I heard a snippet of Tom Ashbrook's OnPoint interview with top B-School leaders when it first aired in October, but listened to the whole program last week as NPR affiliates were rebroadcasting this year's favorites.

There were a lot of ideas presented - by panelists, callers, and contributors to the program's website alike.

The one that stuck with me is path-bending leadership.

Richard Lyons, Dean of the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley, introduced the concept as a way to frame the challenges todays leaders face. He argues that the many of our current "paths" - healthcare expenditures, natural resource use, income distribution, and so on - are unsustainable and that great leaders will seek to shift the shape of the line itself (path-bend), not just tweak the variables along the X and Y axis.

Path-bending leadership. Intrigued, I Googled.

Which lead me to a fantastic post at The Economist's Ideas Economy blog: The MBA Goes Back to School (September 2010). Based on his address to the Graduate Management Admissions Council last summer, Dean Lyons identifies four competencies (more common to the social sciences) that business schools must cultivate if they are to develop the kind of path-bending leaders the world needs:

• Problem-framing. Not one kind of problem-framing, but many. Design methods, systems-thinking, process-analysis - examining problems using multiple methods helps us see them in new ways and presents a broader range of solutions than any one approach. For leaders facing complex problems, the ability to generate and manage many likely-competing problem-solving processes in an efficient and disciplined way will be critical.
  
  
• Experimenting. Uncertainly makes traditional planning hazardous. But we now have the tools to be able to run experiments that provide real-time data in a myriad of ways across all sectors and types of organizations (even if our traditional protocols have not quite kept up). Managing experimentation so that lessons are learned and shared, and a series of many smaller decisions leads to mission-level impact can change the the way business gets done in fundamental ways.
  
  
• Influencing without authority. Command and control is out. Flatter hierarchies and large, hyper-connected networks of people and resources make the ability to communicate, translate, and make-meaning out of data and information crucial for leading within or across organizations.
  
  
• Managing ambiguity and conflict. As organizational boundaries become more fluid, managing diverse stakeholders with competing interests - listening, understanding perspectives, and resolving conflicts - will be essential for maintaining forward momentum.

(There's also a great bit in the post about how B-Schools might think about their cultures).

These are not new skills or competencies, but they've never mattered more (and they sound surprisngly like the kind of competencies social innovators, non-profit leaders, and other admitted world-changers ascribe to effective leaders). This is the back-to-basics bit.

But crucially, Lyons argues, the point is not to integrate these competencies into the B-School curriculum, but to use them to integrate the curriculum itself, making learning more relevant to more professional fields and linking its value not just to profit, but to impact in the world.

Developing long-cycle, pathbending leaders - that's the new Gestalt.

* Thanks to Scott Meis for the use of the Round the Bend photo.

I loved Groundswell (Josh Bernoff, Charlene Li). While little in the way of specific content was new to me at the time I read it, the book offered an organizing framework: an environmental snapshot, an articulation of changing practices, and specific strategies for embracing (and measuring) them - all of which gave me a coherent way to talk with colleagues and partners (including skeptics) about social technologies (more often called "social media" at the time). More importantly, colleagues and partners to whom I loaned or recommended Groundswell also liked it, and a few were inspired to take action.

A follow-up to Groundswell, Open Leadership is Charlene Li's latest book (to be released today). While similar in structure - there's a very practical kind of "roadmap" quality to it - Open Leadership is ultimately a more important contribution to modern organizational thought leadership and to the efforts of millions of people trying to apply open leadership in their own contexts.

First, it's focused on leadership. While this might seem obvious from the title, there are thousands of books on leadership (Amazon lists over 61,000) that are really about a particular leader (e.g., Jack Welch), a leadership style, or characteristics of a collection of leaders. Far fewer interrogate the nature of leadership itself. This one does - simply, and in the context of broader social, cultural, economic, and environmental changes. Pointing to the rise of a "culture of sharing" that increased connectivity makes possible, uncomfortable territory for many leaders to be sure, Li states, "At a time when customers and employers are redefining how they make and maintain relationships with social technologies, it's high time organizations rethink the foundations of business relationships as well." Open Leadership reflects transformative thinking not just at the level of practice but in how people in organizations and thier customers relate to one another.

Second, the book profiles not just private sector firms, but global charities (The Red Cross) and key government agencies (the US Navy and State Department) responsible for some of the world's most important and dangerous work. This underscores the emphasis on leadership broadly - not just for firms selling products and services, but for all kinds of organizations and institutions.

Third, the "roadmap" chapters (assessments, choices, etc.) offer practical direction not just for CEOs, but for open leadership and social technology advocates at all levels in their organizations. While Li doesn't quite come out and say it, Open Leadership is a manual for leading openly from wherever you are. I would like to have seen more (and more explicit) emphasis on leadership outside of a firm context (community level government, multiple organizations engaged in humanitarian work, etc.), but these cross-organizational and network-based models could make nice case studies in a future book?

So What is Open Leadership?

"Having the confidence and humility to give up the need to be in control while inspiring commitment from people to accomplish goals."

There's an important nuance here - giving up the need to be in control is different than giving up control. The critical point is that social technologies have shifted the landscape so fundamentally that leaders simply cannot exercise the kind of control over information and decision-making they once did. However, they can connect to and collaborate with more customers and partners than ever before, provide a platform for those customers to connect to one another (engaging the collective "we" in problem-solving), and facilitate meaningful relationships along the way.

Li identifies five rules of open leadership:

  1. Respect that your customers and employees have power.
  2. Share constantly to build trust.
  3. Nurture curiosity and humility.
  4. Hold openness accountable.
  5. Forgive failure.

And then the book delves into roadmap territory (10 elements, assessments, models, checklists, etc.), so you'll have to pick it up for yourself to make use of them. Importantly, these chapters (more than half the book) frame choices. How open do you want to be? About what issues? What kind of structure supports the kind of openness you want to achieve?

If you are an aspiring open leader, these alone are worth the price of the book as they will prevent you from having to reinvent a wheel or two. [Note: The chapter on structuring openness provides sage advice, and a myriad of examples, but if you need more, a host of social media guidelines or policies is here on the Altimeter Group wiki].

A Closing Note

While many of the examples cited in the book (Best Buy, the Obama campaign, Cisco, Comcast, Ford, etc.) have been the subject of inquiry many times before, Open Leadership presents them as unfinished stories rather than tales of hero/ines. This does a couple of important things.

First, it strengthens the case for open leadership on the grounds that ever more connected markets, communities, firms, and people both accelerate change, and make it less predictable, a condition for which open communications and information-sharing systems are well-suited.

Second, it portrays leaders as learners for whom adapting to the changing technology environment is mission critical - not just "fun." Whether it means blogging, tweeting, or platform building, these leaders are not only embracing these practices but making them central to their work.

Anyone who has ever stood in front of a room full of skeptics trying to explain what a wiki is must have cheered at Paul Levy's defense of CEOs blogging. [If you haven't been in such a position, imagine yourself trying to convince someone like Justice Antonin Scalia that Twitter matters.]

Finally, and on a personal note, I don't know Jeremiah Owyang, but I've been following him on Twitter for some time now. I also read his blog and catch one of his webinars or videos now and then. I appreciate the wisdom he's shared and sense that I would like him. I was surprised by the story in the chapter on failure (now you've got to buy the book), and felt at once supportive of his effort to "get back on the horse" and less embarrassed by my own open mistakes. We're all learners really. And social technologies, used well, help us share experiences so we all move forward faster.

That's Open Leadership.

Note: This review is cross-posted on StartGrowTransform.