The Nebulous Kingdom

Cloud Atlas & Leadership

2/9/2014

Comments

 
I woke up this morning feeling like I had dreamt all night of Cloud Atlas.  We had stayed up late last night watching the movie.  I'm probably in the bottom tenth percentile in both being a movie buff and awareness of pop culture but I had run across some blog post that mentioned in passing the utter strangeness of this movie and of course I had to see it.

The movie was, without a doubt, deeply strange across the board but the narrative that my mind kept lingering upon was the one around the Korean clone Sonmi-451 who was built to be a disposable server in a diner, and who ultimately (and briefly) steps forward to be a catalyst for a new world and is captured and executed.

Free will and the extent to which we have any is a recurrent theme in the movie.  I know of people that would say that we are driven so much by our DNA and biochemicals and environmental factors out of our control that we are actually animals, whether or not we'd like to admit it.  The story of Sonmi-451, the perfectly cloned entity bounded by DNA and environment, helped me synthesize this - that it's not about how much free will we have, it's that we have any.  In even the tiniest microfraction of the opportunity represented by free will, we have infinite choice and it's that choice that makes us human.  

The willingness to exercise that fundamentally human capability is a defining characteristic of leadership.  I've been thinking a lot about leadership lately, examples of both triumphs and failures, how powerfully it affects the people around for better and for worse, and the relationships among leadership, choice and truth.

Leadership is a word that is thrown around so much that it seems like everyone gets their own definition - executives are often asked as a softball question in interviews, "How do you define leadership?"  To me, that's like saying, "How do you define truth?"  As Sonmi-451 says, "Truth is singular. Its versions are mistruths."  

Leadership to me is  specific - it is the ability to build confidence (and reduce perceived risk) in others so that they can make their own choices in the context of risk and uncertainty.  Leadership is about the choices that an individual makes to enable and empower the choices of others.  At the core of it is truth-based trust-building, based on both competence and values.

Here is what failures of leadership look like:  Lack of a shared vision that would enable decentralized decision-making made in lockstep.  Unwillingness to commit to well-defined priorities resulting in suboptimal resource allocation decisions.  A disjoint between the words of leaders and their actions-choices.  An evident gap between what a leader knows and the reality of the situation on the ground.  A leader that needs to be managed.  Neglect.  Low levels of responsiveness, sometimes pervasive across the organization.  Perceptions of unfairness.  Politics.  Implicit acceptance of behaviors that contradict expressed values.  Situations where it's not comfortable to speak up.  Frequent decisions made on power, out of protocol.  Problems are pushed down in the hierarchy, rather than raised up.  Leaders who offload risk to their teams rather than taking it on or serving as an umbrella.  People going to bed at night feeling bad about their jobs. 

But leadership isn't only something that people with titles do.  If leadership is about choices that enable the choices of others, and we have even the smallest iota of free will, then we can all show leadership.  We can make it so people don't go to bed feeling quite so bad about their lives.  In these small spaces, we are God.

You need more leadership when times are uncertain, when you're doing uncertain work and the ground is shifting beneath.  And look around - anyone that doesn't think we are in uncertain times has had their head stuck in the ground.  The folding in of the technology advances of the past two decades into the investments of large enterprises will be enormously disruptive.  Rising income inequality are rewriting the social contracts, and the education debt we've built up over decades of mismanagement of public primary and secondary school systems is coming up for payment.  The very nature of money - the currency of the untold trades that have created virtually all wealth in the world - is being redefined.  We need leadership more than ever.
Comments
    Picture

    Author

    I'm interested in uncertainty, time, trust, consistency, strategy, economics, empathy, philosophy, education, technology, story-telling, and fractals.
    Contact

    Archives

    May 2016
    October 2015
    September 2015
    June 2015
    January 2015
    March 2014
    February 2014
    January 2014
    December 2013
    November 2013
    September 2013
    August 2013
    May 2013
    April 2013
    February 2013
    December 2012
    October 2012
    September 2012
    August 2012
    July 2012
    June 2012
    May 2012
    April 2012
    March 2012
    February 2012
    January 2012
    December 2011
    November 2011
    October 2011
    September 2011
    July 2011
    June 2011
    May 2011
    April 2011
    March 2011
    February 2011
    January 2011
    December 2010
    November 2010
    October 2010
    September 2010
    August 2010
    July 2010
    June 2010
    May 2010
    April 2010
    March 2010
    February 2010
    January 2010
    December 2009
    November 2009

    RSS Feed


    My Favorite Curators


    Email newsletters

    Edge.org
    John Mauldin
    STRATFOR
    Futurity.org
    BPS Research Digest
    Domain-B.com
    FORA.tv
    PopTech!
    PIMCO Investment Outlooks
    GMO Client Reports
    Big Think
    Commonwealth Club
    Someecards.com
    MRN Research Papers
    Chicago Booth eNewsletters
    McKinsey Quarterly
    Boldtype / Artkrush
    Singularity University
    Charlie Rose
    The Aspen Institute


    Feeds

    WNYC
    Radiolab

    This American Life
    Freakonomics Radio
    The Moth
    Chicago Booth Podcast
    The Atlantic Council
    The Memory Palace
    TED.com
    Foreign Affairs
    The Ideas Project
    Long Now Foundation
    The School of Life
    Letters of Note

    Periodicals

    The Economist
    The Wall Street Journal
    The New Yorker
    The New York Times
    Wired Magazine
    The Atlantic

    Other Websites

    Oaktree Capital Memos
    LSE Public Lectures
    Bubblegeneration
    Becker-Posner Blog
    Eric Von Hippel
    NetAge
    John Seely Brown
    Malcolm Gladwell
    John Hagel
    HBR – The Big Shift
    LookBook.nu
    Robert Shiller
    Paul Graham
    Frontline PBS
    Royal Society for the Arts
    Blake Masters

    Humor

    Best of Craigslist
    Texts from Last Night
    FMyLIfe
    MyLifeisAverage
    Lamebook
    The Onion


    Categories

    All