Barack and Beck … and You

What do President Obama and the Barack-bashing politicians at the recent CPAC conference have in common?

They gain power by marketing anticipation.

Americans’ love of being titillated is historic. Famous around the world for our “optimism,” we’re actually born hopers: anticipating that the Next Big Thing will live up to its promise, despite mountains of evidence to the contrary.

Hearing Obama’s promise of real change energized his huge campaign rallies and election. Mere months later, the same promises draw crowds to “tea parties.” Crowds of folks hopin’ that some new group of professional hopers will do more than just sell us more hope.

Anticipation drives our daily decisions and feeds our consumer habits. We buy new services or products in anticipation of becoming more rich, serene, popular. Whatever.

Instant gratification is rarely what drives us. It’s the expectation of instant gratification. Curiosity has become a modern leader’s main commodity, because it sparks potential followers’ anticipation.

Anticipation isn’t only big in America. Dutch researchers recently talked to 974 people who had gone on a trip. Those who’d spent the most time planning it enjoyed it the most, and remembered the lead-up to their trip as the best part. The journey itself was almost secondary.

Social or new media and the internet make us more intensely expectant and fickle than ever. We can now live in a non-stop frenzy of discovery and expectation. To an extreme anticipator, achievement is something dreary that sometimes happens at work.

Presidents Bush and Obama and the Tea Party movement represent our consumer passion for anticipation. It drives up ratings for entertainment channels like Fox News, MSNBC, even C-Span. Simple news or information is never enough.

You’re in marketing. Does your marketing and sales material burst with anticipation, or at least make us all very curious?

Clouds and Conversations

On Monday I was at a “slow media” event with four oil industry experts. In other words, a great conversation.

I helped the geologist, geophysicist, project manager and operations manager interview each other about a challenging job. They didn’t talk about what they were doing, as much as why they were doing it well.

It went great. The geologist even offered the operations guy an impromptu solution to his problem.

Why do such highly intelligent and well trained engineers, working at a leading corporation, rarely have these invigorating cross-discipline conversations? Must be the silo effect.

At most larger companies, it’s still normal to over-categorize their employees. Process experts keep projects “atomized,” broken down into parts so each part can be treated as a real object, analyzed and manipulated . . . forever.

But the internet and social media might bring real change to project management. “Clouds,” creative brainstorming and other post-industrial techniques are gaining momentum. Internet users prefer intuitive, collaborative projects in which they can indulge their curiosity.

Workable process will always be important. But truly productive process benefits from a spoonful of mystery. Systematic curiosity will be part of every great business conversation from now on.

Business conversations of the future will help bring social media thinking into your workplace.

Colin Powell Leads With Curiosity

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Recently, General Colin Powell told me and several thousand other folks, “You’re a good leader when people follow out of curiosity.” Famous media mogul Barry Diller agrees: curiosity helps us outpace the competition, and avoid getting lost in the crowd.

This is great news for emerging leaders. The internet’s already taking most of us off into directions that are interesting, exciting, adventurous, new, and even controversial.

So we already enjoy asking ourselves “why not” and “what if?” You just need to become the first individual we think of when such questions arise. Then zap–you’re our fearless leader!

With no shortage of intriguing or thought-provoking material available on the internet, it’s never been this easy to come up with surprises and charm.

So nothing can stop you from becoming a good leader. Just give us a good reason to follow you. Out of curiosity.

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Mother Teresa at the Stove

Volunteering for Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity in Washington DC gave me two chances to meet the 1979 Nobel Peace Prize winner when she came to the US.

Once she was touring the Mission building where homeless and indigent people came to eat and get simple healthcare. The Indian nun in charge of the DC mission–one of the saintliest, hardest-working young people I’ve ever met–pointed out the kitchen’s antique little four-burner stove, recently donated by a local supporter.

The dozen volunteers crowded into the kitchen with Mother Teresa were shocked when she sternly told the young nun to sell the donated appliance, replace it with one that had only two burners, and put the proceeds into the operations fund.

“In Calcutta we serve many times more people than here, and only have two burners,” she snapped in her unique Albanian/Indian accent.

The dismay on the devoted young nun’s face was understandable. She was being ordered to sell a major donation, and make her wonderful Sisters work even harder without their one labor-saving device.

Not all service comes with a smile. Business leaders these days are encouraged to be “hard headed and soft hearted.” Surely no one has ever fit that profile better than Mother Teresa.

That was how she led. She didn’t think leaders were necessary. “Do not wait for leaders; do it alone, person to person,” she said.

Her leadership style was to burn with single-minded purpose. Everything–even the feelings and needs of her dedicated supporters–was secondary to her work. She and her passion were the same. Not a bad approach to success in the social media age, by the way.
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None of us will ever have her sense of single-minded purpose. It would never succeed in today’s workplace, anyway. But the stronger, clearer and more eloquent we are with our unique purpose and vision, the less we’ll need trendy leadership skills, motivational cliches or quotes and social media widgets.

Ownership Isn’t For Real Leaders

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It’s ironic, isn’t it? We use social media super-widgets like Facebook; iPhones; and internet technologies to gain control over our lives. But in the overcrowded networking age they tend to reduce personal ownership of communications. This means less real productivity.

Think: how many of the last 20 non-salesmen you’ve tried to reach actually answered, maybe two or three? And if you’ve left messages, how many people returned your call in a reasonable amount of time–if ever?

Even friends or acquaintances, like strangers, seem too busy to talk. “Don’t call me, I’ll call you, when I want help or to chat about my priorities.”

This isn’t cruel or unfriendly behavior; it’s how we maintain ownership over our lives.

In a perfect world, everyone would be waiting for my call. Conducting business would be as easy as driving down the freeway at 2 a.m. But the communication superhighway is becoming snarled in a perpetual rush hour.

It’s the rare soul who’s willing to personally answer a call, or at least return it promptly.

That rare soul is also a Leader. Why? Because leadership’s no longer about status or position. It’s about offering more value to every task or interaction. And in our “drive-by” era, nothing is more valued than personal attention and authentic engagement.

Extraordinary leaders have always acknowledged others’ value, and relinquished direct ownership of tasks and solutions. Think of Kambei in “The Seven Samurai,” or the great CEOs. Each built teams respectfully, the way a conductor builds a great symphony orchestra. One superior participant and collaboration at a time.

This approach is also at the heart of Servant Leadership.

I feel like a celebrity every time I get through to the super-busy publisher of the local business newspaper. What a class act! And a few other folks are just as ready to answer and help when I call. Guess who I share my work or referrals with?

You carry your phone around to make calls with. Why not pull the autocratic little thing out of your pocket or purse when it rings as well? Your business will thank you for it.

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Uncontrolled Acceleration at Toyota?

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A stream of negative news has seriously tarnished Toyota’s reputation as the world leader in high quality production. Questions about its vaunted business methodologies are sure to follow.

I’m no project manager, and never studied The Toyota Way or its many profitable permutations. But I lived in Japan for 8 years, helped start a small business in Osaka, then worked for NEC and the Japanese Embassy in Washington DC. I also taught Japanese Business Culture to large companies for the state of Oregon.

And my best guess about Toyota’s deteriorating business problems comes from a scholarly article I translated from Japanese for the Smithsonian Institution, almost 20 years ago.

Describing Japan’s centuries-old rice culture, the author noted how an entire village’s survival would depend on neighbors’ concerted, democratic and selfless determination to plant rice at the beginning of rice season, then harvest it at the end.

Almost every worker was interchangeable to avoid lapses or gaps in orchestrated “production” lines. During those intense days, everyone in the village was either working or actively supporting workers. Malingerers were “murahachibu” or outcasts; that’s how important this annual cycle was to the village.

Now fast forward to Toyota not so long ago, when any line worker spotting a quality problem was empowered to halt car production by pulling a handy “cord” hanging nearby.

That dedication to quality helped Toyota become the world’s top auto manufacturer. But fast growth must have diluted their fierce work ethic and pride in quality. Otherwise, how could company executives have kept sweeping serious quality problems under the rug?

Knowing the Japanese as I do, it’s difficult to fathom the grief that company leaders felt, reading news articles about an American family of four dying in a fiery crash when their Lexus accelerator became stuck on a highway. It’s a good thing they no longer carry swords, or they might be tempted to fall on them.

A pale shadow of the Japanese hallmark sense of unity, shared purpose and dedication felt by those rice farmers is in the brainstorming process that drives my original social networking growth system. But the Marketing Mantra actually reflects pre-industrial community dynamics more than any particular cultural perspective.

Post-war Japanese companies managed extraordinary growth by transforming ancient cultural imperatives into corporate core values. Later, many Western experts made a living by translating those values into Western terms and contexts, so they could apply at least superficially to our workplaces.

How ironic it would be if Toyota’s stupendous growth has undermined its future, by forcing the company to abandon still powerful rice-grower values in favor of industrial processes now being challenged by many Western technocrats.