by Charles Plant | Apr 17, 2013 | Leadership Development
In the knowledge economy it all comes down to ambiguity.
In the industrial economy if you were a front line worker or even a manager, it was pretty easy to see if you were doing a good job. Production was production and it was counted and reported on by the minute. No questions how much was done and quality control could tell you your error rates.
Very simple to know whether or not you were doing your job properly or not.
But in the knowledge economy, how do you know?
Take for an example a book editor (I have a friend with this problem). How do you measure quality in editing? What is too little editing or too much? How much should the manager review the work and even how would you do it. Where is the defined output? How do you know how much time you should spend on each book?
Managing a book editor is highly emotionally charged, ambiguous and interrelationships are much more important.
How does the book editor know she has done her job properly at the end of the day?
This is one of the many challenge of leadership in the knowledge economy. If you think ambiguity is hard to work with, try managing it.
by Charles Plant | Apr 16, 2013 | Leadership Development
I keep using terms like the New Economy and the Knowledge Economy and contrasting them to the Industrial Economy and people keep asking me what I’m talking about. I’ve been asked this so many times I decided to sit down and actually figure out what I am talking about. Let me tell you, it isn’t easy. I can’t in fact find a definition that I actually like.
Instead of a definition, I think it is best to look at how money is made.
In agriculture, mining and oil and gas, you have an asset which is land and you turn it into revenue by producing raw materials that you then sell. This is the Resource Economy.
Companies take those resources and raw material and using plant and equipment, turn them into products. This is the Industrial Economy.
Other companies take those finished products and provide distribution, location, selection and service. This is the Service Economy.
Then there are a bunch of us that take knowledge and turn that into a service or a product. We don’t need land, machinery, stores, inventory or anything else that the other economies need. This is the Knowledge Economy. I make the mistake of calling it the New Economy but it isn’t entirely New so I should stop this.
Why is this important? Well, as a relatively new venture, there are all sorts of things that need to be figured out in order to run a knowledge economy business. How to turn knowledge into a product, how to monetize it, how to make a profitable business model, and how to manage and lead are all issues that need to be figured out in the knowledge economy.
While many people are trying to figure out the business side of the Knowledge Economy relatively few are trying to figure out how to lead in this economy and yet it is even more important than how to lead in the other economies.
by Charles Plant | Apr 15, 2013 | Leadership Development
When I was growing up (or at least making an attempt to do so) we had allegiances to institutions or groups. If your family was a liberal, you were probably liberal. If your family was Catholic, you were probably Catholic. You drove Fords and listened to the Beatles or the Rolling Stones. You worked for your whole life at IBM or belonged to a particular union.
Over time we lost our allegiance to institutions or to groups. We started to follow people instead of parties which is why Jack Layton did well. We dropped traditional religions in favour of evangelical pastors. We now switch car brands at the drop of a hat. We listen to Pink and don’t even know the name of her band. Unions have gone the way of the Dodo except in the public sector. And we switch between multiple employers over many years.
This has really been a fundamental change that hasn’t been translated into the area of leadership. Where we used to look to leadership from institutions and they earned our allegiance, we now look to individuals for leadership, in politics, religion, work, entertainment. This is a fundamental part of the new economy.
Meanwhile, these new leaders aren’t doing anything much different than they did 50 years ago. They haven’t realized that individual leadership is so much more important than it was 50 years ago. Our leaders for the most part have failed to learn new ways to lead for a new set of needs.
That’s why people are so disenchanted now at work, with their lives, with their leaders. Our leaders haven’t seen the new needs of followers that flow from a change of alliegance from the insitution to the individual. In the old days, the firm had your back. Who’s got your back now?
by Charles Plant | Apr 12, 2013 | Leaders
Of the three ways that an aspiring politician can show leadership (Policy, Politics, Personality) the most powerful way is through personality. This Liberal leadership campaign shows this in spades.
For the most part, the party has a bunch of candidates who are genuinely likeable people. But only one of them is really loveable and of course, that’s Justin. Whether it’s because we’ve known him since he was a kid, watched him grow up, love his hair, his name or whatever, he has absolute star power.
And this is what people fundamentally want in a leader. They want an emotional connection with their leader. This works in business, sports, entertainment and certainly in politics. People crave that emotional connection.
When the emotional connection isn’t strong then they’ll make a decision between policy and politics but when the emotions are there, the other two don’t matter. Think back to Martin, Dion, and Ignatieff. No emotional connection there. What we have in Trudeau though is two out of three, a potential leader who is good at politics and who has a magnetic personality. He may yet surprise us with real policies but for now, two out of three ain’t bad.
Every now and then we get a leader who has all three, Policies, Politics, and Personality but that is rare. You can think to John Kennedy, Martin Luther King and yes, maybe even Pierre Trudeau. Since these are rare, if you have to find two out of three, Personality and Politics are the two to go for. As a leader, you can always surround yourself with others who can generate policies.
by Charles Plant | Apr 11, 2013 | Leadership Development
Of the three ways a political leader can excel (Policy, Politics, and Personality), the one that is hardest for potential followers to evaluate is that of politics. After all, you can’t go into the back rooms to watch deals happen.
You can, however watch how people raise money. That’s where the Liberals used to be good at politics, raising money from corporations. But when that option diminished with campaign finance reform, the Liberals started to have problems and have under performed the Conservatives for many years.
The Conservatives themselves have done very well with campaign finances under the new rules as they were always better than the Liberals at raising small amounts from all sorts of people. This is the new skill of politics and the Conservatives are superb at it.
But you may ask why money is a good proxy for political skill. (Or maybe you didn’t but I’ll tell you anyway.) Money in today’s market is obtained through good organization. If you’re well organized and can get favours from people who hold events and fundraise for you then you’re probably good at politics.
As for who in the Liberal race is best at politics? Well there is a clear winner, hands down, and that is Justin. He more than doubled the amount raised by all other candidates showing that he did learn politics at his daddy’s knee.
Tomorrow I’m going to look at the last of this troika which is Personality. Can you guess who the winner is in this category?
I was just going to post this and thought that a few people might wonder how this works in other areas, business for instance. It’s the same thing. The people who are best at politics get the biggest budgets. Simple eh?
