As leaders, we quickly learn that much of the success of our organization depends on our abilities to attract, motivate, inspire and retain skilled, committed people.  Several newspaper articles over the last week gave me some special insights into how to do it right.  From Ahmet Ertegan and Tom Friedman I learned that trusting in our people to do the right thing is essential.  Walter Isaacson used lessons from Steve Jobs to point out the critical role of intuition and attention to the needs of customers.  Ross Douthat reminds us that leaders have much to be humble about.

See what you think:

From the Wall Street Journal review of Robert Greenfield’s new book, The Last Sultan, on Ahmet Ertegun, the famous record company executive:

Ertegun founded Atlantic Records in 1947 with his friend and fellow jazz and blues lover Herb Abramson, though the major shareholder was the Ertegun family dentist, Vahdi Sabit. On the original three-page contract, the name ‘Horizon Records, Inc.’ is crossed out and replaced by “Atlantic Recording Corporation.” Ertegun explained: “The name Atlantic was probably about our eightieth choice, because every name we came up with . . . had already been taken. . . . It wasn’t a name we were crazy about—it was so generic. There are so many Atlantics, A&P and all that, but finally we said, who cares what we call it?”

Ertegun could play plenty of angles, but his primary occupation was simply being out and about. David Geffen, the record executive and film producer, recalls asking Ertegun how to make money in music only to have the older man stand up and shuffle across the floor. After Mr. Geffen says twice that he doesn’t get it, Ertegun finally says: “If you’re lucky, you bump into a genius and that makes you rich in the music business!”

No mention is made here of the thousands of non-starters that Ertegun must have encountered in his nightly prowls. His focus was on the geniuses, and once he found them he gave them free rein. Rather than try to shape his artists’ work to meet the desires of some perceived audience, as other executives did, Ertegun trusted the instincts of his artists as he trusted his own.

New York Times’ columnist Tom Friedman’s article titled “Help Wanted”:

We are present again at one of those great unravelings — just like after World War I, World War II and the cold war. But this time there was no war. All of these states have been pulled down from within — without warning. Why?

The main driver, I believe, is the merger of globalization and the Information Technology revolution. Both of them achieved a critical mass in the first decade of the 21st century that has resulted in the democratization — all at once — of so many things that neither weak states nor weak companies can stand up against. We’ve seen the democratization of information, where everyone is now a publisher; the democratization of war-fighting, where individuals became superempowered (enough so, in the case of Al Qaeda, to take on a superpower); the democratization of innovation, wherein start-ups using free open-source software and “the cloud” can challenge global companies.

And, finally, we’ve seen what Mark Mykleby, a retired Marine colonel and former adviser to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, calls ‘the democratization of expectations’ — the expectation that all individuals should be able to participate in shaping their own career, citizenship and future, and not be constricted.

 ‘The days of leading countries or companies via a one-way conversation are over,” says Dov Seidman, the C.E.O. of LRN and the author of the book “How.” “The old system of ‘command and control’ — using carrots and sticks — to exert power over people is fast being replaced by ‘connect and collaborate’ — to generate power through people.” Leaders and managers cannot just impose their will, adds Seidman. “Now you have to have a two-way conversation that connects deeply with your citizens or customers or employees.”

A lot of C.E.O.’s will tell you that this shift has taken them by surprise, and they are finding it hard to adjust to the new power relationships with customers and employees.

“As power shifts to individuals,” argues Seidman, “leadership itself must shift with it — from coercive or motivational leadership that uses sticks or carrots to extract performance and allegiance out of people to inspirational leadership that inspires commitment and innovation and hope in people.”

An opinion piece in the New York Times by Walter Isaacson on Steve Jobs:

One of the questions I wrestled with when writing about Steve Jobs was how smart he was. On the surface, this should not have been much of an issue. You’d assume the obvious answer was: he was really, really smart. Maybe even worth three or four reallys. After all, he was the most innovative and successful business leader of our era and embodied the Silicon Valley dream writ large: he created a start-up in his parents’ garage and built it into the world’s most valuable company.

So was Mr. Jobs smart? Not conventionally. Instead, he was a genius. That may seem like a silly word game, but in fact his success dramatizes an interesting distinction between intelligence and genius. His imaginative leaps were instinctive, unexpected, and at times magical. They were sparked by intuition, not analytic rigor. Trained in Zen Buddhism, Mr. Jobs came to value experiential wisdom over empirical analysis. He didn’t study data or crunch numbers but like a pathfinder, he could sniff the winds and sense what lay ahead.

He told me he began to appreciate the power of intuition, in contrast to what he called “Western rational thought,” when he wandered around India after dropping out of college. “The people in the Indian countryside don’t use their intellect like we do,” he said. “They use their intuition instead … Intuition is a very powerful thing, more powerful than intellect, in my opinion. That’s had a big impact on my work.”

Mr. Jobs’s intuition was based not on conventional learning but on experiential wisdom. He also had a lot of imagination and knew how to apply it. As Einstein said, “Imagination is more important than knowledge.”

The ability to merge creativity with technology depends on one’s ability to be emotionally attuned to others. Mr. Jobs could be petulant and unkind in dealing with other people, which caused some to think he lacked basic emotional awareness. In fact, it was the opposite. He could size people up, understand their inner thoughts, cajole them, intimidate them, target their deepest vulnerabilities, and delight them at will. He knew, intuitively, how to create products that pleased, interfaces that were friendly, and marketing messages that were enticing.

Ross Douthat, Op-Ed columnist for the New York Times in a piece titled “Our Reckless Meritocracy”:

“In meritocracies, though, it’s the very intelligence of our leaders that creates the worst disasters. Convinced that their own skills are equal to any task or challenge, meritocrats take risks that lower-wattage elites would never even contemplate, embark on more hubristic projects, and become infatuated with statistical models that hold out the promise of a perfectly rational and frictionless world. (Or as Calvin Trillin put it in these pages, quoting a tweedy WASP waxing nostalgic for the days when Wall Street was dominated by his fellow bluebloods: “Do you think our guys could have invented, say, credit default swaps? Give me a break! They couldn’t have done the math.”)

Inevitably, pride goeth before a fall. Robert McNamara and the Vietnam-era whiz kids thought they had reduced war to an exact science. Alan Greenspan and Robert Rubin thought that they had done the same to global economics. The architects of the Iraq war thought that the American military could liberate the Middle East from the toils of history; the architects of the European Union thought that a common currency could do the same for Europe. And Jon Corzine thought that his investment acumen equipped him to turn a second-tier brokerage firm into the next Goldman Sachs, by leveraging big, betting big and waiting for the payoff.

What you see in today’s Republican primary campaign is a reaction to exactly these kinds of follies — a revolt against the ruling class that our meritocracy has forged, and a search for outsiders with thinner résumés but better instincts.

In place of reckless meritocrats, we don’t need feckless know-nothings. We need intelligent leaders with a sense of their own limits, experienced people whose lives have taught them caution. We still need the best and brightest, but we need them to have somehow learned humility along the way.”

What do you think? What did the above teach you about nonprofit leadership?

One of the most thought provoking books I’ve read over the last few years is The Starfish and the Spider by Rod Beckstrom and Ori Brafman. I was reminded about it as I listened to Bill Drayton’s acceptance speech as he was awarded the Independent Sector’s John W. Gardner Leadership Award for his ground-breaking work with social entrepreneurs at Ashoka. Drayton said organizational change is accelerating at the same pace that Moore’s law is changing computers and predicted that the change to come in organizational structure is “bigger than the industrial revolution and even the digital revolution.” This rate of change means today’s systems and institutions can no longer work. Drayton observed that for hundreds of years the world ran on “hierarchy and repetition.” Now this approach doesn’t work anymore. Relying solely on hierarchy – we’ve come to term them command and control systems – are no longer able to respond quickly or sufficiently enough. Depending on repetition to ensure authority and trust has been replaced by an explosion of information from all directions, thanks to the Internet and new technologies. Drayton believes the only way out of this dilemma is to tear down the walls and make everyone into a change maker. To cause change, we need to create teams – not hierarchies – and make sure that all the pieces are working together. The job of the leader is helping to set the goal and getting everyone to agree on it.

I heard Drayton just as I was completing a helpful book called Leadership Agility by Bill Joiner and Stephen Josephs, recommended to me by our Agile development coach Lyssa Adkins. The authors write about the fact that as the levels of complexity and uncertainty grow we need to be creating “agile” companies – organizations that can nimbly anticipate and respond to rapidly changing conditions.

Agile companies require leadership agility. The authors think most leaders aren’t prepared for this new world. They estimate that only 10 percent are truly ready to lead agile organizations and divide leaders into roughly three groups:

• Experts (roughly 45 percent of all managers) are strongly motivated to develop subject matter expertise and believe expertise is the leader’s legitimate power. They have a tactical orientation and believe success can be achieved by making incremental improvements to existing strategies. For these leaders, organizational initiatives focus primarily on incremental improvements inside unit boundaries with little attention to stakeholders. I would say many nonprofit leaders fit into this group –  subject experts about a cause, but not able to see the big picture.
• Achievers (about 35 percent of today’s managers) are highly motivated to accomplish outcomes valued by the institutions with which they’ve identified themselves. They realize leaders’ power comes not only from authority and expertise but also from motivating others by making it challenging and satisfying to contribute to important outcomes. Achievers can be highly effective in moderately complex environments where the pace of change requires episodic shifts in corporate strategy. By the way, the authors think most of the level five leaders of Jim Collins Good to Great fall into this category.
• The authors estimate about only 10 percent of leaders achieve what they call “Catalyst leadership.” These are leaders that are “animated by a compelling vision that includes high levels of participation, empowerment and teamwork where  collaboration, decisiveness and candid, constructive conversation are norms.” In this world, senior teams become  living laboratories that create this kind of culture within the team and work together to promote and encourage this culture in the organizations they lead. “They are committed to developing a genuinely collaborative team and organizational relationships rooted in a deep sense of shared purpose.”

I asked Drayton about this collaborative team approach. I said it sounded a little bit like a committee, which the nonprofit sector has in excess. Drayton said “committees are poison to change, because they promote a status quo or a lowest common denominator.” Teams are different. They have a shared sense of purpose and share power.

The authors of Leadership Agility believe the level of agility often depends on what type of organization you run and where the manager fits within the leadership team. Some ways to increase organizational agility include:

• Emphasizing cross-functional teamwork.
• Setting up cross-functional teams to make needed organizational improvements.
• Telling stories that highlight the business value of cross-functional teamwork.
• Rewarding those who take constructive risk-taking is also important.

There’s a lot to think about here. In some ways, these observations seem to be stating the obvious. But if this is so simple, why aren’t we doing it? I think all too often it’s because we don’t know how to think this way. We and our organizations are trapped in old models and we often don’t even recognize it. The authors’ advice can best be summed up by two familiar quotes that seem to fit the Agile strategy perfectly:

Mahatma Gandhi:  “You must be the change you want to see in the world.”

Lao Tzu:  “Best leaders are the ones that when they finish people say we did this ourselves.