Leadership From Below
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Synopsis:
Globetrotter Trond Arne Undheim, Ph.D., has discovered that in the Internet age, you do not have to be a leader to lead. While researching his book Leadership from Below in places such as Silicon Valley, Scandinavia and Asia, he found that the Internet generation completely redefines leadership in the global workplace. Much of the management literature misses this point by still addressing CEOs instead of knowledge workers, he argues.
Leadership From Below is a recession-proof management perspective built on peer-to-peer, community, energy, and psychological balance. It explains how the workplace is being changed by ideas from Asia, Scandinavia, and the socially networked Internet-by those who are aware of the opportunities.
The Internet generation of interculturally minded, socially networked leaders is redefining the workplace. Management is slow to respond. Whether you are changing the rules, or watching the rules change, you need to read this book. How can you ground your leadership in the here and now?Asian philosophy - with concepts like ba, Zen, feng shui, and ki - is becoming increasingly important for tomorrow's leader. Blend that with the Scandinavian mindset of egalitarianism, openness, and gender equity, add sophisticated use of network effects and you begin to understand the true logic of Internet in the workplace. Cultural diversity and technological dependence are global trends that demand constant attention. See how they can be integrated in a pragmatic leadership framework.
Book Excerpt:
Social networks
On today's Internet you can keep in touch, play, and visualise their own perspective on the world through online communities like Facebook and YouTube. You can network with peers in business communities like LinkedIn, Plaxo and Xing. As an employee, you can build corporate community in intranets. I participate in a dozen of these, and I have created a professional best practice community for European stakeholders in e-government (epractice.eu). My experience is mixed. Community is hard to create, hard to sustain, and definitely very easy to destroy. But when they succeed, they can be immensely powerful - although usually not for the purposes they were originally designed for.
Common to all of these, is that they build on the natural inclination of people to respond to social cues. Now, it may be useful to keep superficial contact with lots of connections, cleverly called "friends" on many of these online sites. The more pressing question when you try to use it to get real work done is - will these ties respond to more serious requests? More often than not, the answer is no.
So, the real warning here is not to get too excited. You can rely on people you rely on in the real world. You can get to know them better through networking sites. In fact it may even build relationships - given that there are enough compelling reasons to do so. But the Internet does not create wonders. People do.
There may also be thresholds to look out for. There is a proliferation of community sites and community development these days. But people's attention span is limited. People's patience with being your online helpdesk is limited. How much is too much community?
What the Net can't do
Current trends lead toward a proliferation of technological objects that affect leadership, although not always for the better. Mastering changing conditions demands a command of the underlying logic. Leaders must have realistic expectations and experiment as well. While technologies like the Internet are powerful, they will not transform society overnight. In this chapter we have looked at the mastery of technological objects. The most efficient way to perform knowledge work is to apply the principles of leadership from below.
Get an active relationship with technology; try to understand more about your implicit assumptions about how it contributes to, may interfere with, or could enhance your work:
Identify your total leadership environment. Look at your own immediate surroundings, your office, the infrastructure in and around it, the city you live in, the objects that are of potential use to you or your colleagues. Are there any missing? Should you introduce new objects?
Re-think your own use of technology and other resources, like office supplies. Are you using them as intended? Or, are you using them in your own way? Are you using objects for what they are worth? Overriding user scripts can release innovative potential - so be creative. Figure out whether you have any particular experience or aptitude to "sell" regarding their use.
The way office technologies and objects interact, how well they are handled, what infrastructure is in place, whether they are fit to purpose or merely disturb the flow of communication - all of this affects their efficiency for the knowledge worker.
Interestingly, even the ancient technologies can contribute significantly to innovation. They are not saturated or beyond their best days yet. There was something so fundamental about them that it will take a long time to change. Or their legacy is so entrenched that we refuse to do away with them. We have become dependent upon them. In fact, we are comfortable with them in our culture.
Feeling comfortable with a technology takes time. The telephone, which was invented by Alexander Graham Bell in 1876, did not take off immediately. In fact, 130 years later, some people prefer not to use it for sensitive communication. But it is certainly preferred to the computer for those matters. A European study found many prefer the phone to the Web when interacting with the government on sensitive matters.
In the end, your choice of technology remains influenced by many factors outside of your control. You have to consider whether your employer is supportive of your choices. Even armed with a memory stick and portable applications, using technology that nobody else in the office is using is not necessarily fruitful. It creates distance between you and them; does not allow you to fully be in sync with their needs, worries, and concerns; and could, therefore, turn out to be counterproductive. On the other hand, as long as you select carefully, being at the technological edge could give you the advantage you need to excel. The choice is yours.
Lesson # 12
Choose a few knowledge technologies - such as online communities, email, and a PDA - and ignore the rest. Master them, go beyond their intended scope.
Topics/Categories:
Asian philosophy, business books, Communication, Energy, Information Technology, Internet, ki, knowledge, leadership development, Lifestyle, Management, Scandinavia, speed reading, Technology, trends
Genre:
Business, General Business, Globalization, How-to, Leadership, Sociology, Technology
Type of Work:
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Original Publish Date:
November 7, 2008
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