Fostering Creativity, Collaboration, and Inclusivity

hello and welcome to today's webinar fostering creativity collaboration and inclusivity i'm paul michelman editor-in-chief of mit sloan management review and i'll be your moderator today this event will be recorded and the recording and slides will be available to all attendees approximately three to four business days after the end of the live event our speaker today is ahmet mukherjee ahmed is a professor of leadership and strategy at the hult international business school earlier he was on the faculties of imd babson and insead he is the author of leading in the digital world how to foster creativity collaboration and inclusivity i'm it welcome and over to you thank you paul thank you members of the audience for making the time to listen to me unlike traditional talks on collaboration and inclusivity mine won't tell you that great leaders rely on these amazing ideas and so should you instead i'll argue that creativity collaboration and inclusivity have become existentially important in the digital world these ideas have moved from being nice to have to being essential for the organizations that you lead or aspire to lead so i'll make that case and after that i'll discuss specific changes you need to consider and why in order to thrive okay so this being a webinar here's a question that you can only answer for yourself for now around the world teams are the building blocks of all modern organizations how long has that been true here's another question corporate leaders try to be coaches and guides empower people and listen to the lessons from the front lines how long has that been true hold on to your answers we'll return to them shortly i'll begin the core of my talk by making a bold sweeping assertion traditional attributes of leadership are biased and should be abandoned and here's why we are often told that leadership attributes are timeless these words simply imply that what was valid 50 years ago 150 years ago or a thousand years ago are still true worse they imply that if you can't be like the leaders of odd you simply can't lead if that's really true most of us probably couldn't be leaders we're also told emulate this great man who behaved in this manner acted thus had these characteristics and it's always a man isn't it in america today steve jobs and increasingly elon musk are offered as exemplars i've personally heard top leadership professors reinforce this crazy idea by telling their students that square jaws project leadership and women should reduce the pitch of their voices does this bother you as it bothers me such ideas disrespect the diverse people who drive work globally undermining the ability of many to even imagine themselves as leaders here's another canard our research with tons of data shows that these competencies are key for leadership how old are these data sets does it make sense that while the world is changing as profoundly as it is old competencies are still valid now some of you probably fit these models perfectly even if you do you should ignore them today's businesses are bringing together men and women from around the world you'll inevitably work with people whose leadership potential won't be predicted by these ideas if you believe these ideas you will get blindsided after all while america has almost 300 unicorns asia alone has over 250 by the way this isn't just a western problem in 2017 a renowned japanese leadership scholar asked me to co-author a book on asian leadership i declined last year an indian leadership model wasn't released these efforts are equally flawed they ignore the reality that while asia has over 250 unicorns the rest of the world has over 400. in the digital world we need leadership models that apply across genders and cultures more importantly such efforts inevitably ignore the oversized role of technology now this is where you need to recall uh the answers that you gave to the questions that i asked you for most of the 20th century ruthless authoritarians not empowering inspires led american businesses in the 1970s and 80s fortune magazine regularly published articles entitled america's toughest bosses the last from 1993 spoke of a penchant for psychological oppression an especially sadistic way of making a point bullying cruelty and abusive behavior the 1989 article said we uncovered no violence because several ceos used to throw heavy things at subordinates who displeased them you'd recognize the names of many of these ceos you'd recognize certainly the fortune 500 and the s p 500 companies that they led these ceos were called prince of darkness jack the ripper the pompidou bully dr jekyll and mr hyde a thoroughgoing sob mean-spirited a a ruthless crude arbitrary whip cracker a research report grouped many into categories entitled snake in the grass attila the hun and heel grinder dr daniel goldman is one of today's top experts in leadership go back in time to see how he described good bosses in 1986 typically they know the company's business and perform their assigned tasks help employees grow give credit when it is due dole out criticism where it is needed and create an atmosphere where it is easy to talk would you consider a boss which only did these things but who didn't inspire people who didn't think out of the box good no because the standards of leadership have changed and with that simple realization you know that leadership attributes are not timeless authoritarian leaders were common in the 20th century because work and organizational structures required and enabled such behavior work was narrowly defined if an engineer designed the left rear tail light of a car presumably somebody else designed the right rear tail light assembly workers couldn't even talk to their neighbors to correct problems today you are given the task of breaking down these silos that your predecessors deliberately created but why did they do so they created those uh silos because the technological environment that they worked in needed them a set of technologies that we call scientific management measured people holding them individually to demanding performance standards people were not paid to think they were supposed to do what they were told often not more and definitely not less the bosses were supposed to do all the thinking and the bosses were always right even if they were wrong by the way if you set smart goals today you are still following the logic of scientific management later i'll argue that smart goals actually block creativity and collaboration in the 1980s the japanese introduced teams and empowering leadership my classmates at a brand name business school loft saying that these would never take hold in america's individualistic society but then countless american companies went bankrupt the big four car companies became the big three chrysler survived only because the us government rescued it and that's when america began scrambling to change scholars began researching teams the curve that you see records the number of papers they published about teams after hovering around zero for most of the century the curve skyrockets in 1990 today you get leadership training your own leaders ask you for your inputs and you lead people in team building exercises thank the japanese for pioneering these practices now the japanese didn't use teams in empowering leadership because their society was collectivist they did so because they had adopted instead of a newer set of transformational technologies quality management long before anybody else did they had learned that these technologies couldn't be used without teams and empowering leadership business schools then spread the message worldwide a very simple message if you don't change you'll die and so the attributes of leadership that many consider timeless actually started spreading a mere generation ago by the way customer centricity and agility are both based on the logic of the quality management era so what have i told you transformative technologies change the nature of work when work changes organizational structures must change in my book i added when work and structures change the demands of leadership also change professor ranchin the jacomar who had identified the first two changes based on his study of all transformational technological changes that have occurred since 1780 used to say doctrines of good management that work beautifully in one technological epoch tend to be insufficient in the next he was a professor of technology and so didn't quite delve into leadership issues in any case companies that don't adapt to transformational technology technological changes can't compete and die so another tech transformation this time driven by digital technologies is currently happening a few years back i started researching the changes it was producing i found that i focused on a human activity that simply couldn't be done without digital technologies the creation of genomic drugs the images that you see are of a dna strand how genes were analyzed by hand in the 20th century an old computer that a researcher used very early in the human genome project at the turn of the 21st century and how today because of that project genomic drugs and digital technologies are inseparable i tested the lessons that i learned here in industries other industries to make sure that the ideas were generalizable i then surveyed 700 senior executives from around the world their distribution roughly matched the distribution of the 2000 largest global companies finally i interviewed mid-tier and cxos in the u.s europe and asia and yes my sample included both men and women so digital technologies are actually changing work in five ways they de-skilled the elite enabling many people to do what only a few could they upskill non-experts giving them abilities they formally lacked you've probably experienced the impact of these two pathways sometimes they are linked but they also happen independently the other less appreciated pathways are perhaps a bit more important third digital technologies make work thought driven not muscle powered all prior transformative technologies magnified the power of human muscle these uniquely magnify the power of our brains fourth digital technologies deliver value from unpredictable sources when cars begin began replacing horse buggies predictably smooth roads had to replace cobblestone roads also predictively along highways gas stations petrol pumps had to replace stables in contrast app stores exist because apple and google simply cannot imagine all the possible uses a smartphone can be put to i'll skip the fifth pathway uh radical uh transparency because it doesn't relate to this particular talk in the realm of organizational structures digital technologies distribute work over time and across geographies the circle on the left individual pharma companies used to develop traditional drugs the circle on the right in contrast as i'm sure you have learned during this pandemic many globally distributed companies collaborate to create genomic drugs similarly more than 14 companies from multiple countries on three continents created the boeing 787 providing technologies that boeing simply didn't have finally digital technologies tightly connect the insides of organizations to their outsides in nanoseconds events can race across the world in 2008 this fact more than greedy bankers corrupt politicians or ineffectual regulators turned america's subprime mortgage crisis into a global recession an article on my website extends the logic of this agreed argument to today's pandemic so these profound changes in the nature of work and organizational structures are the ones that are making inclusivity collaboration and creativity existentially important for leadership so let's consider inclusivity when work is distributed some people who um who are key for success don't work under policies and procedures you control or under legal systems you understand they don't even look like you eat like you talk like you have the same life experiences or follow the dictates of your religion when work is done inside people's heads not outside their bodies you simply cannot access ideas concepts and models that they don't willingly share with you yet relatively homogeneous sets of corporate bigwigs still lead these diverse peoples corporate leaders still mostly come from the country in which the headquarters is located or from similar similar countries in 2015 the new york times reported that among s p 500 companies women ceos were outnumbered by ceos named john in 2018 women still accounted for less than five percent of western ceos and sadly the number was probably lower elsewhere when home when a homogeneous leadership group sets standards of behavior those standards reflect their own cultures and lived experiences because these standards are not relevant to their diverse workforces the leaders can slowly but inevitably lose control their people can walk away if they feel disrespected taking with them the ideas in their heads this is already happening for example asian companies in western firms talk to headhunters more often than their western compatriots in the same firms countless articles online promise to teach you five ways to overcome such challenges most are useless two years back a software coder kicked off a crisis which is still afflicting google he wrote women can't code no list of five rules will ever make him an effective leader of teams that include women research offers a powerful lesson if you believe in the benefits of diversity you benefit from it if you don't you won't so truly embrace it inclusivity don't try to change people's behaviors or force them to abandon their identities without really having good reasons for doing so mind your language of leadership what do i mean by that americans for example expect leaders to be decisive they overlook the fact that many people around the world come from cultures where decisiveness is not something to be admired but that doesn't make them any less effective as leaders learn about people you work with particularly if they are different or can't be called around can't or are can't or aren't co-located sorry about that if not in the digital world you will lose the very people that you can't afford to lose the digital world also demands collaboration because work is distributed because we are tightly interconnected because collaboration can produce unforeseen unpredicted value i interviewed a former cxo of a global company who was renowned for creating highly collaborative networks a new counterpart at another company once told him do you know what win-win means to me it means you win the first time and you won the second time overuse and abuse of win-win has made it a meaningless banal buzzword that inhibits collaboration use the term sparingly because real collaboration recognizes that sometimes win-win isn't even the right choice megan rapinoe is a brilliant american professional soccer player who is leading the fight for equal pay for women athletes she's pursuing a win-lose outcome in her battle with the u.s soccer association hers is the right choice win-win wouldn't be when you do use it the term win-win structure behavior and actions that demand and enable collaboration real collaboration requires all parties involved to do more for each other than they were for outsiders here's a simple test to decide whether you have the right mindset to collaborate if you push your partners until they reluctantly say well i guess we can live with that you don't in an era when unpredictable sources often generate value sooner or later you will lose the partners you slight today in this way may hold back tomorrow insights that could benefit you real collaboration also requires a willingness to distribute power the cxo i interviewed added that if you behave like kings of old his words pulling back decision making power when it suits you then you're really not collaborating so check your behavior what do you do now because of cerebral work and unpredictable sources of value the digital age's most important impact on leadership is the skyrocketing importance of creativity very few renowned 20th century ceos had personally created anything that was new you famous 21st century ceos have not created something new ceos in a 2008 ibm survey said their number one requirement of aspiring leaders was creativity moreover the curve of the number of research articles that are being written today about creativity is rising exponentially exactly like the curve that i showed you for teams so if you haven't heard too much about creativity yet pay closer attention i'm not speaking about creativity of an individual genius like michelangelo instead digital technologies require groups and organizations to be creative that makes collaboration essential oscar-winning producer director steven spielberg said when i was a child there was no collaboration it was you with a camera as an adult he learned that filmmaking is all about appreciating the talents of the people you surround yourself with and knowing that you could never have made any of these films by yourself inclusivity is also essential serendipitously finding unpredictable sources of value requires associating with people with different knowledge bases and life experiences and yet our organizations are still structured for the 20th century they single-mindedly produ pursue productivity doing more with less they actively kill creativity which focuses on building things and imagining things that simply don't exist so if you are a senior executive who is worried about this reassess your corporate policies perhaps like many american companies in recent years you've abandoned the performance evaluation systems that you implemented in the 20th century but do you still mandate smart goals do you still hire people only from a handful of schools on your approved list have you considered that your capital budgeting system by design is not going to fund creativity focused projects if you are an aspiring leader trapped in that world recognize that creativity by definition requires breaking rules so start by breaking the ones that block creativity research shows that creative organizations encourage help seeking and help giving behavior most organizations if you go and ask for help you are showing weakness that needs to change and by the way smart goals which were designed to enhance individuals performance performances don't allow help giving and help seeking behavior so undermine smart goals for your team members you may not be able to change the entire organization but you have no excuse for not changing the people who are looking up to you ethically and legally subvert the productivity focused capital budgeting systems my website has a link to an article that i wrote for forbes a few years back that discusses how to take such steps organizations still structure work solely to improve productivity they build pockets of deep expertise long tails in contrast because of several of these pathways by which digital technologies work today's leaders need broad wingspans relatively shallow knowledge about many things now let's be clear i am not arguing against expertise i want expert engineers to design the aircraft that i fly in i want highly skilled doctors to look after my health i am poor political leaders who claim to know more than experts they are always incompetent always i am saying leaders need a very different set of experiences and training without breath you can't connect those very different deep pockets of expertise one topics negative i interviewed called this the ability to navigate the in between spaces that experts avoid another topic executives added then in addition to possessing broad knowledge leaders must be willing to read all the papers and learn quickly only then can they bridge differences and structure inclusive environments experts then trust them even when they are overruled because they know their views were heard and understood not ignored and so leaders with broad wingspans can help experts with disparate ideas collaborate to produce creative outcomes if you are a senior executive you probably already know that cxos research shows have more in common with each other than they do with the people and the functions they lead in other words they have breath not depth so consider what policies and procedures you need to change to build stronger pools of future leaders if you're an aspiring leader volunteer for badly defined under-financed under-resourced projects ask people from other functions how they think about specific problems these efforts will teach you to consider issues from perspectives you might otherwise not even consider finally my survey showed that around the world managers are making key decisions that cross organizational national and cultural boundaries much sooner than their predecessors did their officers don't house everybody doing distributed work moreover de-skilling and upskilling gives them information that their predecessors typically lacked and so compared to even a decade ago the power to move make major decisions is actually moving deeper and deeper into organizations this is especially true for multinational companies now this very reality of course also reduces the time that people have to learn to collaborate well or to deal effectively with unfamiliar problems unfamiliar people of strange systems so if you're a senior executive if you're an hr person if you're a learning and development person ask yourself how do you prepare people for these challenges do you start doing so early enough if you are an aspiring leader i want to share with you an idea of what you could do to prepare yourself a few years ago i call it a team that redesigned hulk's mba program we appointed as faculty people who had lived in multiple countries spoke multiple languages and could connect effortlessly with strangers from other cultures even if they had absolutely no business backgrounds these people skills are essential today how will you acquire them you may wonder whether this is academic mumbo-jumbo no well-known companies are already implementing such ideas johnson johnson spent three years developing culture and gender-neutral leadership standards daimler put into effect a program called leadership 2020 which had the same goal i keynoted the launch of that effort in singapore ceo and and founder mark benioff regularly discusses salesforce's efforts along these lines in america in the 1980s initially a handful of companies experimented with teams and empowering leadership and then suddenly everyone was scrambling to implement them in less than five years the new ideas became the norm tens of thousands of managers and executives who couldn't adapt were fired so much so that national u.s national unemployment statistics actually rose we are on the edge of broad scale change today when it happens it will happen very quickly so let me leave you with one question when these new demands of leadership take hold in your companies will you be someone people will emulate or someone who will be scrambling to catch up that's the only thing that you need to consider thank you for your attention ahmed thank you so much that was a really wonderful presentation i'll give you a second to pull up your camera and then we can dive into the q a and a reminder for our audience you can submit your questions by entering them at any time in the questions module and the questions submitted are manifold already um so on it let's dive in i'm going to kind of bounce all over the place i have some questions that i had queued up in advance but we have a we have a huge surge of audience interest um picking your brain as well um so you wrote this book and did the research for this book prior to the pandemic what has the last year taught you um about leadership what should we learn from it and has remote work in particular proved to be a hurdle an asset in adopting new and better leadership models so um great question of course as usual so um so what has it taught me about leadership uh earlier this year past year i was actually reflecting on this question and what i was struck by is how remarkably similar are the parts by which a virus spreads across the world and how information spreads across the world uh in our interconnected world uh societies and so a lot of the stuff that we actually learn from uh from dealing with uh uh you know the interconnected world uh information uh spreading is really really relevant to what we are doing with the pandemic actually what we are not doing with pandem so for example um in 2008 2010 after struggling with every possible option which could not work finally around the world uh leaders of of government realized you either tackle the entire problem or you're not going to succeed you can't go and say today we're going to rescue uh bear stearns tomorrow we're going to rescue um you know washington national doesn't work you either deal with the entire problem or not at all what are we doing today we are focusing in most places on dealing with the individual problems instead of looking at the overall problems can it be done yes it can be done remote work um you know one of the things that fascinates me is how many companies are poised to make a huge mistake they have been looking at the last so many months and you see articles and stuff like that about this i'm sure you know you know this saying yeah the last few months have taught us we really don't need to be at places together to work okay so what they don't ask is why do we need to be at a place to work what do we do together that we simply cannot do when we are apart and very often what we can't do is creativity very often what is really really hard to do when you're remote is build trust and we are not thinking about the long term issues while we are focusing on the immediate problems that we can solve great let's get through this but then don't say that what worked in the short term is actually going to work in the long term does that make sense it does and i think as we as we look into the as we look into the future every bit as cloudy as it always is um and we think about new hybrid work models right we don't we new language we're using this language we don't know quite what it means but it means some combination of of co-located and remote work that looks a lot different from either the past year or or the decades that preceded it yep if that is if we are moving to a model like that how will we build trust in that environment how are we going to overcome these significantly greater hurdles presumably the collaboration yeah so um well i'll give you a perfect example of that you know when when halt moved from classrooms to online i had my own method of building trust with students who walked into the classroom okay and even i who focuses on this problem forgot that when i went online i would have to come up with completely different ways of building trust okay um and it's easy to forget simple things like that when we are so focused on doing the work in front of us how do you onboard a person well let's make sure the person has a computer let's have this let's have that let's have that but we don't spend time enough time as leaders in actually fostering a person-to-person communication and we make the problem worse over time what do we do well you know we have a team which is based all over the world so we have to be very very efficient with our time guess what what goes away when you are being efficient with the time people don't get to know each other people don't get to talk to each other and understand each other so imagine this every time you look at a computer screen what you're actually doing is you are trusting the person who sent you information right and if you don't have if you don't break bread with the person which you can't when you're remote if you don't build these links then you're only going to make your your job harder it's not going to hurt you with everyday things it's going to hurt you when something really really needs collaboration so i i'll just say one more thing and i'll stop um i constantly tell executives and and and students that you can't lead in the 21st century unless you watch good near future science fiction okay unless you read good near future science fiction so let me make that plug and here's why okay think about all the science fiction movies that you have seen do you ever see movies uh near future movies in which people don't come together for work you don't because and these are the people who are actually aggressively imagining things that are not a part of our our current world and even then they can find reasons why people have to come together so yes we have to work on this hybrid model and in particular focus on how do we build trust at a distance um your description of the challenges to inclusivity namely the diversity of the population with whom you will work partner to business in the digital world could suggest that one of the most cited required qualities of the modern leader empathy may be harder to achieve than we realize actually it sounds almost impossible to realize it so i guess one i want to hear your kind of thoughts on that um and if this kind of traditional notion of empathy that we should be able to get inside how other people they're feeling isn't really feasible if our left do to do the kind of cultural chasm that exists between people what does minimum viable inclusivity require what does it look like yeah so um when i was uh writing the book i actually looked into the research on this question and paul the most amazing research about this actually is being done in medical schools um now medical schools have act found that in today's world when we when so much of our medical training is technology focused medical school students start losing empathy in the third year of their training and they never get it back they simply never get it back and so in the u.s at least medical

schools are now going and focusing on the issue of rebuilding empathy in in the in their students because a doctor without empathy is a doctor who is usually ineffective that too research shows so they're going about doing this and amazingly enough the you know so they do a whole bunch of different exercises but what they're also doing which is fascinating is that they are bringing in technology in ways that people normally don't think about it so think about a pre uh tech you know a 20th century world let's say where we don't have this much of digital technologies and one of the examples i read was for 26 year old woman who is who is studying medicine and she is studying about a problem that a 70 year old man who is has uh who is losing eyesight and has a whole bunch of other problems is experiencing and there is no way she can actually relate to that except that with virtual reality you can suddenly take this person and you can say hey look at the world through the eyes of a 70 year old patient so empathy if anything is more important um again it is something that we need to focus on and amazingly enough it is something that technology can actually help us with if we use technology creatively instead of simply focusing on how many people can we get rid of okay what does your research suggest about the way we um identify future leaders both within the organization and through hiring processes right we we as human beings we get economies mental models of what leadership looks like for a lot of us that's still a very outdated model um if we um if we um follow your line of thinking so what are some thoughts to help organizations kind of break those models and identify leaders who might better you know grow into the capabilities that you describe okay um so that's a great question uh i find that most of the problems that we have in companies actually are because of the performance evaluation systems that we wouldn't put into place okay what do we do we create systems which screen out some people and screen in other people okay so traditionally what do we do if you plan well and you execute brilliantly that's how you get to positions of power and organizations and that's the model that we use for everything now when we when we are screening people and looking for whom do we want that model which focuses on planning and execution what does it not do it doesn't look at creativity it doesn't look at help seeking behavior help giving behavior it doesn't look at something which is incredibly important in in in a world in which an idea can go across the world in a nanosecond how do you sense and respond most of the things that you do as senior leaders is actually simply say i don't have a plan i'm going to figure out what i need to do and i've got to do it just like that there is no planning there is no execution there is only sensing responding and learning for the next time and none of these capabilities traditional uh performance evaluation systems pick up so in the book i tell the story of um uh you know from uh i was in taking a group of senior executives from a 100 year old company in asia to an incubator in their capital city and this was serendipitous we walked in and i had you know 50 60 or very very senior executives this company was chartered by the king and so it was had a very very long heritage and a young man walked up to them and bowed and said do you remember me sir you know and he went to four people and needed that and they all looked at him and said oh oh you where had you gone you know you were my best worker okay so i asked this young man a question that i knew the answer to but i wanted them to the executives to hear it i asked him if you were given everything that you wanted would you want would you go back and work for this company where obviously people love you and he said no absolutely not so i then went to him and i said so tell me why did you leave so he hemmed and odd and then he said well i was managed for productivity i was not led for creativity nobody cared what i could contribute as long as i did my job so i sat there i collected all the ideas and now i'm building a company which will potentially put this big company in trouble that's what we lose out when we stick to these old-fashioned models i mean there are a series of really interesting kind of operational questions um that that i'd like to dive into none of which is going to have an easy answer i'm sure okay how do you balance collaboration and accountability saying everyone as a team is accountable could be like saying no one is accountable and let me just make this a compound question what's in this environment what are the options a leader has when they need to make when hard decisions need to be made i'll put that in the passive and the best pathway isn't clear um okay um i am just jotting down your two questions i'm going to treat them separately okay so the story that i told everybody about how the japanese came to empowering leadership and collaboration the part that i left out of course many people might know is the japanese didn't develop those ideas on their own the the two people who actually developed those ideas were americans um edward's grand deming and joseph geran and japan's two national quality prizes are named after the two of them now about deming and juran spent their lives trying to to teach americans that seeking individual accountability does not work now that doesn't mean that if things go wrong and we know enough examples of america japanese companies where things have gone wrong nothing should happen but the first bias shouldn't be towards pointing a finger at an individual so demings and geran basically thought hey look at the underlying problem why are people making this mistake i think when we start talking about accountability in this fashion what we end up doing is we as leaders take our eye off the ball we ignore the deeper issues that we need to deal with so collaboration doesn't mean that you don't demand effectiveness collaboration means getting people together collectively so that they can be more effective and how could you do that so the classic example that i often use is this and i can since as you would you said it was a tactical question let me give you a tactical answer marketing and sales never agree on anything so let's take a product focus company simplest example okay manufacturing wants to keep supply chain wants to keep inventory low sales uh manufacturing and and sorry so manufacturing i meant manufacturing and sales so supply chain manufacturing wants to keep inventory low uh sales wants to keep it high so that product is always available what do we do we put them into their own boxes and hold them accountable for each of their goals what is the best solution give an inventory related goal to the salesperson give an availability related goal to the supply chain per person and say figure it out what have you done you have diffused accountability but you have created a better sort of accountability where people will have to work together and that's those are the types of steps very simple steps we don't take okay um so does that did i answer the question i'm sure i missed the second one that you asked um no but you you you um you gave a great answer um so one more one kind of one more at least operational um question this is very operational in most ques in most companies performance bonuses are based on the financial benefits that the organization receives right you make your numbers you get your bonus but not on organizational behavior change so what are your thoughts on this how do we measure and reward the um the adoption of new behaviors yeah and um so um i'm sure many of you are the people online have heard about danielle pink and have seen the wonderful video that i that has taught at just about every business school that i've ever visited in that you can find online on motivation uh in which he summarizes a lot of very interesting research and the essence of what he says is this right um we don't pay people who volunteer to work on open source projects they do it because they want mastery they want um autonomy and i'm i'm forgetting the third one okay um they do it because they want to do it okay and the worst thing you can do when you're talking about building skills which are knowledge based is to say you are going to get this carrot only if you do this that is the worst possible way of getting people to learn to acquire new skills and become better at what they do um and this is the problem paul the idea of a carrot and a stick goes all the way back to the first decade of the 20th century it is quintessentially scientific management but it has been so drummed into our organizations that we can't seem to get away from it and we have to we have no choice but to get away from it um ahmet we have just a minute left so first a number of people have asked um for them for us to repeat the name of your book it is leading in the digital world how to foster creativity collaboration and inclusivity and on that note people have also asked whether or not you might suggest some other books um that you think will be will be useful as we broaden our mindset around leadership yeah so i suggest whenever i'm asked that question and i've asked that a lot some crazy books um which are not business books i suggest a book called the essence of decision which looks at how human beings actually make decision i suggest because people constantly say win-win go and read the evolution of cooperation the first book which actually created the concept of win-win they are thin books and they are absolutely wonderful and they will help you change how you look at complex problems i'm a final question i want to do something positive and aligned to your work today okay give me one thing i can do to improve my leadership and my organization as a follow-on to this great talk um if you have smart girls get rid of them they are so incredibly damaging so if all the things that i could use to focus and attention on what can you do tomorrow morning i pick smart goals because of that because they are so incredibly damaging they damage creativity they damage collaboration and they damage inclusivity advice heard amit thank you very much thank you to members of our audience um for your overwhelming set of questions and i apologize we only got to a relatively small percentage this concludes our program thank you for attending thank you again ahmet mukherjee author of leading in the digital world how to foster creativity collaboration and inclusivity i hope you all enjoy the rest of your day

2021-01-24 08:20

Other news