Prolog

Leadership of every hue and cry has been covered in over 437, 869 book titles available on Amazon.com alone (Search for Leader). Not to speak of countless blog posts, magazine and newspaper articles on the subject.

Judging from the reams of material that has been written and from personal experience, Leadership is a tough topic and it is clear that we don’t understand it that well.  Therefore, it is seductive to boil leadership down to a set of formulae:

• Try this small exercise with me – think of any number N from 1 to 50 and search for N leadership traits and you are likely to find an article(s)/book(s) like the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People,  36 traits of leaders,10 characteristics of leaders, 21 indispensable qualities of leaders …

• It is also inspiring to read about great leaders and insights drawn from their experiences.  Therefore, you get to read the leadership wisdom of people starting from Sun Tzu to Steve Jobs.

It is all about the Leader

The one unifying pattern that emerges from reading the popular leadership press is that it seems to be all about the leader and his/her skills.  There is some wisdom bandied about – on choosing the right people , making sure you eliminate the people who don’t fit your vision, etc.  But for the most part, leadership is about seeking to become the ideal leader with all the N qualities depending on whose N you believe in.  With all this talk about the Leader,  if becoming a leader seems like a Herculean task, you are not alone.

The 21st Century Leader

Having been in leadership roles for the past 18 years, i don’t think it was ever about the leader 100%. Now, in the 21st century, with the latest and greatest communication and management tools, the leader is much much less important. Only those leaders, who grasp this counter-intuitive insignificance of themselves, are going to succeed. John Chambers, The legendary CEO of Cisco recently articulated this shift:

“The CEO role at Cisco going back over the last five to 10 years has been very much ‘command and control’ and I think we do it pretty well, and if we say ‘turn right,’ 65,000 people turn right,” Chambers said.

“That’s very effective when you’re in a couple product areas or one or two major cross-functional initiatives per year. It is not an effective leadership style or organization structure if you’re moving into a lot of market adjacencies and you have a lot of major cross-functional priorities.”

This whole obsession with, who the leader is and what his/her personality is, is a vestige from the command and control era of management.  The 21st century leadership will be marked by a totally different style – which i decided to call UnLeadership.

Developing the UnLeadership Manifesto

I would like to engage the community on this blog in developing this manifesto.  The community has delivered the goods many times before including the mission impossible – can passion be taught?

Here is what i propose we should do – build a set of rules for the UnLeader and in the next pass recommend the tools that will be needed.

That would be my first one on the manifesto – 1. Instill passion in your team.

No Asshole Rule

One of my favorite authors Bob Sutton has written a fantastic book called No Asshole Rule recently.  This is a must read to understand what one should never do as a leader.  This would be my recommendation for the second rule – 2. Never be an Asshole.

Inspiration

In order to inspire you all to the task at hand, i would like you all to spend 1 hour and 16 min watching this video from Professor Randy Pausch, famously known as the Last Lecture. I will guarantee you that this will be one of the best 1 hour and 16 min you have ever spent watching a lecture. [Sadly he passed away yesterday]

Epilog

Now for the community to develop the rest of the rules – decision making, dealing with/developing expertise, empowerment, performance management (vision, goal setting, reviews etc) and any other category you want to add.  Numbered lists are seductive indeed, so let us keep our list to 10.  Most important thing to bear in mind – don’t be held hostage to existing models of leadership, let us rewrite the rules. I am also tagging bloggers that i know are passionate about leadership – Ganesh Vaideeswaran, Arun Sankaranarayanan , Ranjit Nair and Subba Muthurangan .  I am hoping other bloggers will also join in and help create the framework.

]]> http://www.sastwingees.org/2008/07/26/the-unleadership-manifesto-making-of-the-21st-century-leader-part-1/feed/ 59 http://www.sastwingees.org/2007/11/11/long-tail-by-chris-anderson-win-a-copy-of-the-book/ http://www.sastwingees.org/2007/11/11/long-tail-by-chris-anderson-win-a-copy-of-the-book/#comments Sun, 11 Nov 2007 15:01:24 +0000 Sukumar http://www.sastwingees.org/2007/11/11/long-tail-by-chris-anderson-win-a-copy-of-the-book/ Long tail by Chris Anderson – win a copy of the book

Chris Anderson made a superb presentation about his concept of Long Tail at our customer conference 2 weeks ago. Before i talk about his presentation, i want to give you all a few pointers to pick up this concept. I strongly believe that all management professionals must understand the Long Tail because it has deep implications for everyone. If you already know about the concept you can skip the following section and go to the next section.

The Long Tail Concept
As a subscriber of the Wired magazine, i chanced upon the article that Chris Anderson wrote in Oct 2004 which talked about the Long tail concept for the first time. It didn’t hit me the first time i read it. Almost 6 months later, i came across Joe Kraus’s blog post about Long tail and his explanations and the charts he published made me really understand the concept. Make sure to read the powerpoint slides he has attached to his blog post as well. [In case you didn't know Joe Kraus is the founder of Jotspot, now part of Google. Also note that some of stats he quotes about Amazon, Netflix etc were later revised making the long tail sales of Amazon/Netflix not as stark as these charts show.] To be sure, Long tail is just a new way of looking at what Pareto pointed out long ago about winner-take-all-power- law distributions. While Pareto focused on the head of the curve, Chris Anderson, has brilliantly pointed the whole world at the tail of the curve – hence the term, Long Tail.

Long Tail Presentation titled “The Economics of Abundance”

Chris Anderson gave a great presentation. Compared to Dan Tapscott’s earlier presentation, this was less entertaining. But Chris covered his ideas extremely well. I found a version of his presentation on Slideshare and i have embedded it below.

| View | Upload your own

The main idea he was presenting was that the whole internet revolution has given us the abundance (Amazon can
list as many books as there are available) as opposed to the scarcity we have faced (Barnes & Noble has only a limited
shelf space for books). He made the point that we need a whole new mindset to manage in the world of abundance. If you
look at slide #22 (next few slides give more contrasts) in the above presentation – in the scarcity dominated world, we need
to think about ROI whereas in the Abundance dominated world, we can figure out the ROI later because it is very cheap to experiment. I could personally identify with it. When we started our internal blogging, I had no idea about the ROI and when
i looked at the cost of running a blog server (we use the open source Wordpress), it was so tiny that i realized ROI doesn’t matter.
So i went ahead and now it is a raging phenomenon within the company pulling in 3 million page views a month. If you want a
public example, look at how Guy Kawasaki started Truemors with just $12,000. With that type of costs, it is just much easier to experiment and figure out than write a
big business plan and run after VCs for investments.

The Long Tail Book Ever since I came across the concept, i have been following Chris Anderson’s long tail blog and bought the book as soon as it came out more than a year ago. The book definitely lived up to my expectations.
The Long Tail book has a lot more examples and they all serve to reinforce the idea better. The book explains the 3 forces that are driving the long tail

1. Democratize Production – how digital video cameras, blogs, pod casts etc have put the power of production in the hands
of the masses. He calls them “Producers”. 2. Democratize Distribution – How Amazon, Netflix, iTunes are able to create a vast distribution channel for niche content. He calls them “Aggregators”. 3. Connect Supply & Demand – how Google, blogs, recommendation lists etc are helping connect supply and demand. He calls them “Filters”. He devotes a chapter each of the 3
forces and explains them in detail with lots of examples.

In sum, Anderson shows how the culture has shifted from the water cooler talk – “did you watch the <popular sitcom> episode last night” forcing us all to be in sync with each other to a culture driven by individual needs, desires and tastes.

Win a copy of the Long tail book

Now to the contest. Just after Chris Anderson’s presentation i was talking to my colleague and he was debating me on how
the Long Tail doesn’t apply to software development outsourcing companies like the one i work for? I disagreed with that assertion, of course. So here is the contest – the best response to the question – how does the Long Tail affect software development outsourcing companies? wins a copy of the Long Tail book – I have a spare copy to give away.

Notes & References:
1. I wrote an article titled “Egocasting” on ITOTD. For some reason, unbeknownst to me, i failed to mention the Long Tail concept even though i encountered it before writing this article. I have recently amended the article. It will give you a good idea on how the power is shifting in the media world.

2. Rashmi Sinha expresses her contrarian views on the Long tail concept. In my view, she has just explained how the internet accelerates and accentuates power law effects. In fact, i would argue that her Slideshare business is actually a long tail business.

3. Tim Wu of Slate slams the Long Tail with his article titled “The Wrong Tail”

4. The long tail post i did a while ago.

Updated 16th Nov 2007: Shuchi Grover pointed me to this excellent ideacast on the Harvard site [mp3] about Wikinomics. Thanks Shuchi.

Updated 30th Oct 2007 : Rajesh Kumar joins the conversation with a post on Wikinomics.

I am at our annual customer conference and had the privilege of listening to a fantastic lecture by Dan Tapscott, the best selling author of Wikinomics.

I am of the strong belief that virtual communities are going to be the key to progress in the future. As many of know i have been at the forefront of creating virtual communities within my company. Don Tapscott’s lecture was music to my ears.

He gave some superb examples of collaboration and i am listing the ones that caught my attention:

1. The brilliant example of the Gold miner corp which did the unthinkable for a mining company – posted its geo data online and requested the community to find potential gold mines. This is from Ross Dawson’s Living Networks book (which i haven’t read). Ross has written about the Goldminer example on his blog.

2. He talked about how they used the community to create Doritos ad and the winner was aired during the Superbowl – what an honor for a small time amateur ad maker! The winner was this one about the check out girl [must see video clip]. He played the one that won the contest and the one that he liked the best – the mouse trap. [This is a must-see video clip, please follow the link]

He gave several examples like Flickr Vs. Kodak Photo Gallery, Youtube Vs. MTV, Wikipedia Vs. Brittanica etc. The overall point being that Community approach always wins over the “Content is King” approach personified by the losing companies.

He talked about a 7 point framework that lays out the strategy of the Wikinomics approach. You can read more about these 7 points in the Business Week Wikinomics special series:

1.Peer Innovation and Production
2.Ideagora, a Marketplace for Minds
3.Hack This Product, Please!

4.The New Science of Sharing
5.Opening Up to Collaboration
6.The Global Plant Floor
7.The Wiki Workplace

Overall, the lecture has convinced me to add this book to my to-do list. If any of you have read this book already, please chime in, in the comments section.

I recently came across an article in the Times of India newspaper featuring Verghese Kurien, the father of India’s white revolution.

He says in that article:

When noted dairyman and director of dairy research in New Zealand Professor William Riddet visited Anand, he told me that he was happy to know that I had made a significant name in the dairy industry at such a young age. Then he asked me: “But, why are you such a bloody fool? Why are you working on a project that is bound to fail?” I told him that I would make it. He asked me if there was anything on earth that could dissuade me from embarking on a project that was bound to fail and I replied “nothing.”

I started wondering about why converting Buffalo Milk into powder is so important. It turns out that India has amongst the world’s largest populations of Buffalos – we have close to 50% of the total population of buffalos.

By extension, we also produce a lot of buffalo milk whereas most other countries mainly produce cow’s milk. During the lean months, when milk supply is not high, it is common practice to mix in milk reconstituted from milk powder to supplement the supply. Because, we could not convert Buffalo Milk into powder, we faced a serious issue of over supply in peak months and under supply in lean months. If the White Revolution had to take off, we absolutely needed to figure out a way to convert Buffalo Milk into powder.

This is what drove Verghese Kurien and H.M. Dalaya to figure out a way to do the impossible. Here is an article that was written when Dalaya passed away in the Hindu Business Line.

IF there is one technological breakthrough that truly revolutionised India’s organised dairy industry, it is the making of milk powder out of buffalo milk. And the man who made this possible defying prevailing technical wisdom — Mr H.M. Dalaya — passed away in Pune on Sunday, aged 83.

It is not clear why the scientists thought that buffalo milk could not be converted into milk powder. After reading several articles, it appears it is due to the fact that Buffalo Milk has amongst the highest fat content. Perhaps, the high fat content somehow interferes with the spray drying process used for producing milk powder.

If there is some dairy expert out there, please let us know the real reason.

The White Revolution or Operation Flood has been so successful that India was transformed into the world’s largest milk producer in 1997 and has retained its leadership since – one of the few areas in which we are ahead of China.

We have to thank Amul for playing the key role in this epochal accomplishment under the leadership of Dr. Verghese Kurien.

By their pioneering efforts, Kurien and Dalaya proved an old Arabic proverb – “the difficult is done at once; the impossible takes a little longer.”

It is 10 years since the Innovator’s Dilemma was published. Businessweek interviewed Clayton Christensen to commemorate the event.  Christensen predicts during the interview that Apple iPhone will fail.

What do you all think will the iPhone succeed?