Since then, I’ve found myself weaving Sinek’s thinking into my own work and recommending it to others.

I also made a point to get my hands on the book version of Sinek’s thinking: Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action.  While it helps fill in some holes in his argument, I think most will find the TED talk more than sufficient to grasp Sinek’s argument and start adapting it to their particular situations.

As you’ll discover, Sinek believes that the differentiating role of leadership is to define and ultimately embed into an organization’s culture a clear sense of "why" the organization exists.

Sinek’s arguments and examples are sufficient to encourage me to make the why/mission question more explicit in my work and I’m already seeing it bear fruit in several settings. Sinek makes an effort to anchor his ideas in what we’ve been learning about the organization of the human brain. While he makes an interesting case, I think it’s a bit of a stretch and not essential to his argument.

What Sinek does do is give you both a framework and some plausible examples to support important conversations with organizations and leaders who are struggling to find their focus.

Following up on yesterday’s post about John Cassidy’s New Yorker article, “The Real Reason that Capitalism is so Crash-Prone,” we want to highlight an alternative theory put forth by Calvin Trillin. Trillin’s recent NY Times op-ed starts with this intriguing line: “If you really want to know why the financial system nearly collapsed in the fall of 2008, I can tell you in one simple sentence.”

Calvin Trillin’s Food for Thought
Paul Carroll and Chunka Mui
Tue, 20 Oct 2009 15:25:35 GMT

If you’re interested in the deep challenges of thinking strategically you would also do well to start paying attention to the work that Paul and Chunka are doing at The Devil’s Advocate Group. It’s a continuation of the work they did in creating Billion Dollar Lessons, which I reviewed here.

The Mantra of Entrenched Industries

By Tim O’Reilly

CJ Rayhill, our CIO, and the organizer of O’Reilly’s Tools of Change for Publishing conference, passed on a fabulous quote from Robertson Davies that aptly captures the hopes of entrenched industries: “The world is full of people whose notion of a satisfactory future is, in fact, a return to the idealised past.” (The quote is from his 1960 book A Voice from the Attic.)

Fixed Costs “By the Drink”

One of the most interesting business articles I’ve read in a long time. And it’s short….

Here are the core summary grafs from the article.

The repercussions if that happens? Well, look at what’s going on in the media. The Internet created a platform for user-generated content. Now, blogs, videos, music, animation and websites from individuals and small companies constantly challenge traditional media companies. YouTube got bought by Google for $1.7 billion. TV networks are rushing to put content on the Web. Newspapers have lost readers to blogs.

Media are only a fragment of global industry. Imagine that same scenario plowing though one consumer sector after another: food, clothing, cosmetics, sporting goods, musical instruments and so on. It could be a wonderful, vibrant, scary chaos. [Amazon's new direction: Point, click, make a product to sell to the world]

The Long Tail : Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More

Rating: 5 out of 5

Author: Chris Anderson

Year: 2006

Publisher: Hyperion

ISBN: 1401302378

Tags: network-economics strategy

Let My People Go Surfing : The Education of a Reluctant Businessman

Rating: 4 out of 5

Author: Yvon Chouinard

Year: 2005

Publisher: Penguin Press HC, The

ISBN: 1594200726

Tags: strategy

You must read …

The New York Times Magazine, December 4, “Coach Leach Goes Deep, Very Deep.” By Michael Lewis (author of Liar’s Poker, Moneyball, etc.).

You simply don’t beat NEBRASKA 70-10. And a lightly regarded QB doesn’t pass for 643 yards against Kansas State�before being pulled early in the 4th quarter. And you sure as hell don’t do all this in Division 1-A with a coach who topped out as a bench-rider during his junior year in high school in Cody, WY. [tompeters! ]

The article is a feature piece on the unorthodox coaching strategies and success of Mike Leach, head football coach at Texas Tech. It’s a very different riff on the relationship between strategy, leadership, and talent than you usually find. Leach and Texas Tech don’t get first or second crack at the best talent. Not when you you’ve got UT and Texas A&M to compete with for starters. Here’s how one NFL Coach summed it up:

Schwartz had an N.F.L. coach’s perspective on talent, and from his point of view, the players Leach was using to rack up points and yards were no talent at all. None of them had been identified by N.F.L. scouts or even college recruiters as first-rate material. Coming out of high school, most of them had only one or two offers from midrange schools. Sonny Cumbie hadn’t even been offered a scholarship; he was just invited to show up for football practice at Texas Tech. Either the market for quarterbacks was screwy – that is, the schools with the recruiting edge, and N.F.L. scouts, were missing big talent – or (much more likely, in Schwartz’s view) Leach was finding new and better ways to extract value from his players. “They weren’t scoring all these touchdowns because they had the best players,” Schwartz told me recently. “They were doing it because they were smarter. Leach had found a way to make it work.”

“Never mistake a clear view for a short distance.”
Paul Saffo

Last month I had an opportunity to listen to Paul Saffo of the Institute for the Future speak at the CIO Magazine CIO|06 The Year Ahead conference in Phoenix. I was there as part of CIO’s Enterprise Value Award Process Review Board and as a facilitator for several of the breakout sessions. Paul was the MC for the 3-day event and his opening talk offered his rules for forecasting. They’re worth having handy if you find yourself in a position to have to make some bets on what might happen next.

Before sharing his rules, Saffo made the point that he thinks of himself as a forecaster not a futurist. In his categories, a futurist is an advocate for a particular future, while a forecaster is an observer trying to understand and bound the uncertainties generated by events and trying to frame the choices that might influence the outcomes. Saffo used the following image (actually his image was much nicer – this is from my notes, but you get the idea).

Rule 1. Know when not to make a forecast. Saffo made pointed reference here to Apple’s famous Knowledge Navigator concept video in contrast with Doug Engelbart’s Demo Video from 1967. I think what Saffo was driving at was the distinction between setting out a vision that will drive inventors and innovators on the one hand and recognizing that a salient event has occurred that opens up uncertainties that you ought to factor in to your planning.

Rule 2. Overnight successes come out of twenty years of failure. If you’re not paying attention, you’re going to be surprised a lot. This is where Saffo began to offer his take on the role of S-curve k inds of phenomena and how to account for them in your planning processes. Two points that I took away here. One is that there early stages of these curves is when you typically have the most leverage, if you can find a curve that will make it to the knee. Nothing terribly new there. The second, which I hadn’t thought about as much, was the difference in planning errors depending on where you were in the curve. I’m used to thinking only in terms of the tendency to overestimate how fast things will happen in the early stages of development. I’ve been less tuned in to the equally likely tendency to underestimate speed and demand changes past the tipping point. BTW, one of Saffo’s specific observations relative to this rule was that he’s paying more attention to Robotics as potentially the next big thing.

Rule 3. Look back twice as far as forward. Another quick bit of capsule advice about how to think smarter when you are dealing with exponential/logistics curve phenomena. This is a rule of thumb that captures the essential error in our tendency to think in linear terms about power laws. The change you’ve lived through in the last 10 years is a predictor of what you are likely to experience in the next 5. Douglas Adams captured this most memorably in his 1999 essay “How to stop worrying and love the internet.”

Alan Kay has talked about this in the context of why we’ve had more success at dealing with smallpox than with AIDS. If you are dealing with something that is operating on exponential terms, then the rate of growth matters as much or more than the slope at any instant in time. Given our tendency to project on a linear basis our tendency to over or under predict actually depends greatly on when/where you make that projection. With smallpox, the growth rate/infection rate is so fast that by the time you make any projection you are likely to be over predicting. With a slow growing epidemic such as AIDS, early stage linear projections will under predict. The corollary, of course, is that the surprise factor in slow-growing exponential phenomena is much higher.

Rule 4. Hunt for prodromes. Learned a new word. For you non-medical types, a prodrome or prodroma is an early symptom or leading indicator. This is William Gibson’s observation that the “future is already here, it’s just unevenly distributed.”

Rule 5. Be indifferent. Don’t confuse your desire for a particular outcome with its likelihood.

Rule 6. Tell a story or, better, draw a map. Trying to package your insights into a story (or scenario if you need to justify your consulting rates) helps reveal gaps, risks, and opportunities present in the events you are trying to understand. It can also help you get a better grasp on the potential wild cards. Saffo was more keen on the value of trying to find a way to capture your insights into something more graphical/visual. The value there is that those representations can help you highlight important relationships more easily and they raise the possibility of revealing ‘whitespace’ where you might find important opportunities to exploit or risks to minimize.

Rule 7. Prove yourself wrong. The essential wisdom of the scientific method. Understand and resist the natural human tendencies to believe. Be careful not to rely on a single element of strong information. Look for lots of pieces of weak information that collectively reinforce your insights. Your search for strong information should be for that one piece of evidence that proves you wrong. Look for the one thing that will make you look stupid if someone else brings it up after you’ve gone public.

It was a well spent morning listening to Paul, as was the opportunity to interact during the breaks.

Technorati Tags : paul+saffo, forecasting, s-curve, predictions2006

One of the most profoundly important (and disturbing) things about the Internet is that fundamentally no one is in charge. One of the individuals responsible for that design is David Reed, a computer scientist from MIT.

As far back as Jethro and Moses in Exodus, we’ve applied hierarchy to bring complexity under control. Many have characterized Jethro as the world’s first management consultant. One of the reasons that hierarchy works so well in organizational settings is that is addresses the problem of information overload on managers, where middle managers serve to consolidate and route information through the hierarchy.

However, computers are not people and hierarchy is not the only, or necessarily the best, solution to information management problems. Reed, along with J.H.Salzer and D.D. Clark, wrote a seminal paper in the early days of the design of ARPANET and TCP/IP called “End-to-End Arguments in System Design” that laid out the reasons that hierarchical solutions were a bad idea in designing a network of the scale and complexity envisioned for the ARPANET. Those design insights were baked into the basic architecture of TCP/IP and are one of the core reasons that the Internet has grown as widely and rapidly as it has. If you hope to understand how the net and network thinking in general will continue to impact the future of work, this had better be one of your starting points. “End-to-End Arguments” is a pretty technical paper, although it is manageable; you might find “The end of End-to-End?,” also by Reed, a better starting point.

More recently, David has been exploring other notions about how markets and technology interact in ways that don’t necessarily mesh with our default assumptions. In particular he’s done interesting work on why eBay and other internet companies have thrived but handing significant power over to their customers with the notion of Group Forming Networks.

Currently, David is back at MIT at the Media Lab leading a research program on Communications Futures. A good starting
point for this work is the program on Viral Communications (PDF) David is doing with Andy Lippman of the Media Lab.

Like other thinkers, the value of looking at what David is up to is twofold. First, the ideas themselves are powerful. Second, watching how someone smart tackles problems can give you insights into how you might tackle other problems

The third big lesson we can learn from open source and
blogging is that ideas can bubble up from the bottom, instead of
flowing down from the top. Open source and blogging both work
bottom-up: people make what they want, and the the best stuff
prevails.

Does this sound familiar? It’s the principle of a market economy.
Ironically, though open source and blogs are done for free, those
worlds resemble market economies, while most companies, for all
their talk about the value of free markets, are run internally like
commmunist states.

There are two forces that together steer design: ideas about
what to do next, and the enforcement of quality. In the channel
era, both flowed down from the top. For example, newspaper editors
assigned stories to reporters, then edited what they wrote.

Open source and blogging show us things don’t have to work that
way. Ideas and even the enforcement of quality can flow bottom-up.
And in both cases the results are not merely acceptable, but better.
For example, open source software is more reliable precisely because
it’s open source; anyone can find mistakes.[ Paul Graham]

Well worth your time. I suspect that most large
organizations will have an extraordinarily hard time grasping and
acting on the trends Graham highlights. Those that do manage will have
an edge in attracting talent.