not fit within our personal/societal orthodoxy and
2. the possibility that in the world that is emerging, a source – perhaps the greatest source – of value and growth and sustainability lies in transforming society’s ‘weeds’ into useful plants; NOT by transforming the nature of the ‘weed’ itself but by expanding our games, our scripts, our orthodoxies, to include these weeds as legitimate players that generate value and are a source of growth

What are your – and your organization’s – orthodoxies?

What – and who – have you declared to be ‘weeds’ in your organization and in your life?

What about in yourself; what parts of you keep insisting on sprouting up even though you have labeled them as unwanted, undesirable, and a nuisance?

These weeds must not be rooted out, they must be included.

In addition to (or perhaps instead of?) goals/resolutions for the year, what is your melody for the year?

Is it tight enough that you can actually play/sing it……but at the same time not so tight as to eliminate the possibility of improvisation? You don’t need the whole song, just the root melody; a few simple ‘notes’ that hang together.

One of my favorite musical pieces is Bach’s Die Kunst der Fuge. This remarkably rich, complex and moving work is actually an ongoing exploration of a single, seemingly simple musical idea:

From these 13 notes, Bach generated 14 unique pieces which, as a whole, are a musical monument to the art of Art.

What is the root melody for you in 2012? What are the short series of intentions and commitments that will be the boundaries you will absolutely not violate – while also being the themes on which you riff, improvise, wail and create? Here are mine:

• Generate
• Automate
• Invest
• Activate

These ‘notes’ most likely mean very little to you and I would guess that they won’t occur for you as a ‘melody’, just as your ‘notes’ would likely hold little meaning for me. What’s important is that it’s a set of constraints that I’ve consciously chosen for the year and they will inform what and how I create over the course of the next 12 months. In the significant areas of my life, I have no goals for 2012. I’m uncertain what will happen. I don’t know when I’ll be done. Or if I’ll be done. Or what done might even look like.

In and of itself, this might not seem like all that big a deal; lots of people ‘self-publish’ these days. But C.K. is arguably one of the hottest 5 talents working and is just starting the real ‘marketable’ phase of his career; i.e., he is exactly what the entertainment industry covets most: a legitimate talent with a solid following who is in a phase of his career where he is producing a high volume of very high-quality product. The problem is that he’s opting out from the entire system. Read the statement he released yesterday. Without knowing it – perhaps he does! – Louis has written a mini-manifesto that summaries the rationale for going directly to the marketplace as well as mindset required to succeed.

In the first 4 days of this experiment, Louis sold 110,000 copies of the video. He sold the video for $5 each and has made $200,000 in personal profit; I’d imagine he’ll at least double/triple that over the next couple of weeks. If a production company had handled this for him, he would have likely made about the same but the price for the video would have been $20 and the 75% of the revenue that didn’t go to Louis would have gone to the company.

The experiment having been a success, Louis has committed to running his entire business this way: CD’s, concert ticket sales, etc. Most of the business leaders I meet don’t get what’s actually happening here. It’s an intellectual understanding at best.

Control is slipping away. The role of ‘middlemen’ is becoming devalued. The advantages of scale are rapidly becoming irrelevant. The distance between Creator and Consumer is disappearing. Who are you in this world? What value do you provide when all of your ‘secret knowledge’ and proprietary processes are accessible to anyone?

P.S., the video is genius; go buy a copy!

oc·cu·py \ˈä-kyə-ˌpī\

to engage the attention or energies of
to reside or have one’s place of business in
to fill or take up (a space or time)

Like you, I have read about and watched videos of the Occupy ‘movement’ over the past several months. And, like you, I have had a variety of reactions: hippy kids making noise; expression of legitimate frustration with an dysfunctional industry; liberal version of the Tea Party; is Phish playing on Wall Street?; etc. But I’m not sure I know what’s going on with this thing anymore, I can no longer pinpoint a single issue or agenda at the center of this thing….which excites the hell out of me because it means that something generative may actually be happening at these events.

One of the distinctions I engage my students in is ‘Protest’ versus ‘Profess’. I won’t work through the entire distinction in the main body of this post but want to explore the issue of Protest. What does this term mean for you? Most likely something along the lines of: standing in opposition to, challenging, dissenting, etc. This however is not what the term originally meant.

‘Protest’ is from the Latin roots: testus (to witness or stand) and pro (for). A much more useful – and accurate – understanding of ‘protest’ is as a witnessing for or standing for a certain possibility. ‘Protest’, properly understood, has nothing to do with opposition. My question to the students in the Graduate Psychology program I teach in, the majority of whom what to pursue careers as change agents in organizations, is: what is the Protest that is at the center of your life’s work? In other words, what is it that you are witnessing for through your work as an Organizational Development practitioner?

Over the past week or so, I have seen some things from the OWS community that extends far beyond the bounds of the habitual understanding of protest. These folks may well be legitimately witnessing for something. There is a possibility that many – certainly not all – are at work on holding space for the conversation about what a post-industrial society looks like. If you’ve read my – admittedly infrequent! – posts here or read the Trip-Soy Era book, you know that this conversation is central to the protest that’s at the core of my work. So, I’m intrigued; so much so that I’ll be spending time over the next month or two attending some of these events. Stay tuned…

In the meantime, check out this video; what do you see?

One of my many ‘in-process’ writing projects is an interpretation of Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience titled ‘Corporate Disobedience’.  In Thoreau’s original work, the first line is: “I heartily accept the motto, ‘That government is best which governs least’.” Given the economy that is emerging and the velocity – and acceleration – of transformative change that will define our economic environment for decades to come, I believe strongly that ‘That organization is best which organizes the least’.
For the past few centuries, we have operated from the premise that Control and Predictability are THE standard for quality, that the litmus test for a true Professional is the degree to which they can create highly predictable outcomes within their area of Expertise. The whole point of our model of organization in the industrial era is to maximize the probability that the system – and all of it’s constituent parts – will produce exactly what is expected/predicted. All well and good. However, enter Gen Y. These folks were raised and live in a state of constant and complex interconnection. Hierarchy and control have not been the defining characteristics of their lives; choice, constant and real-time conversation, and, most importantly, access have defined their experience. Access to information, to each other, to technology, to markets, you name it. My 12 year-old daughter is more directly connected with the world and the people, ideas, and cultures in it than I even knew existed at her age. That’s not a product of ‘smarter’ or ‘better’, that’s a product of the flattening of hierarchies, of near-unlimited access. So why in the world would these folks enter the workplace and have the automatic relationship with Control and Predictability, with Hierarchy and Organization that we ‘business veterans’ have? Now, here’s the really interesting part: these Gen Yers, they’re actually your practice run for the world that’s emerging.

Imagine that you are a business manager in the 1960′s. Odds are very good that you are a white male and that all your peers are not only the same gender and race as you but also have a very similar world view. However, society is fundamentally changing all around you; there is an aggressively emerging expectation that women and minorities be treated the same way as you are, that they be given the same opportunities in business as you have. You could fight this and attempt to maintain the status quo, complaining that ‘these people don’t get how it is.’ Or you could attempt to adapt your behaviors, learning how to deal with more diverse individuals and diverse perspectives. Either way, the thing to look at is that these early experiences with diversity would have been your entry point into learning how to deal with the radical explosion of diversity that would mark the decades to follow….and if you didn’t learn to deal with the folks who were showing up in the workplace, you were unlikely to have been prepared to deal with what your broader cultural and social world was becoming. And so it is with Gen Y.

These folks aren’t inherently problematic…nor are they terribly special. They simply grew up ‘after the asteroid hit’ and are therefore well suited to live in a low-hierarchy, high-access world. And it’s important to note that many of us who are not of the Gen Y age group share the Gen Y world view. A caller to John’s radio program rightly pointed out that there are plenty of Gen Xers and Boomers who are quite comfortable in a connected world. But be clear about this: if you understand what we discussed during the radio program as being a discussion ONLY about how to deal with a specific generation of workers, you are missing the bigger picture. The worldview this generation represents is the worldview that will inform the economy that is emerging. Learn how to work with them and you’ll learn how to work in the 21st century.

The full opening passage of Corporate Disobedience looks like this:

I heartily accept the motto, “That organization is best which organizes least”; and I would like to see this acted on more aggressively and clearly by our corporations. Carried to it’s logical conclusion, it amounts to this, which also I believe–”That organization is best which organizes not at all“; and when human beings are prepared for it, that will be the kind of organizations which they will have.

Gen Y as a whole is certainly not prepared for an organization which ‘organizes not at all’….but some are, and most are much closer than those of us that grew up prior to the age of access. Our work is to learn with them how to live in a world that moves further and further away from the industrial model while, at the same time, educating them on those (relatively few yet quite critical) areas of our organization that truly do benefit from control and predictability.

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P.S., my colleagues Nick Wedge and Ryan Levine were on with John as well and if you take the time to listen to them on the recording of the show you’ll hear why I have so much hope about the contribution this generation will make – and is already making – to our organizations and institutions.

13-week Time Horizons Create the Illusion of Engagement and Motivation
In late 1993, I was asked to take a position in the corporate Marketing function of the publishing firm I had been working for. I had just come off of 2 years overseeing the turnaround of 2 failing business units and had developed something of a reputation as an effective manager and, in an organization where employees tended to be high on the cynicism scale, as someone who seemed to have an ability to generate high levels of satisfaction and loyalty from my employees. At around the same time I was making the transition to my corporate role, an article was published by Alfie Kohn that instantly resonated with much of what I believed about how to run a business and engage employees. I immediately made dozens of copies and began distributing them to my new colleagues. Before I share their reaction, here is a very brief summary of the key points Kohn made in the article:

1. Pay is not a motivator: When people are asked what matters most to their co-workers or those they supervise, pay ranks fifth or sixth. Frederick Herzberg, one of the central figures in motivation theory, nailed it when he said: “just because too little money can irritate and demotivate does not mean that more and more money will bring about increased satisfaction, much less increased motivation.”
2. Rewards punish: Just as punishment destroys motivation and creates defiance, defensiveness, and rage, rewards “have a punitive effect because they, like punishment, are manipulative.” Employees feel controlled and resentful, and this is not conducive to exploration, learning, and progress.
3. Rewards rupture relationships: “The surest way to destroy cooperation and, therefore, organizational excellence, is to force people to compete for rewards or recognition or to rank them against each other.” Also, our reward and incentive-based approach encourages employees to present themselves as competent and hide developmental needs and/or long-term problems from those in control of the money. “Very few things threaten an organization as much as a hoard of incentive-driven individuals trying to curry favor with the incentive dispenser.”
4. Rewards ignore reasons: “Relying on incentives to boost productivity does nothing to address underlying problems and bring about meaningful change.” The dispensing of rewards based on achievement of narrow, prescribed outcomes fundamentally lets management off the hook from the deeper accountability of creating conditions in which every employee can make a significant contribution.
5. Rewards discourage risk-taking: “When people are focused on what they will get if they accomplish a mission, they become less inclined to take risks or explore alternatives.” Thus, “the number one casualty of rewards is creativity.”
6. Rewards undermine interest: People who do exceptional work do not work simply to collect a paycheck; they work because they love what they do. Extrinsic motivators, such as rewards, are poor substitutes for the intrinsic motivator, genuine interest in one’s job. “The more a manager stresses what an employee can earn for good work, the less interested that employee will be in the work itself.” Furthermore, the more employees feel controlled, the more they will tend to lose interest in what they are doing.

Kohn’s article was titled: Why Incentive Plans Cannot Work and it was followed by a book, Punished by Rewards. If you are in any way engaged in business, are a parent or are involved in education, Kohn’s work is must-read.

As you might have guessed, the reaction to my enthusiasm for Alfie’s work was cool at best; most of it was along the lines of a metaphorical pat on the head and a message of: ‘oh, you really don’t know how the world works do you’. Eighteen years later and we have yet to learn what Kohn has been pointing to. For the record, Kohn’s insights are backed by decades of research conducted in schools and business organizations and the conclusion is the same every single time: extrinsic rewards of any kind will, over time, destroy an individual’s inherent motivation for the work. What’s worse is that the greater the level of initial motivation, the greater the negative impact of rewards; i.e., the more you are rewarded for work that you have the most passion for, the more likely you are to lose your passion for it.

The obvious question here is: ‘well if that’s the case, why do we still rely so heavily on incentives?’ The answer is pretty simple: incentives WORK; however, they work in that they generate compliance for the short-term future. Remember that the work of Management is to generate control and predictability and, in the Industrial-era paradigm, incentives as a driver of compliance are quite a useful tool. Also note that the deteriorating effect that rewards have on motivation occur over time, they don’t show up over the course of a few weeks – or even months – but rather manifest slowly after successive cycles of engagement with rewards and incentives.

Which brings us to the title – and point – of this post: the emphasis on the fiscal quarter as the dominant unit of time in business ensures that the compliance-generating benefit of rewards is highlighted while the motivation-deteriorating effect of rewards is completely masked. This was fine when our central concern was ensuring that everyone ‘did their job’. However, as I have discussed in other posts, the economy that is emerging requires that everyone in your organization is actively and creatively engaged, that ‘doing their job’ is at best the beginning of the conversation about what it means to work for you. For this we need a philosophy of organization that has a longer attention span than 13 weeks and a deeper understanding of human motivation than the ‘do a trick and get a treat’ approach that we use on our pets.

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*NOTE: given the structure of this site and the need for short posts, I am very much simplifying Kohn’s work. I strongly urge you to visit his site where you can find some well-written articles that will provide a richer insight into the conversation that I am opening up here.

13-week Time Horizons Serve Management and Subvert Leadership
The work of Management is to create control and predictability, to plan for exactly what will happen and how it will happen, to make promises and deliver on those promises. The work of Leadership is to explore possibility, to bring new realities into existence that are in alignment with the ‘why‘ of the organization, to declare visions and make commitments that forward those visions*. By it’s nature, the work of Management lends itself to a short-cycle measurement paradigm that emphasizes tangible results; the Fiscal Quarter as a timeframe within which to check the health of the organization is tailor made for gauging Management work.

The work of Leadership, in contrast, doesn’t unfold as linearly and a short-cycle measurement paradigm can fundamentally miss – and thereby marginalize – Leadership work. The drivers of Leadership work are for the most part intangible and relational (e.g., trust, influence, reputation, vision) and can’t be accounted for in the way tangible and discreet elements are (e.g., revenue, market share, error rates). As Felix points out in the interview, Wall Street has come to be dominated not by those who invest as owners of the enterprise but rather by those who are interested in short cycles of return on their investment. In my work consulting to pre-IPO companies, one of the running themes is a clarity on the part of organizational members that, once their shares are traded publicly, the opportunity for creation and exploration will diminish if not be shut down totally. There is a palpable sense of ‘going public’ as a Faustian bargain, an act of enormous financial benefit that will come at the cost of their personal and collective visions. The painful irony is that, at a time when the engagement with Possibility and Creation – the work of Leadership – are central to economic survival, there is an intuitive understanding that Wall Street does not value Leadership but instead insists on ever more efficient application of Management. Consider this simple but illustrative example:

Imagine that you are CEO of a publicly traded firm. Last quarter, you produced $500M in profit and this quarter you have promised $550M. At the end of this quarter, you announce that your company did in fact deliver $550M; what is Wall Street’s reaction? Positive, of course. Now, what if you produced $548M? The reaction is perhaps a little negative but you’re probably still OK. What about if you produced $552M? Likely a very positive response from the Street. And, of course, if you only produced $525M you know you’re in big trouble. Now here’s the really interesting one:

What if, after having promised $550M your company actually delivered $650M? The Street should be happy, right? After all, you just made them much more money than you said you would. However, the result of $650M would be taken as a negative, a sign that you have no control of your business. I’m not suggesting that this is a ‘bad’ perspective for Wall Street to have, but it’s important to understand what that system was and wasn’t designed for. The reality is that Wall Street rewards, first and foremost, control and predictability and has no tolerance for uncertainty; i.e., it’s very design ensures the rewarding of efficient Management and the suppression of effective Leadership.

Long-term investors can engage in the long-term conversations that Leadership speaks to, they are engaged in a relationship that allows for certain measures of uncertainty and surprise. Short-term investors, by their nature, cannot. So, while I share Felix’s concern about the possible emergence of a very small investor class (which I actually don’t see happening), I do welcome the marginalization of Wall Street as a force in business.

In the second part to this post I’d like to discuss how the 13-week Time Horizon Creates the Illusion of Engagement and Motivation; but, for now, what do you see?

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*If you confuse the terms Management and Leadership as specific titles or jobs in an organization, this perspective falls apart; we are referring here to Management and Leadership as two distinct, and complementary, ways of engaging within an organization, regardless of one’s title or job.