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.
