Leadership dilemma

What made Apple so successful and a very good place to work? ”The lack” of bureaucracy within projects, engineer-focused corporate culture, emphasis on passionate and loyal employees, the huge company has maintained the corporate culture from the start-up days, said Bianca Males in ‘8 Management Lessons I Learned Working at Apple.’ Is that all?

John Harvey-Jones claims: “If a company is successful, it is due to the effort of everyone, but if it fails, it is because of the failure of the board. If the board fails, it is the responsibility of the chairman, notwithstanding the collective responsibility of everyone.” This is a better, but still not an all-encompassing answer.

Least of effort in leadership

The Mandarin Chinese word wú wéi could be described: ‘by inaction nothing is left undone.’ It may well be also translated as ‘non-acting makes all action possible.’ Lǎo Zǐ, a philosopher of ancient China and the author of the Dào Dé Jīng, in stanza 38 ‘About Dé of the Dào’ described it as:
High virtue by obliging not acquires moral force.

Low virtue obliges always and thus lacks moral force.

High virtue neither strives nor acts for its own ends.

Low virtue does not strive but acts for its own ends.

Dào is usually translated as way, road, channel, path, doctrine, or line and by Chinese opinion cannot be obtained as virtue cannot be approached. The legendary Chinese sovereign and cultural hero Yellow Emperor (reigned from 2.696–2.598 BE) said that once Dào is lost, virtue arises; once virtue is lost, humaneness arises; once humaneness is lost, righteousness arises; once righteousness is lost, formalism arises. But formalism is the flowery representation of Dào and the beginning of disorder.

Two sides of the same coin

What constitutes to be a superior leader? F. Marcos said: Leadership is the other side of the coin of loneliness, and he who is a leader must always act alone. And acting alone, accept everything alone (brainyquote). So, is it a head or is it a tail?

My lessons from “the other side of a coin” started when, together with my sons, we decided to go to the Mount Kilimanjaro. My decision had nothing to do with Kilimajaro being the biggest free standing mountain in the world or because it is the tallest mountain of the African continent and not even because it bares my name in it. I joined the idea because it was my long lived dream since the times I lived in Africa.

To climb the summit of 5.895 m in eight days via Lemosho route had to be planned well in advance as we were not physically fit for such a challenge. For months prior to the challenge we have been successful at climbing and trekking to each and every hill or mountain available to us in Slovenia. After Kilimanjaro I realize that it was not the trekking of more than 70 km or freezing temperatures that we have underestimated. It was “the other side of a coin.”

High altitude and lack of oxygen proved to be subjected to our naivety in thinking that climbing such a mountain is only a physical challenge. Slow walk, introduced by our guides from the ANDA African Adventure, at the beginning of our tour seemed ridiculous to us, but each succeeding day on the mountain proved that it was the only compulsory physical possibility for success.

Management practices and tools that just “don’t work”

From the management’s perspective managers perform tasks, manage people and do business. Accordingly, there are numerous methodologies and tools helping to manage business and people:

(1) In Japan at Toyota Motor Company, Taichii Ohno and Shigeo Shingo incorporated Ford’s type of production and some other techniques into an approach named the Toyota Production System or Just In Time Production (JIT). The inventory strategy strives to improve a business return on investment by simultaneously reducing in-process inventory and associated costs.
(2) The core idea of a Lean organization is to maximize customer value while minimizing waste. Simply, lean means creating more value for customers with less resource.

(3) Iwao Kobayashi’s 20 keys is a longer list that can be used in manufacturing audits. It reads very much like a “who’s who” of manufacturing innovations and hence makes a very useful checklist.

(4) Six Sigma (6б) is a business management strategy originally developed by Motorola in 1981. It was initially aimed at quantifying the defects that occurred during manufacturing process first and then at reducing those defects to a very small level.

(5) Business Process Reengineering (BPR) is a top-down approach in which organizations become more efficient and modernized. Reengineering is a fundamental rethinking and radical redesign of business processes to achieve dramatic improvements in cost, quality, speed and service.

(6) The Self Directed Work Team (SDWT) is perhaps the most powerful organizational concept that motivates, coordinates, solves problems and also makes better decision than an individual could. But this performance comes at a price: decisions are slow, work teams require extensive training and months to mature.

(7) Total Quality Management (TQM) is a set of management practices throughout the organization geared to continuously improve the business processes in order to ensure that the organization consistently meets or exceeds in satisfying a customer or a supplier.

(8) … others.

Mission and vision

Is the mission in a company a driving force for actions? Does a mission provide overall goal, a path, and is it a guide for decision-making?

And a vision? Is it an aspiration for a company? Does it focus on the potential essentials in the company's mid-term or long-term future, or what company intends to be?

Most of mission and vision statements are generic, therefore awfully deficient. A result of long-drawn meetings where in the end everyone is so tired and approves any nonsense just to bring it to the conclusion. They are full of phrases like ‘market-leader’, ‘best-in-region’,  ‘most successful’, ‘best customer/owner value’, ‘leading in this and that'. Fluffy words that mean nothing. They just repulse a reader and make skip the text!

Leadership catch: Adjustment and listening

Imagine walking through the woods. You carefully move and step slowly on the uneven ground where even the exposed tree roots are all covered by leaves. We adapt to environment. Although trees might seem static and unmovable they are still flexible and adaptive. They adjust to the surrounding environment and therefore become even more stable. They do not consume extra energy to rise straight up. It is natural for them to adapt to the floor declination when they grow.

We all have to adjust to our environment, or in martial arts to opponent, and to the mistakes you make during the fight. You can do this only by being flexible. In everyday life there is an abundance of events and issues that require our adaptation. But are we able to adapt quickly? How do we know what to do? When someone trips and is just about to fall, his brain starts to function at high speed. When we are very young or very drunk, we just let it go and fall down. Kids roll with it or just fall loosely, and because of this reaction, they are not severely injured most of the time. What about the rest of us? Our first reaction is violent; we start to gesticulate wildly with our hands. We start to contradict the obvious that happens all the same. Most of the time, instead of bending our knees, we stop our fall with our arms and quite a lot of times break our wrists. We forget how to fall and do not know how to adjust to this event that has happened to us many times before in our lives. We react in panic.

Steering and leadership

In live situations, and similarly in martial arts, we learn by repetition and mileage, repeating the task again and again. Try to recall how difficult the first attempt to ride a bicycle was. 

More than a decade ago I was introduced to Tai Chi. How difficult it was to understand the concepts that are so far away from our (Western) ones. On top of it my body coordination ability was proving difficult, remembering the sequences was even harder. Grasping the idea took some time, and so on. But, just like the process of learning to drive a car, where at the beginning simultaneously completing the tasks seems so difficult, patience is the key. The improvement is gradual and within time the steps are deeply ingrained in you. With no effort you drive a car, ride a bike or perform Tai Chi with calm and relaxed mind.

The beginner of one of five major styles of Tai Chi, the Yang style, was Yang Lu Chan (end of the 18th century - 1872). In his youth he had learned another Tai Chi style still in use today from the Chen family. At those times, the knowledge of the art was kept in the families not to be revealed to others and carefully transferred only within family. Yang was an outside apprentice, for which he was treated unfairly. But, being persistent he stayed and persevered in his practice. A story tells that one night, he was awakened by the sounds of hen and ha in the distance. He got up and traced the sound to an ancient house. Peeking through the broken wall, he saw his master Chen teaching the techniques of grasp, control, and emitting jīng to his sons in coordination with the sounds hen and ha. This knowledge gave young Yang a new perspective to control and to steer the opponent with great success.

Gong Fu (drinking) tea

The traditional way or the Chinese method of tea making is called gōng fu chá or meaning “making a tea with great skill or great efforts.” It is as much about escaping the pressures of life for a few moments as it is about enjoying every drop of a tea.

 Tea and coffee bear some similarities. The energizing effect of the coffee bean plant is thought to have been discovered in Yemen in Arabia from where the Muslims spread coffee first to Italy, then the rest of Europe, and finally it was spread throughout the world. In English and other European languages, the word coffee derives from the Ottoman Turkish kahve.  As for tea, there are at least six varieties of tea: white, yellow, green, oolong, black and pǔ’ěr. Just to name some: jí pǐn lóng jǐng or Dragon Well, high-grade green tea that was granted the status of luán chá or imperial tea during the Qīng Dynasty and is nowadays frequently given to very important visitors of China; a tiě guān yīn tea – a wǔ yí wū lóng or oxidized oolong tea with a creamy taste; refreshing nutty taste and aroma tea lì zǐ xiāng that translates as “fragrance of chestnut” is a green tea from the Guangdong province; cultivation of pu’er, also known as Yunnan tuó chá, can be traced as far back as the Han Dynasty and has been used in traditional Chinese medicine for generations to build up internal energy and to invigorate the activity of the spleen and stomach. All teas are made from the same species of plant, but processed differently. And there are others which are not to be mistaken by a ‘herbal tea,’ or an infusion that is made from leaves, flowers, fruit, herbs, or other plant material that contains no Camellia sinensis as coffee and tea do.

Internet games and Leadership

Most people argue that games are just for fun and to kill time. How would you consider gaming experience in person’s curriculum vitae asking for a leadership position vacancy? An asset?

Nick Yee surveyed MMORPG players for the first time at the end of the previous millennium. Since then, he has surveyed over 35.000 MMORPG players of the most popular USA MMORPG games. Near 280 respondents wrote about their guild leadership experience. Yee’s findings about leadership can be described in the same terms as in the real world.

First, most novice guild leaders fall into the trap of trying to be everyone’s friend and making sure that everyone in the guild is happy. The most common lesson learned was that it’s simply impossible to please everyone. Second, in any situation where people have different needs and motivations, conflicts will arise. These conflicts tend to be particularly stressful because of the existing friendships and ties within the guild. Inevitably, the guild leader will be asked to become the mediator. Third, many respondents noted that laying down a firm hand was important and that sometimes you have to be tough and say no. Because many guilds start off as small, casual, and friendly guilds, guild leaders often feel conflicted when it comes to disciplining guild members. The next finding was the difficulty in picking the right people for the guild, as well as the difficulty in kicking people out of the guild. In the game and in the real life, the duality of being a leader is well perceived. It is not easy to be a friend and a leader at the same time. The guild leaders highlighted the importance of having ground rules, making people aware of them and being consistent with those rules, which is equal to real-life leadership.

Leadership and stability

Old Chinese philosopher Zhuangzi quoted Confucius: ‘Men do not use running water as a mirror; they only use the still water.’ Only things that are still in themselves can still other things.”

Why the power of stability is so important? The ground on which we stand can hold up tall buildings, high trees, and us as well. Gravity pulls us to the center of our planet. The ground pushes back with precisely the same force, effortlessly in the opposite direction of gravity, and is therefore called the ground reaction force. No wonder grounding is considered so important in martial arts. It resists power and accepts energies. A stability lies within what one knows and how one lives his live each day.

Stability is not equal to rigidity. It is fundamental to all fighting techniques. The ability to control your movements, to develop, and to receive power originates in stability. Losing stability means losing control. Without control you cannot win.  A good fighter knows that during the battle, the sun should be in the eyes of your opponent and not facing yours. Secondly, stability is being able to float safely on each wave of change. Lower a fighter’s position is and the lowest his center of gravity is, the better stability he has. But, while increasing stability lowering a center of gravity lessens mobility. There are always trade-offs but you should balance them into win-win situation.

Leadership and “happy” organization

Have you ever wondered what the ultimate goal of an organization is?

Today’s management will conclusively respond that organization strives to achieve only one ultimate goal: to become a profit oriented “machine”. That is why the key device of modern management is in lowering costs: pushing on suppliers’ side, on employees, on product development and production, to name just some. But is this “ceteris paribus” solution, focusing only on one parameter and all other things being equal or held constant, sustainable in long term? Or it spirally aims down and not up? Cost reduction – instead of cost optimizing in an economic system causes the only possible outcome – less money in circulation. The customers are also reducing and optimizing their costs according to their income.

How often have we heard that people are the biggest asset of a company? They, on the other hand, are costs. If they work, they produce cost, if they attain a training program it is again cost, if they visit a customer ... costs. How differently people are treated from tools that for us represent the investment. But the smallest football club in the league knows that buying a player is not a cost – it is an asset, an investment. And they treat him accordingly. Not so in many modern companies. By, among other things, ignoring this, leads us to risky situations far away from the business objectives. There is a Gallup-poll of a 1.5 million sampling, and the result is: 30% of employees are happy with their managers, 20% are not, and 50% have disengaged themselves in having any feelings at all.