Ed Batista

Derek Sivers on Leadership Lessons from Dancing Guy

Derek Sivers does a nice job extracting leadership lessons from the Dancing Guy at Sasquatch.  That's right, this guy:

Sivers writes:

A leader needs the guts to stand alone and look ridiculous. But what he's doing is so simple, it's almost instructional. This is key. You must be easy to follow!

Now comes the first follower with a crucial role: he publicly shows everyone how to follow. Notice the leader embraces him as an equal, so it's not about the leader anymore - it's about them, plural. Notice he's calling to his friends to join in. It takes guts to be a first follower! You stand out and brave ridicule, yourself. Being a first follower is an under-appreciated form of leadership. The first follower transforms a lone nut into a leader. If the leader is the flint, the first follower is the spark that makes the fire.

And what proves Sivers' point about the importance of standing alone even further is that Dancing Guy was dancing for quite a long time before he finally sparked a movement: Other videos show him dancing for at least 20 minutes before the video above was shot.

It's noteworthy that the guy Sivers dubs the "First Follower" technically wasn't first.  Those other videos show a dozen people interacting with Dancing Guy before First Follower comes on the scene.  Most of those others seem self-conscious, including one man who's egged on by his friends shooting the video to actually mock Dancing Guy--not that Dancing Guy cared.

What distinguished First Follower wasn't that he was first in line, but that he shared Dancing Guy's passion, his unselfconscious playfulness.  He wasn't first, but he was the first to stick around, and that's what made the difference.  As Sivers concludes:

If you are a version of the shirtless dancing guy, all alone, remember the importance of nurturing your first few followers as equals, making everything clearly about the movement, not you.

Be public. Be easy to follow!

But the biggest lesson here - did you catch it?

Leadership is over-glorified.

Yes it started with the shirtless guy, and he'll get all the credit, but you saw what really happened:

It was the first follower that transformed a lone nut into a leader.

There is no movement without the first follower.

We're told we all need to be leaders, but that would be really ineffective.

The best way to make a movement, if you really care, is to courageously follow and show others how to follow.

When you find a lone nut doing something great, have the guts to be the first person to stand up and join in.

(Sivers echoed aspects of this theme in a talk he gave at SXSW: "The biggest secret of promotion is that it's all about them--it's not about you.")

Chief Culture Officer

For the past few months I've wanted to recommend Grant McCracken's Chief Culture Officer, a terrific book that came out last December, although I had to wait until I began writing again a few weeks ago.  (Full disclosure: I consider Grant a friendly colleague, and his publisher sent me a review copy of the book.)  In a feat of imagination, Grant has willed into being an entirely new profession--the CCO--and is now tackling the daunting task of telling the business world how to fill a void it didn't even know existed.

So just what is a CCO?  I'll let Grant describe it in his own words (I've added headings for clarity):

The Professional CCO

[pp 14-15] In [many] cases, someone can act as a CCO not because he has studied contemporary culture but because he comes from that culture.  He knows it in his bones.

The problem with this approach is the "best by" date stamped on knowledge.  Our community carries on without us.  In the early days, we can update our knowledge without much effort, but eventually our knowledge wears out.  We have lost our "seal" with culture.

The other problem is that we must finally transcend the community from which we come... Eventually every CCO has to know about the whole of culture, and not just the part of it he or she knows from personal experience.

This is, finally, an issue of professionalism, of systemizing our knowledge, of getting organized, of going beyond our own preferences and comfort zone.  Unofficial CCOs may rely on particular knowledge, on "hunches."  They may feel things "in the gut," as if culture were a probiotic enterprise, after all.  But the professional CCO has a breadth and depth of knowledge.  The CCO has to know the whole of the waterfront, not just his or her favorite patch or point of origin...

Standards, knowledge, continual learning, the ability to process massive bodies of data and possibility, the ability to spot the crucial development in a perfect storm of possibilities--this, and not intuition, is the work of the CCO.

The CCO and the Consumer

[p 30] [The role of the CCO is] to dolly back far enough to see the consumer in her life, in her culture.

Actually, CCOs move in two directions.  The go inward toward the consumer more than anyone else in the C-suite.  They come to know what these lives feel like.  But CCOs also move outward to capture the bigger picture.  Dolly up.  Dolly back.

The CCO and "Homeyness"

[p 46] It is topics like homeyness that separate the CCOs who are moved by genuine curiosity about their culture from those who are merely in it for the really stylish eyewear.  There is nothing in homeyness that will make you look hipper to your friends.  There is nothing here you can drop into conversation at a party.  There is no knowledge here that really works as social capital.  No, the CCO wants to know about homeyness because it is part of American culture, and that's his job.

The CCO, Marketing and Smart Culture

[pp 92-93] The world of marketing is changing at light speed.  And this is another reason to hire a CCO.  If the corporation is now going to talk to consumers, instead of shout, or lie, it needs to know how to start and sustain the conversation... It needs to proceed with a new order of intelligence.  As Steven Johnson says in Everything Bad is Good for You, "For decades we've worked under the assumption that mass culture follows a steadily declining path toward lowest-common-denominator standards, presumably because the 'masses' want dumb, simple pleasures and big media companies want to give the masses what they want.  But in fact, the exact opposite is happening: the culture is getting more intellectually demanding, not less."  To live in this culture, to profit in this new marketplace, a CCO is called for.

This may require a complete replacement of the marketing team.  In the meantime, it will require the presence of the CCO, someone who knows the culture well enough to engage with it, to talk about it, to contribute to it.

The CCO and Profitability

[p 107] There are two ways the CCO pursues profit.  The first is in the workaday business of making the C-suite's decisions better informed of the opportunities and the risks that come from culture.  The second is by acting like an internal entrepreneur, an innovation agent inside the corporation.

The CCO and Corporate Respiration

[p 119] Things are more complicated now.  Now the corporation is not just an economic actor, it is also a social and a cultural one... Instead of the interest-seeking automaton, the corporation looks more organic, like something living and breathing.  A key part of its respiration now is the movement of culture in and culture out.  Only a CCO in the C-suite and only a very smart person serving as CCO can manage this respiration.

Paying particular attention to A) Grant's reference to Steven Johnson's Everything Bad is Good for You (another great book) and the idea that our culture is actually getting smarter all the time, and B) the concept of "corporate respiration," the process by which corporations absorb and (in turn) influence the culture at large, I'm reminded of the first three theses of the Cluetrain Manifesto (surely no accident on Grant's part):

1. Markets are conversations.
2. Markets consist of human beings, not demographic sectors.
3. Conversations among human beings sound human. They are conducted in a human voice.

Grant's convincing case that a CCO is now a necessary function ultimately derives much of its power from the fact that the world now looks a lot like the Cluetrain visionaries said it would.  Old-school marketing wasn't a conversation, it was a broadcast, or, at best, a one-way feedback loop informed by the findings of focus groups and (gag) "cool-hunters."  That system never really worked well--e.g. John Wanamaker's "Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half."--and its shortcomings explain why we now need a new profession to augment the position formerly occupied by the CMO.  Marketers know how to broadcast to demographic sectors, but they don't necessarily know how to hold a conversation with other human beings (in their professional capacity, that is--I certainly know plenty of marketers who are a joy to talk with :-)

This highlights one shortcoming of Chief Cultural Officer: any newfangled CCO will face a huge challenge in navigating the complex relationship with their conventional marketing colleagues, and I wish Grant had explored that topic further.  In a section entitled "Playing Well with Others: The Rest of the C-Suite," Grant rightly emphasizes how important it will be for CCOs to never "play the cool card" or be "hipper than thou," and to collaborate with their colleagues by making themselves useful.  But I suspect that while this will be easier said than done, this is actually where CCOs will need to focus a great deal of energy to be most effective.  Even companies that buy into the concept of a CCO will likely continue to maintain a separate marketing function under the direction of a CMO or the equivalent, and the CCO's ability to help the organization make best use of those resources will depend on the strength of the collaborative relationships they build with their marketing peers.

As Grant continues to proselytize on behalf of this fledgling profession, I suspect he'll use lessons learned from the field to fill in this gap.  And this quibble aside, I do highly recommend the book--it's a thoughtful read from a skillful writer and provocative thinker.

(FYI, two other concepts by Grant have had a big influence on me: the Swift Self, and the Elements of Reinvention.)

David Foster Wallace on the Meaning of Life

Tonight I learned that a writer whose work I admired from a distance but hadn't read in a few years died of cancer in 2007.  She wasn't a public figure on a large scale, so none of my family or friends knew of her death or even that I was a fan of her work, and I'd never been in touch with her.  But the illusory sense that a reader has of "knowing" an author gave her passing a personal dimension for me, perhaps in part because it was such a surprise.

And this reminded me of another recent and surprising writer's death, the suicide of David Foster Wallace on September 12, 2008.  I lacked the patience for Wallace's sprawling, endlessly footnoted novels--a flaw in me, not in his work--but I found those same qualities compelling in his stories and nonfiction.  I knew little about him personally, but the persona that emerged from his work, particularly his essays--which covered every topic imaginable, sometimes in a single piece--was wise and humane, all too aware of our culture's flaws but also aware that each day flawed individuals were doing their best to make it better.

Shortly after Wallace's death, the Wall Street Journal published an essay adapted from a commencement address he gave at Kenyon College in 2005.  I encourage you to read it all, but these two paragraphs near the end convey his message clearly:

In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism.  There is no such thing as not worshipping.  Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship.  And an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of God or spiritual-type thing to worship -- be it J.C. or Allah, be it Yahweh or the Wiccan mother-goddess or the Four Noble Truths or some infrangible set of ethical principles -- is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive.  If you worship money and things -- if they are where you tap real meaning in life -- then you will never have enough.  Never feel you have enough.  It's the truth.  Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you.  On one level, we all know this stuff already -- it's been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, bromides, epigrams, parables: the skeleton of every great story.  The trick is keeping the truth up-front in daily consciousness.  Worship power -- you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay.  Worship your intellect, being seen as smart -- you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. And so on.

Look, the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they're evil or sinful; it is that they are unconscious.  They are default-settings.  They're the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that's what you're doing.  And the world will not discourage you from operating on your default-settings, because the world of men and money and power hums along quite nicely on the fuel of fear and contempt and frustration and craving and the worship of self.  Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom.  The freedom to be lords of our own tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation.  This kind of freedom has much to recommend it.  But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talked about in the great outside world of winning and achieving and displaying. The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day.  That is real freedom. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default-setting, the "rat race" -- the constant gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing.

It is hard to take advice on how to live a good life from a man who chose to end his, and I don't simply mean that it's difficult--I mean that it's painful, because these words strike me as so true, so fundamentally right that I can't believe that they lacked the power to save the life of the man who wrote them.

I've read this essay many times, and each time I still feel a unique sense of grief and anger and terror and hope.  The grief is for Wallace, and the anger is for the fate that left such a talented man so tormented.  The terror and hope are for me; I'm terrified that I'll never transcend my own petty gods, the unworthy objects of my worship--and I'm hopeful that I will, that I'll find freedom in attention and awareness and discipline and effort, in caring and sacrifice for others, in consciousness.

Photo © Outline/Corbis.  All rights reserved.

Brand You in the 21st Century

Twelve years ago Tom Peters introduced the concept of Brand You:

We are CEOs of our own companies: Me Inc... [O]ur most important job is to be head marketer for the brand called You...

[A]sk yourself the same question the brand managers at Nike, Coke, Pepsi, or the Body Shop ask themselves: What is it that my product or service does that makes it different? Give yourself the traditional 15-words-or-less contest challenge...

If your answer wouldn't light up the eyes of a prospective client or command a vote of confidence from a satisfied past client, or--worst of all--if it doesn't grab you, then you've got a big problem. It's time to give some serious thought and even more serious effort to imagining and developing yourself as a brand.

Start by identifying the qualities or characteristics that make you distinctive from your competitors--or your colleagues. What have you done lately--this week--to make yourself stand out? What would your colleagues or your customers say is your greatest and clearest strength? Your most noteworthy (as in, worthy of note) personal trait?...

Your next step is to cast aside all the usual descriptors that employees and workers depend on to locate themselves in the company structure. Forget your job title. Ask yourself: What do I do that adds remarkable, measurable, distinguished, distinctive value? Forget your job description. Ask yourself: What do I do that I am most proud of? Most of all, forget about the standard rungs of progression you've climbed in your career up to now. Burn that damnable "ladder" and ask yourself: What have I accomplished that I can unabashedly brag about? If you're going to be a brand, you've got to become relentlessly focused on what you do that adds value, that you're proud of, and most important, that you can shamelessly take credit for.

When you've done that, sit down and ask yourself one more question to define your brand: What do I want to be famous for? That's right -- famous for!

Peters concluded by noting four key skills essential to the success of Brand You:

No matter what you're doing today, there are four things you've got to measure yourself against. First, you've got to be a great teammate and a supportive colleague. Second, you've got to be an exceptional expert at something that has real value. Third, you've got to be a broad-gauged visionary -- a leader, a teacher, a farsighted "imagineer." Fourth, you've got to be a businessperson -- you've got to be obsessed with pragmatic outcomes.

Chris Anderson recently built on Peters' last question--"What do you want to be famous for?"--and added a fifth key skill:

The key talent of the 21st century is self-promotion and creating celebrity...[and] the goal is to create celebrity, or reputation...and convert that into something that pays the rent.

One of the most skilled practitioners of this process is famous-for-being-famous Paris Hilton, cited by Anderson as "the perfect 21st century business model."  He wasn't holding her up as a role model--he was simply noting her success at defining a personal brand through self-promotion and using that reputation to pay the rent, so to speak.

And obviously I'm trading on that reputation here by assuming that Ms. Hilton's presence alongside Messrs. Peters and Anderson above will capture some additional attention.  I'm not suggesting that Hilton's a role model, either, but she's a logical (if regrettable) result of the dynamics that Peters and Anderson describe so well.

So what are you doing to take advantage of those same dynamics?  The technical and social transformations of the recent past have given all of us the ability to independently present our ideas, our talents, our passions to the world at large (or at least to that segment of the world that matters to us.)  We're now our own brand managers in a very tactical, tangible way.

Peters challenged us to identify the essential qualities that define our brand, and exhorted us to adopt four specific skills to enhance that brand.  Anderson is challenging us to use the new media environment at our disposal to build our brand equity.  He's saying that it's not enough to have all these terrific qualities described by Peters if no one knows about them--and it's never been easier to get that message out.

That's not always a good thing, of course--cf. Hilton's success.  And Anderson is quick to admit that the business of converting celebrity into something that pays the rent "can be just as dirty as it sounds."  We can interpret Hilton's prominence as a dismaying indicator of the rise of bad taste and the coarsening of popular culture.  But we should also view her as the product of a system that every one of us can take advantage of in one way or another.

No traditional cultural gatekeepers saw Hilton as an untapped talent waiting to be promoted.  She followed Anderson's formula to the letter--she promoted herself, created a celebrity identity, and converted that reputation into an ability to pay the rent.  Is the world a better place as a result?  No, but I don't blame Hilton for that.  She saw a market need and filled it.

No matter what we think of the "acting," "singing" and public misbehavior that made Hilton famous, she's worthy of attention as a "perfect 21st century business model" and as an example of the power of a personal brand.  I'm not suggesting that we should follow her lead in any specific way, but if she can take advantage of these dynamics to create and maintain a business based solely on that brand, they're clearly accessible to all of us in our own communities and markets, using our own talents and abilities.  Now if you'll excuse me, I have a Carl's Jr. commercial to make.

Photo of Tom Peters uncredited, photo of Chris Anderson by Joi, photo of Paris Hilton by the Los Angeles Sheriff's Department.

Cross-Cultural Communication: Individualism vs. Collectivism

How do cultural differences affect communications across a cultural divide?  Specifically, how does a culture's individual or collective orientation affect communications?

I've written before about the primary dimensions of cultural difference identified by Geert Hofstede.  One of the key dimensions is individualism vs. collectivism, which Hofstede defines as follows:

The degree to which people in a country prefer to act as individuals rather than as members of groups.  On the individualist side we find societies in which the ties between individuals are loose: everyone is expected to look after him/herself and his/her immediate family. On the collectivist side, we find societies in which people from birth onwards are integrated into strong, cohesive in-groups, often extended families (with uncles, aunts and grandparents) which continue protecting them in exchange for unquestioning loyalty. The word 'collectivism' in this sense has no political meaning: it refers to the group, not to the state.

In Yes!: 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to Be Persuasive, Noah Goldstein, Steve Martin and Robert Cialdini talk about the impact of this cultural dimension on communications:

People from collectivistic and individualistic cultures tend to differ in the relative weight they give to two central functions of communication.  In short, one function of communication is informational: When we communicate, we convey information to others.  A second, less obvious function of communication is relational: When we communicate, we help build and maintain relationships with others.  Although both functions are clearly important to people in all cultures, social psychologists Yuri Miyamoto and Norbert Schwarz argued that individualistic cultures place a greater emphasis on the informational function of communication, whereas collectivistic cultures place a greater emphasis on the relational function...

What do these findings say about influencing others within and outside the workplace?  As we discussed in previous chapters, relationships are a key component to the persuasion process--but this is especially true with people from countries with collectivistic orientations... These results suggest that, when dealing with people from collectivistic cultures, it is particularly important to attend to aspects of the relationship that the two of you share...

These findings also suggest that we should be especially vigilant about providing such feedback with people from collectivistic cultures, letting them know that we're attending to the relationship that we share with them as well as to the information they're trying to convey.

A point I'd add is that within any national culture, there are innumerable sub-cultures associated with different regions, industries and even organizations.  And these sub-cultures may differ substantially along the primary dimensions of cultural difference, including individualism vs. collectivism.  So even--and perhaps especially--when communicating with someone from your own country, it's worth taking some time to understand where they fall along this spectrum and tailoring your communication style accordingly.

(In addition to the research by Yuri Miyamoto and Norbert Schwarz in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology referenced above, Goldstein, Martin and Cialdini also cite the work of Ron Scollon and Suzanne Wong Scollon in Intercultural Communication: A Discourse Approach.)

Neuroscience, Coaching, Leadership and Learning

Inspired by the fascinating research being conducted by Matthew Lieberman, Naomi Eisenberger and other neuroscientists, some great neuroscience blogging by Stephanie West Allen, Jeffrey Schwartz and Roger Dooley, the work of Alvaro Fernandez and Co. at SharpBrains, and the prescient questions that Tom Wolfe has been asking for the past decade, I've become obsessed by the implications of neuroscience for the fields of executive coaching, leadership development and experiential learning.

I'm well aware of the limitations of current brain-imaging technology and of the excesses of "neuro-hype" (well-documented in Haaretz by Ofri Ilani and Yotam Feldman--thanks to Roger Dooley for the reference), and I've expressed concerns myself about the rejection of sound humanistic principles by neuroscience boosters--and yet I remain convinced that neuroscience holds tremendous promise for coaches, organizational development consultants and experiential educators.

I find Wolfe's work extremely compelling.  In the articles and talks I link to above (and presumably in the upcoming book on neuroscience to which he occasionally alludes), Wolfe asserts that Homo sapiens have in some ways freed ourselves from genetic determinism by means of language and, more precisely, speech.*  For at least the last 11,000 years (dating from the earliest evidence of agriculture), Wolfe claims, speech has allowed us to adapt to and overcome our environment far faster than our genes ever could.  From Wolfe's recent interview with Steve Heilig for the S.F. Chronicle:

Once you have speech, you don't have to wait for natural selection! If you want more strength, you build a stealth bomber; if you don't like bacteria, you invent penicillin; if you want to communicate faster, you invent the Internet. Once speech evolved, all of human life changed.

And perhaps the most important change is that we're no longer merely the expression of our genetic heritage; our speech-sodden brains are far more plastic and malleable than our hard-wired genes would ever allow us to be.  Advances in genetics in recent decades ultimately suggested that humans lacked free will--our fate was written in our genes.  But Wolfe sees things differently--more from his Chronicle interview:

I'm willing to say OK, we may have no free will, but speech creates so many variables that it doesn't really matter. No machines will ever truly fully figure the brain out, because the brain's performance is constantly altered or else constrained by this inanimate, rogue artifact you can't control, namely, speech. Laws you obey, scientific findings you assume to be correct, creeds you believe in, existing plans you go by, history as you understand it - these artifacts, once accepted, will affect your thoughts and behavior and use you more than you use them.  Culture is just too big a variable to explain away with genetics...

So what's the connection with my fields of executive coaching, leadership development and experiential education?  If genetic determinism would have us believe that "Leaders are born, not made," then Wolfe's theories on the power of speech and the meaning of culture suggest just the opposite.  We have "natural," genetically-defined tendencies that support or undermine our ability to lead and to be effective interpersonally, but those natural abilities don't define our actions in those spheres.  We can learn, we can adapt and we can improve.  Some leaders may be born with a genetic head start, but all truly effective leaders are made, not born.

And just as Lieberman, et al's research on the impact of talking about feelings provides a scientific explanation for a practice that I've used in my own work countless times, Wolfe's theories and the neuroscience on which they're based suggest that many of the practices we employ in coaching, leadership development and experiential education are effective because they're consistent with--and take advantage of--the way our brains function.  (And at the same time, neuroscience also has the potential to tell us which practices and techniques are ineffective and need to be updated or scrapped.)

As noted above, I'm mindful of the limits of neuroscience, and I'd hate to see the genetic determinism of recent years replaced by a "neuro-determinism" that simply substituted brain scans for gene maps.  But we're clearly at a point where humanistic professionals--executive coaches, OD consultants, experiential educators--need to incorporate neuroscience into their practices.

* Wolfe actually suggests that we rename ourselves Homo loquax--"Talkative man"--a proposal that may have been inspired by Walter Miller's A Canticle for Leibowitz, in which Miller called us Homo loquax nonnumquam sapiens--"Talkative, and sometimes wise, man."

Reading List

Updated June 2009

Below is a list of books that have had a major impact on my professional development and to which I frequently refer in my work as a coach and consultant.  Each item includes a link to the book, usually on Amazon, followed by links to any of my posts that focus on or reference the book.  This list isn't exhaustive, but it's reasonably comprehensive.  (And note that I regularly share interesting links to blog posts, articles, papers and other resources as well.)

I update this list occasionally, adding books as well as links to new blog posts of mine, and at some point I may sub-divide the list into categories, but at the moment I find that an alphabetized list strikes a nice balance between order and chaos:

The Answer to How is Yes: Acting on What Matters, Peter Block

Authentic Happiness, Martin Seligman

Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, Malcolm Gladwell (my post, part 2, part 3)

Changing for Good, James Prohaska et al

The Cluetrain Manifesto, Christopher Locke et al

The Coaching Manager: Developing Top Talent in Business, James Hunt and Joseph Weintraub

Co-Active Coaching, Laura Whitworth et al (a related post)

Cognitive Therapy, Judith Beck

Comfortable with Uncertainty, Pema Chödrön (my post)

The Consolations of Philosophy, Alain de Botton

Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When Stakes Are High, Kerry Patterson et al

Exuberance: The Passion for Life, Kay Redfield Jamison

Fierce Conversations: Achieving Success at Work and in Life One Conversation at a Time, Susan Scott

The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization, Peter Senge

The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook, Peter Senge et al

Flawless Consulting: A Guide to Getting Your Expertise Used, Peter Block

The Flawless Consulting Fieldbook and Companion, Peter Block et al

Getting Things Done, David Allen

Harvard Business Review On Managing Yourself

Harvard Business Review On Women in Business

The How of Happiness, Sonia Lyubomirsky (my post)

Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, Robert Cialdini

The Inner Game of Work, Tim Gallwey (my post)

Management Challenges for the 21st Century, Peter Drucker (my post, another, yet another, still another)

The Masterful Coaching Fieldbook, Robert Hargrove

Meditations, Marcus Aurelius

More Than a Motorcycle: The Leadership Journey at Harley-Davidson, Rich Teerlink and Lee Ozley

The Neurotic Behavior of Organizations, Uri Merry and George Isaac Brown (my post)

The No Asshole Rule, Bob Sutton (my post)

The Organizational Behavior Reader, Joyce Osland et al

The Power of Resilience, Robert Brooks and Sam Goldstein (my post)

Power Up: Transforming Organizations Through Shared Leadership, David Bradford and Allan Cohen (my post)

Reading Book for Human Relations Training, Alfred Cooke et al (my post referencing an article in the book)

Start Where You Are, Pema Chödrön

Status Anxiety, Alain de Botton (my post)

The Substance of Style, Virginia Postrel (my post)

Transitions: Making Sense of Life's Changes, William Bridges (my post)

Transformations: Identity Construction in Contemporary Culture, Grant McCracken (my post)

True North: Discover Your Authentic Leadership, Bill George (my post, an earlier post, and an even earlier post)

What Should I Do with My Life?, Po Bronson (my post)

When Things Fall Apart, Pema Chödrön (my post)

Why Bad Presentations Happen to Good Causes (free download), Andy Goodman (my post)

Why Should Anyone Be Led by You?, Rob Goffee and Gareth Jones (a related post, another related post)

The World According to Peter Drucker, Jack Beatty

Work Matters: Women Talk About Their Jobs and Their Lives, Sara Friedman (my post)

Working with Emotional Intelligence, Daniel Goleman

Yes!: 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to Be Persuasive, Noah Goldstein, Steve Martin and Robert Cialdini (a related post)

Photo by joguldi.  Yay Flickr and Creative Commons.

Geert Hofstede on the Dimensions of Cultural Difference

Some recent reading (James Hunt & Joseph Weintraub's The Coaching Manager and Terry Bacon & Karen Spear's Adaptive Coaching) led to further thinking about the dimensions of cultural difference: What are the ways in which cultures differ?  How do we measure these differences?  And how do these differences affect our interpersonal relationships?

Hunt and Weintraub referenced a paper by Geert Hofstede on "Cultural Constraints in Management Theories," first published in 1993 in the Academy of Management's journal Executive (now known as Perspectives), and cursory research suggests that Hofstede has been the leading thinker on this subject since the 1970s.  (A full copy of Hofstede's paper is available online.)

Hofstede joined IBM in 1965 as a trainer in the international Executive Development Department, and his work over the next 15 years formed the basis for his 1980 book Culture's Consequences: International Differences in Work-Related Values (republished most recently in 2003 as Culture's Consequences: Comparing Values, Behaviors, Institutions and Organizations across Nations.)

Hofstede initially identified four primary dimensions of cultural difference and subsequently added a fifth on the basis of further research conducted by Michael Bond.  Here's a quick overview of these dimensions of difference (definitions excerpted from Geert-Hofstede.com and from Hofstede's 1993 "Cultural Constraints..." paper):

• Power Distance
  The degree of inequality among people which the population of a country considers as normal: from relatively equal (that is, small power distance) to extremely unequal (large power distance).  The extent to which the less powerful members of organizations and institutions (like the family) accept and expect that power is distributed unequally. This represents inequality (more versus less), but defined from below, not from above. It suggests that a society's level of inequality is endorsed by the followers as much as by the leaders.


• Individualism
  The degree to which people in a country prefer to act as individuals rather than as members of groups.  On the individualist side we find societies in which the ties between individuals are loose: everyone is expected to look after him/herself and his/her immediate family. On the collectivist side, we find societies in which people from birth onwards are integrated into strong, cohesive in-groups, often extended families (with uncles, aunts and grandparents) which continue protecting them in exchange for unquestioning loyalty. The word 'collectivism' in this sense has no political meaning: it refers to the group, not to the state.


• Masculinity
  The degree to which tough values like assertiveness, performance, success and competition, which in nearly all societies are associated with the role of men, prevail over tender values like the quality of life, maintaining warm personal relationships, service, care for the weak, and solidarity, which in nearly all societies are more associated with women's roles. Women's roles differ from men's roles in all countries; but in tough societies, the differences are larger than in tender ones.


• Uncertainty Avoidance
  The degree to which people in a country prefer structured over unstructured situations. Structured situations are those in which there are clear rules as to how one should behave. These rules can be written down, but they can also be unwritten and imposed by tradition. In countries that score high on uncertainty avoidance, people tend to show more nervous energy, while in countries that score low, people are more easy-going. A (national) society with strong uncertainty avoidance can be called rigid; one with weak uncertainty avoidance, flexible. In countries where uncertainty avoidance is strong a feeling prevails of "what is different, is dangerous." In weak uncertainty avoidance societies, the feeling would rather be "what is different, is curious."


• Long-Term Orientation
  Values associated with Long Term Orientation are thrift and perseverance; values associated with Short Term Orientation are respect for tradition, fulfilling social obligations, and protecting one's 'face'. Both the positively and the negatively rated values of this dimension are found in the teachings of Confucius, the most influential Chinese philosopher who lived around 500 B.C.; however, the dimension also applies to countries without a Confucian heritage.

Both Hunt & Weintraub and Bacon & Spear discuss a related dimension which appears to be rooted in Hofstede's work:

• High vs. Low Context
  (Hunt & Weintraub) The influence of context involves the degree to which protocol and tradition dictate how communication should proceed.  In high-context cultures, greater emphasis is placed on protocol, and communication tends to move from the general to the specific.  In low-context cultures, communication tends to be more to the point, an approach that can come across to individuals from high-context cultures as rude.
  
  (Bacon & Spear) Some cultures, mostly Western, are low-context cultures that practice explicitness and directness in their communication style.  They depend on the people in the immediate communication situation to convey meaning and create a unique context.  The purpose and outcome of the communication--the transaction--take precedence over the interpersonal relationships involved... High-context cultures, on the other hand, prize subtlety and indirectness... They depend on a shared cultural context to carry meaning.  Instead of getting down to business, high-context cultures tend to rely first on existing relationships outside the business arena so that shared understandings make explicitness unnecessary.  Or they take time to build relationships of the participants are strangers--often maddening amounts of time to a transactionally minded, low-context person.  To a low-context culture, this style of communication can look undisciplined, evasive, untrustworthy, uninformed (dare we say "stupid"?), or just plain lazy and a waste of precious time.  To a high-context culture, the explicitness of low-context communication can look boorish, pushy, patronizing, indelicate, distrustful, unnecessarily detailed ("stupid"?), and insensitive.

In addition, Bacon & Spear discuss two other dimensions of difference:

• Achievement vs. Ascription
  In ascription-oriented societies, factors such as age, gender, social connections and social class, family background, and religious or spiritual position define status... These societies define status based on who the person is.  On the other hand, achievement-oriented societies tend to define status based on what the person has achieved: educational credentials, both in terms of degrees earned and where they came from; stature in the business hierarchy; amount of experience.  In actuality, these two distinctions can be tightly intertwined... Some "ascriptions" are harder to cross than others... Likewise, even the most achievement-oriented culture still looks for certain markers of ascription: the right references, the right schools, the right dress, even the right physique.  There is a tendency to think of ascription-oriented cultures as traditional and achievement-oriented cultures as more modern and progressive, but it is more useful to see how sources of ascribed value change and continue to influence all societies.


• Objective vs. Subjective
  Western culture conceives of itself as having a rational, empirical, objective relationship with the world... For someone bound up in objectivist ways of knowing and interacting, emotions simply cloud the issue and waste time... For a person for whom a subjective emotional response is a gauge of something worth attending to, something worth putting your heart in, detached objectivity signals disengagement or unimportance, coldness, and distance.

I found it helpful to have these definitions clearly articulated; they give me a useful frame of reference when considering the ways in which cultural differences could be at work in a given interaction.  But what really brought these concepts to life for me was Hofstede's research on the United States--again, quotes are from Geert-Hofstede.com:

There are only seven (7) countries in the Geert Hofstede research that have Individualism (IDV) as their highest Dimension: USA (91), Australia (90), United Kingdom (89), Netherlands and Canada (80), and Italy (76). [Note: The world average is 43.]

The high Individualism (IDV) ranking for the United States indicates a society with a more individualistic attitude and relatively loose bonds with others. The populace is more self-reliant and looks out for themselves and their close family members.

I've always held individual autonomy and freedom of choice to be among the most important values; in fact, much of my work revolves around helping others be more fulfilled and effective by realizing their individual identities more fully.  And while I've certainly been aware that these beliefs are culturally conditioned, it's striking to realize that I live in the most individualistic society on the planet.  This knowledge doesn't necessarily alter my values, but it puts  them in a useful context.

The next highest Hofstede Dimension is Masculinity (MAS) with a ranking of 62, compared with a world average of 50. This indicates the country experiences a higher degree of gender differentiation of roles. The male dominates a significant portion of the society and power structure. This situation generates a female population that becomes more assertive and competitive, with women shifting toward the male role model and away from their female role.

Again, although I'm well-aware that my attitudes about gender roles are culturally conditioned, it's interesting and useful to know that U.S. society is substantially more male-dominated than the rest of the world.

The United States was included in the group of countries that had the Long Term Orientation (LTO) Dimension added. The LTO is the lowest Dimension for the US at 29, compared to the world average of 45. This low LTO ranking is indicative of the societies' belief in meeting its obligations and tends to reflect an appreciation for cultural traditions.

I actually find this piece of data confusing.  It's hard to believe that the U.S. is much more appreciative of cultural traditions than the rest of the world, particularly when our Uncertainty Avoidance ranking--see below--is so low, suggesting a high level of comfort with change and ambiguity.  (Perhaps I'm simply misunderstanding the concept of Long-Term Orientation and its implications for tradition.)

The next lowest ranking Dimension for the United States is Power Distance (PDI) at 40, compared to the world average of 55. This is indicative of a greater equality between societal levels, including government, organizations, and even within families. This orientation reinforces a cooperative interaction across power levels and creates a more stable cultural environment.

The last Geert Hofstede Dimension for the US is Uncertainty Avoidance (UAI), with a ranking of 46, compared to the world average of 64. A low ranking in the Uncertainty Avoidance Dimension is indicative of a society that has fewer rules and does not attempt to control all outcomes and results. It also has a greater level of tolerance for a variety of ideas, thoughts, and beliefs.

As with Individuality, Hofstede's research on these final two dimensions resonate deeply with me.  I feel that I share my culture's low Power Distance and Uncertainty Avoidance and as a result have a clearer understanding of just why I feel at home in the United States.  At the same time, having this objective view of my culture allows me to see it from a new perspective--it's suddenly visible to me in a way that it wasn't before, and I have a better understanding of myself as a product of my culture.

This brief exploration of the dimensions of cultural difference doesn't address the third (and possibly most important) question I raised above: How do these differences affect our interpersonal relationships?  But any answer to that question has to start with a better understanding of our own culture and the ways in which it has shaped us as individuals, and by knowing more about U.S. culture and its impact on me, I feel much better prepared to engage in a discussion with someone from another culture about our mutual differences and their collective impact on our ability to understand each other and work together.

UPDATE: Small world [heh]--the day before I wrote the post above, Stephanie West Allen cited Hofstede in a post on cultural differences and neuroscience:

Neurocience research is showing us that the brains of people in different cultures are not the same. Because brains differ from culture to culture, so will resistance to change. Also varying will be how conflict is viewed—and resolved. Here are just a couple of examples of the research on brains and culture.

Recently scientists in Singapore and Illinois compared how the brains of East Asians and of Westerners reacted to visual stimuli. They found that the older East Asian's brains responded differently from the brains of the older Westerners. In an article "Culture sculpts neural response to visual stimuli, new research indicates" principal investigator Dr. Denise Park is quoted as saying:

These are the first studies to show that culture is sculpting the brain.

In another study, researchers looked at how native English speakers and native Chinese speakers did arithmetic. From an Associated Press article about the research:

Simple arithmetic was easily done by both groups, but they used different parts of the brain...

I've expressed some concerns about how neuroscientific findings are applied--I think there's a powerful contemporary desire to reduce the brain to quasi-mechanical terms, and as a result we tend to privilege neuroscience and dismiss the "outdated" humanism of thinkers like Carl Rogers and Abraham Maslow from the 1950s and 60s.  But that said, it's clear that anyone with an interest in understanding human behavior must integrate neuroscience into their perspective and view it as a complementary discipline (which seems to be West Allen's approach.)  Thanks, Stephanie.

Why You Drink

From Le Grand Content, a brilliant and baffling 4-minute animated film by Clemens Kogler and Karo Szmit:

Le Grand Content examines the omnipresent Powerpoint-culture in search for its philosophical potential. Intersections and diagrams are assembled to form a grand 'association-chain-massacre'. which challenges itself to answer all questions of the universe and some more. Of course, it totally fails this assignment, but in its failure it still manages to produce some magical nuance and shades between the great topics death, cable tv, emotions and hamsters.

There's an obvious association with Jessica Hagy's Indexed (she lists Le Grand Content's URL in her blog header), but I'm not sure who's the Chicken and who's the Egg.

Thanks to Paul Hebert for turning me on to Indexed in the first place.

Three Batistas: On Blogging, Marketing and Global Fandom on the Live Web

The ways in which the Net--particularly the "Live Web" of indexed blogs and powerful search engines--continues to shrink the world never ceases to amaze me.  For example, if you Google "batista," the first three people who come up are Dave (the professional wrestler), Fulgencio (the Cuban dictator deposed by Castro), and, uh, me.  (Can you guess who's who above?)

I'm not sure how many students of Cuban history stumble across this site, but I know that some pro wrestling fans do because yesterday morning I received the following email:

Dear Batista Supper Star,

 

My name is [deleted] and My nationality Cambodian people I watching TV on the Supper Star of Smarkdon and Raw clubs soar you to be the Supper Star have the justice and have the very much people support and take care and this firs time I searching see your email and would like to support you. I am very happy to search see your email. My two daugther she like-minded and she is like watched TV supper Star very special to be to see you.

if you contact me please you see bellow my address.

 

Thanks, Best Regards

[deleted]

On a certain level, of course, the confusion is pretty funny--"Supper Star" is my wife's new nickname for me--but I'm not posting the message to mock it.  Never having seen Dave in action, I don't know much about his wrestling persona, but apparently he's a good guy--he "[has] the justice" and "the people support."  And it's somehow touching to think about a man in Cambodia watching pro wrestling with his daughter, both of them rooting for Dave Batista, then tracking down an email address and sending a message to express their admiration as fans.

I know I shouldn't be surprised that American pro wrestling is popular in Cambodia--but I am.  And now I have all sorts of questions about the internationalization of pop culture: How is pro wrestling perceived in places like Cambodia?  As pure entertainment?  Pure sport?  Some combination of the two?  Are the wrestlers' outsized personas seen as characters?  Are kids around the world holding "backyard brawls" like their American counterparts and getting scolded by their parents?

But there's an even more basic question: What have I done to be in the mix with Dave (whose reach obviously spans the globe) and Fulgencio (a third-rate dictator but an historic figure nonetheless)?  The answer is: I blog.  And blog posts are indexed, and search engines just love indexed content, and that's how you get found on the Live Web these days.