Tag: managing diversity

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10 Reasons Not to Ignore Malcolm Gladwell’s Mind-Blowing Ideas

I’m a Malcolm Gladwell fan. He has a capacity that educators treasure: the ability to review research on a complex topic and synthesize it into a teachable moment. To add icing on the cake, Gladwell also makes his teaching points usable by putting them in a form others can easily remember. Whether you buy everything Gladwell proposes or not, he gets you thinking.

BusinessInsider.com has a series on Gladwell’s Top 12 Mind-Blowing Ideas. Take a look.

Why is this important to leaders? Here are my Top 10 reasons why you can’t afford to ignore Gladwell’s work.

  1. 1.  Change and influence are complex social processes, difficult under the best of circumstances. You increase the odds of success when you understand Gladwell’s Law of the Few. One person can change the world, but it’s a lot easier and quicker for the right strategic few. Learn how to start a social epidemic.
  1. 2.  Leading is hard, and you don’t want to go it alone. Who can help give voice to your vision? You need allies, especially credible ones. Connectors, mavens, and salespeople add social weight to your message. Make sure you understand the difference among the three roles and have a few of each in your court.
  1. 3.  A sticky idea is a memorable way to frame a message – and if you can’t remember the message, how will you heed it?
  1. 4.  We are all social beings, influenced by the environment in which we live. The tacit and influential Power of Context is huge. Use it to your advantage, and you’ll enhance your influence skills. 
  1. 5.  Strong diagnostic skills involve capacities to form good judgments quickly and from limited data. That’s Gladwell’s blink phenomenon. We all can improve our powers of rapid cognition. Great leaders have it, and it serves them well.
  1. 6.  Data gathering is at the heart of informed decision making, but there can be too much of a good thing. Gladwell’s prod toward information frugality helps avoid information overload and analysis paralysis. Leadership, after all, is about action.
  1. 7.  Authenticity is a characteristic of effective leaders, but it isn’t shooting from the hip – or the mouth. We all make unconscious snap judgments that can get us in trouble if we act on those tacit thoughts before we really think them through. Better to stretch through priming: broadening our experiences and positive interactions with more and different kinds of people so that our first reactions will be more positive than those with a more narrow set of experiences.
  1. 8. It takes 10,000 hours of practice to perfect a skill or talent, according to Gladwell. Practice does make perfect. 
  1. 9. Genius is more about practice (see above), persistence, and a supportive environment and family than natural skill or IQ alone. There’s hope for us all.
  1. 10.  Talent is important. Experience key. Persistence required. But so is luck. May we all have some.
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Predictions for the World in 2050: Top Ten Opportunities and Challenges – Are You Ready?

A colleague sent me U.S. Census Bureau projections of the world in the year 2050. For those of us building institutions, communities, and businesses, this is important stuff.

Too often, leaders plan for the present based on the past while ignoring the future. What do the demographic shifts mean for your current work? What do they mean for new products, policies, and services for the global marketplace?

Population shifts in a nutshell: India will be the most populous nation, surpassing China around 2025. The U.S. will remain in third place, despite its projected growth of 115 million people.

Declining birth rates for two current economic and political powers, Japan and Russia, will lead to a fall from current spots as the 9th and 10th most populous nations, respectively, to 16th and 17th.

Russia will suffer most: the nation has been undergoing steady depopulation since 1992, not only from declining birth rates but low life expectancy due to alcoholism and poor diet. Russia’s population will drop another 21% by 2050.

Western Europe’s long-declining birth rate is reversing, and Spain and Italy are on track for a population “uptick" thanks to that and to immigration.

Africa’s poised for a boom, with Nigeria and Ethiopia on track for the biggest gains. Nigeria’s population will jump from 166 million to 402 million by 2050. Ethiopia’s is predicted to triple from 91 million to 278 million, placing it on the list of the top 10 most populous countries in the world.

Most of the changes for the U.S. will be internal. More than half of children under age 2 currently are ethnic minorities. That percentage will grow; and the aging of the non-Hispanic white population, immigration, and differing birth rates among races and cultures will lead to big shifts in the country’s ethnic composition.

So what does all this mean for you? You’ll need to figure the specifics for your work. My crystal ball sees things like:

1.  An increasing need for and use of clean, affordable alternative energies 

2.  The need for new ways to make sustainability everyone’s responsibility – we learned from China that managing the impact on the planet of population booms like those predicted for India and Africa will not be easy

3.  Attention to global water policies and usage 

4.  Rising markets in the U.S. and abroad for more diverse and ethno-centric products and services

5.  New national and global policies that anticipate shifts in world power and economic dominance – and deep diplomacy skills and negotiation-based strategies to handle strife, manage diversity, and deal with the realities of increasing competition for the world’s resources and markets

6.  Global attention to health and welfare issues and the need for new ways to understand diet, nutrition, mental health, addiction, the spread or eradication of disease, healthcare, and more

7. Advances in food production, transportation, and storage: Africa’s expected population growth, for example, significantly compounds current food-supply issues in many of its nations

8. Increases in global travel with all its ramifications

9. The internationalization of higher education

10. More internet-based businesses and services to respond to the realities of an increasingly global marketplace. 

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The Arts Can Teach Us to Lead, Part 1: Embracing Diversity Brings Innovation — The Compelling Case of Sissoko and Segal

I am a firm believer that we can learn much about how to lead from engaging with and in the arts. This post begins a series on the topic.

It’s a set of ideas I’ve been thinking and writing about for a long time. Quite simply, the arts “traffic in understanding,” in the words of Pulitzer Prize-winning author Annie Dillard – and understanding one’s internal and external worlds is at the heart of leadership effectiveness. 

The major challenges in leading – understanding and working with those who are different from us, forging shared interests and common goals, motivating, influencing while remaining open to new learning, understanding the roots of competing interests and conflicts, finding lasting solutions to complex problems – echo life’s larger challenges.

The arts lay out these grand dilemmas in accessible form and invite us to reflect on and learn from them. I’ve been reminded of this by some recent events.

The first was a Ford Foundation conference held May 4, 2011 called "Fresh Angle on the Arts: Reimagining Culture in a Time of Transformation" – a day of discussions and performances exploring the role of art and artistic expression in times of social transformation and revolutionary global change.

Different cultures, ethnicities, and social traditions can separate us. But understanding our own history and heritage and then broadening our perspectives on other cultures through education and collaboration can take us to rich, new heights and toward common ground despite our differences.

Listen to excerpts from the CD called “Chamber Music” as performed by Ballaké Sissoko (an African musician playing a traditional lute-harp from Mali called the kora) and Vincent Segal (a French musician playing the classical cello) at the Ford Foundation conference.

Through the music of Sissoko and Segal, you’ll hear and experience quite simply and enjoyably exactly what I’m talking about – and chances are you’ll understand the importance of leading through and with diversity in today’s global world faster and deeper than you might from a lecture, essay, or class on the topic. 

“Chamber Music” has been reviewed as “one of Europe’s most buzzed-about world music recording.” It is also a clear and powerful illustration of fusion without loss, synergy without dominance, differences as the springboard to innovation, shared leadership through true collaboration, and globalization without fear. 

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Shimomura’s Art: Moving Beyond East-West Stereotypes

I’ve recently discovered Roger Shimomura’s art. It’s gorgeous, engaging, and provocative – and can be found in the permanent collections of over 80 museums. (Thanks, Brian!)

It’s also a powerful vehicle for thinking about the East-West stereotypes we hold and about how they interfere with our capacities to connect with those different from us.

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Shimomura’s paintings, prints, and theatre pieces address sociopolitical issues for Asian America, and many have been inspired by diaries kept by his late immigrant grandmother for 56 years of her life. They also reflect the artist’s own experiences, including as a child in a U.S. internment camp for Japanese Americans during World War II.

Oh, the power of art to provide opportunities to discuss the undiscussable!

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It’s human nature to have assumptions and to try and understand others by grouping and evaluating them against the standards and culture that we know. When that process anchors us in bias and fear, we and the world are in trouble.

Take a look at Shimomura’s art. It’ll enable you to appreciate more deeply what that really means.

His pieces speak about the pain in being objectified, misunderstood, excluded, and dehumanized. Equally important, they remind us of all the everyday missed opportunities to connect with others whose differences can make our world richer, brighter, and deeper. 

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Global Leadership: Conquering the Fear of Differences

Days have been filled preparing for our Executive MBA international residency which begins in three days.  We’re going to China. Part of my preparation involves enabling 40 experienced leaders, most with little international experience, to appreciate and respond to cultural differences without paralysis. 

It’s key to their career advancement and professional development. It’s essential for all in a global world. 

As we move closer to the departure date, students have begun acknowledging their fears of anticipating a vastly different world and of the unknown. Some report dreams of not knowing what to do or of being lost in the China-size crowds, others feelings of losing the control over their lives that they have at home.

These are powerful admissions – and they are right on. We all fear the unknown. Human nature loves predictability, and we all want to believe that everyone thinks and sees things just like us. They don’t and that’s OK – and we’ll be OK in a world where that is true. Accept that, and you’ve got the global citizen piece down cold.

How do we take in and use all the knowledge about cultural differences that we can gain through reading and studying without freezing our capacity to act?  The quick answer: with patience, persistence, and humility. It’s like learning and integrating anything new into effective practice.

Preparation helps – the better you know something, the better able you are to call it into play when you need it. So does remembering the Joan Gallos 2 Rules of Thumb for Learning Any New Behavioral Skill:

  1. 1.  go slow. Add anything new and you’ll need to be more deliberate – less automatic – in doing it. It will feel awkward, and you will feel clumsy and ineffective. It may be counter-intuitive – to slow down and to do something that’s awkward and uncomfortable in order to be more effective. But it’s the only way.
  1. 2. be patient with yourself. This is especially hard for successful people: you’ll make mistakes, feel lost, or be scared. It’s OK. Stay open. Figure out what works and doesn’t. Keep trying. And have a sense of humor. You are the only one taking yourself so seriously!

And remember: people are people are people.  When we talk about an increasingly diverse and global world, we tend to focus on differences. Comparing and contrasting how other cultures are different from ours is a good way to recognize and break out of our narrow mindsets about life and the world.  But bottom-line: people share a common humanity. 

Approach any meeting with authenticity and an open heart, and you will connect well with others – even if you struggle with language or customs. Be curious – ask. Relationships are built on connection and conversation.  Make a mistake?  Step on a cultural toe?  Stay alert and respond as you would to any friend.  An honest and humble “Oh, my apologies, please” will go far.

You know more than you may realize about conquering the fear of differences.