United Way "Agenda for Change" Meeting 9-6-2007

LEADERSHIP: Curiosity, Pattern Recognition, Mastery of Subject-matter, Compelling Shared Future-Picture!

Lessons from a Great Thinker

by Margaret Heffernan

A master at recognizing patterns and avoiding reductive career structures, Alfred Chandler ensured his business success by recognizing that you can’t understand a business by simplifying it -- you have to master its complexity.

Last month, a great man died: Alfred Chandler. Aged 89, his passing didn't cause much of a stir, but it should have. Because like all great thinkers, Chandler set himself a huge question and devoted himself to exploring it. For Chandler, the question of our age was: how do businesses work? What are the relationships between the times, the technologies and the people that make corporations dynamic and self-sustaining?

A former professor of business history at Harvard Business School, Chandler tended to study the titans of the American economy -- General Motors, Dupont, Standard Oil and Sears -- but the lessons he extracted from those studies could be, and were, applied to businesses around the world. One business leader compared The Visible Hand to The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Chandler's book had shown him everything about how organizations succeed or fail.

I met Chandler socially on a number of occasions and was always struck by two things. First was his immense youthfulness. His most recent book came out in 2005, at the age of 87, and he died in the midst of the next. He must have been eighty when we first met and yet he was the liveliest, best informed, most provocative conversationalist I can remember. Installing himself in a comfy seat, hubbub always formed around him; parties went into full swing when Chandler was there. And that was because of his second quality: curiosity. He wanted to know about everything from everyone. The people gathered around him weren't just business people; he befriended writers, musicians, artists, scientists, anyone with a lively mind. He understood that, at a certain level, you can't understand business by simplifying it. You have to master its complexity. It was no accident that he was married to an artist.

Chandler did what great thinkers do -- which, it turns out, is what great business leaders do too. When studies of thousands of top executives at companies around the world were analyzed, only one cognitive ability alone distinguished star performers. It wasn't technical expertise, schooling or IQ. It was pattern recognition, the big picture thinking that allowed leaders to pick out meaningful trends and to think far into the future.

Chandler was an ace pattern recognizer -- starting with his time in the Navy during World War II, when his job was analyzing aerial photographs of Japanese and German territory before and after bombing raids. He did as a young man what he would do for the rest of his life, and what, I would argue, all business leaders must do: survey the terrain, identify significant changes and figure out what they mean.

This is the most important thing that CEOs do and is almost always what spurs entrepreneurs into action. Business success is all about identifying patterns -- in product development, consumer tastes and social trends. To perform pattern recognition at a high level, you need to be curious, and you need to know a very wide range of people who are curious too. You can't know everything yourself, so you have to know a lot of people who know a lot. You have to place yourself in the midst of the hubbub.

Business failures occur when that pattern recognition stops, when business leaders fall for their own publicity or when the business itself becomes too narcissistic -- more concerned with internal politics and processes than with markets and customers. Many of our reductive career structures contribute to these failures. We start as generalists, and then get increasingly specialized until all we know is our area of expertise, and other people in it. We hang out with people just like ourselves who work in our industry, drive cars like ours, live in houses like ours, speak and think like us. The higher we get in the corporation, the more skills we need -- and yet our careers narrow our horizons at each step along the way. This reductivism is just the opposite of what we, and our companies, need.

One trend in leadership development seems to recognize this problem. More and more of the executive leadership conferences at which I speak feature experts and thought leaders from vastly different walks of life. Filmmakers talk about leading teams that must disband the minute work is complete. Religious thinkers discuss the spiritual dimensions of leadership. Scientists explain how to identify, from a sea of problems, those that you are capable of solving today. This is the opposite of old-style reductive thinking. It embraces the complexity of the business world and seeks to develop the talents to master it, not deny it. It stimulates the curiosity and enrichment true business leaders crave.

So what does that mean for individual careers? I think it means that the best employee, like the best leader, must at once be both narrow and deep. There's no substitute for knowing your business inside and out. But context is crucial and your ability to read the world around you is no longer an optional extra. This may feel like work has become harder than ever. It has. It's no longer enough to know just your job, to live it and breathe it eighteen hours a day. Now you need to have a life too.

The Center for Creative Leadership found a correlation between excellence at work and commitment to activities outside of work. This often comes as a surprise to corporate executives who think excellence and reductivism come together. But it comes as no surprise to women who've always had to combine a career with outside commitments. It serves as a significant wake up call to men who are just beginning to see fatherhood as a career asset. But Chandler, I suspect, would not have been surprised at all.

YESTERDAY! 6-11-2007

Videoconferencing in Education

A videoconferencing initiative at Eastview Middle School has students interacting with people from all over the world right from their classrooms.

By Jody Howard-KennedyJan 1, 2005 5:00
AMURL: www.global-leap.com) is a site developed by teacher Mike Griffith, who is devoted to helping other teachers make natural curricular connections with resources throughout the world. Mike Griffith states, "Incorporating an awareness of global issues into the curriculum, and developing innovative classroom resources and strategies, encourages an understanding of world issues and interdependence. We hope to provide a framework from which our students can become active and effective world citizens. By making the curriculum more topical and global, it becomes more relevant to the lives, experiences and interests of pupils, now and in the future. A global dimension can help to demystify the unfamiliar and to enrich the learning process in linguistic, subject specific and cross-curricular ways."

The Youth Summits for Global Harmony project, founded by teachers from the St. Wilfrid’s School in England and teachers from Eastview Middle School is a good example. During the 2003- 2004 school year, 12 schools from 10 countries have participated in collaborative projects. The goal was to guide our students in pondering universal essential questions, and these questions have guided our international work. This work will encourage students to participate in dialogues, debates, presentations and performances as schools from around the world share their knowledge, experiences and ideas with each other. Students become their own experts and each other’s audiences. Examples of these collaborative partnerships include foreign language exchanges with classrooms in Mexico, Costa Rica and Canada, cultural exchange presentations including dance performances with partner schools in New Zealand and Argentina, and dialogues about personal challenges, world perceptions and discrimination with students from Kosovo, Afghanistan and South Africa.

The sheer power of this kind of communication medium was demonstrated when our eighth grade Health Studies students, learning about HIV and preventative awareness, were able to interview HIV-positive students in South Africa. Students were able to hear first-hand about the severity of this global issue as they ‘put a face’ on this epidemic that before was simply a distant abstraction. Students were moved from apathy into empathy as they began to form an emotional connection to the people on the other side of the world. So connected were these students that they took action and conducted a fundraiser for the Growing South Africa Foundation to sponsor a vegetable garden for a school in Johannesburg, South Africa. As educators these are the learning opportunities that we must strive to provide for our students.

Careful planning and research will enable us to teach the child as a whole, and as an intellectual and emotional human being.

As with any new initiative we were faced with many challenges. Teachers needed training, we needed to gain district and community support and develop teaching materials that reflected curriculum. Patience and perseverance became our mantra throughout the last few years as we slowly began to address our needs. We developed turn-key training courses for our teachers. A committee of 13 teachers met frequently to discuss concerns and the development of our initiative, and we invited administrators, parents and board members in order to gain the support of our district. We even created several videos documenting our conferences for training and public relations purposes. The concept of videoconferencing in a classroom was difficult for many to imagine .We needed, therefore, to create a resource to help people visualize how it could be used as a teaching tool that added value to units of study.

Additional Uses of Videoconferencing
Videoconferencing saves time and money. Through the use of this technology, professional development opportunities that might otherwise be unaffordable for a school district became available to teachers and administrators. Ties with colleges and universities to take advantage of their resources such as trainings, certifications and career development opportunities, can enrich existing programs. Interviewing potential candidates, parent support workshops, sharing teachers between schools, and presenting at conferences are all other possibilities to explore.

Equipment
Based on our experience thus far, here are several key factors to consider when buying equipment for your school:
Select equipment you can grow into. There are two ways to make a connection: either IP (Internet) or through ISDN (telephone lines). Buy equipment that is capable of doing both even though your network might not be ready yet or you don’t have ISDN lines. Progress happens fast and you want to be ready.
Select your vendor carefully. When selecting a vendor it is imperative that you investigate their support and help-desk services. Teachers will need support, lots of it. Our vendor, IVCi, has given us impeccable service, advice and on-demand support through their help-desk, and this has been critical to our success. They are also very experienced in this field and share their knowledge readily. They offer products and services for all of the leading manufacturers of videoconferencing units, including Tandberg and Polycom, and will help to supply an affordable unit based on your budgetary requirements.

The Human Connection
Human interaction and communication are basic human needs. Videoconferencing is a powerful communication tool that has the potential to change the way we deliver information to students. As globalization affects more of our society there is an increasing need to be globally aware and tolerant. As tomorrow’s generation, students need to develop an understanding of citizenship on national and international levels and practice exercising their rights and responsibilities as such. Schools are microcosms of the wider world. Videoconferencing is just one of today’s integrative technologies that help educators address these new educational challenges as they offer opportunities that empower students to prepare for their lives as responsible, integral contributors to society.
Email: Jody Howard-Kennedy

Hi folks:

I spoke with Joe Bradley Wednesday, March 19, 2003 about setting up a meeting with the YAPO CLC Youth Advisory Board of Directors to discuss what we might collaborativly design for a Summer Program offering. Joe said he would discuss it with them and get back to me. I have also discussed the various possibilites with Rose Culpepper from the United Way / Pontiac Neighborhood Youth Initiative (PNYI). Please let me know when we can get together.

Best,

Jim

Fellow YAPO Bloggers:

I was contacted by Travis Sims on Wednesday, February 19, 2003. He wanted to know what was happening with the Pontiac SMART Community Project. We also discussed what we could be doing with the PictureTel Videoconferencing System at the YAPO Computer Learning Center and what we might be able to do during the this summer (did I hear Summer Program?). I have invited him to join this blog-site so we can begin to share our ideas, etc.

Let's plan to have some FUN while we are learning.

Best,

Jim

Welcome fellow YAPO Bloggers:

Please "post" a simple message to let us know of your arrival to this blog-site. I think this may be the beginning of something extraordinary!

Blog-on.

Best,

Jim