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Why Smart Leaders Run Their Organizations With Dignity | Digital Tonto
In "Seeing Around Corners," Columbia Business School’s Rita McGrath emphasizes how important it is for leaders to get more visibility at the edges. When you’re at the center, you are insulated in ways you’re not aware of and there are going to be things that you don’t see. A striking example of these blind spots occured when Portuguese colonists first came across manioc in South America. They were perplexed by the elaborate, multi-day process the indigenous people followed to prepare it. Some steps, like boiling the raw tuber to eliminate its bitterness and prevent digestive issues, appeared practical. Others seemed superstitious. What the Portuguese didn’t realize was that they were seeing survivors—those who had inherited generations of hard-won knowledge about manioc’s dangers. As it turns out, manioc, if not properly processed, has low levels of cyanide, which accumulate over time and cause chronic poisoning. Those who ignored these traditions had died out. When the Portuguese streamlined the process to gain efficiency, they slowly poisoned entire populations, which is a great metaphor for what happens when leaders fail to treat people with dignity. Just like the Portuguese ignored generations of knowledge, leaders who dismiss long-standing institutional wisdom often pay a heavy price. They cut themselves off from crucial channels of information. Eventually that catches up to you. Linus's law states, “given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.” But the opposite is also true. Without enough eyeballs, all dangers are potentially lethal. That’s why it's so important to treat people with dignity. When you empower those around you, they are that much more capable of delivering the performance you need to compete.
3 Strategic Tools Every Changemaker Needs In Their Toolbox | Digital Tonto
When I was researching my book, Cascades, I noticed that change movements all started out very differently. The activists in the 19th century and early 20th tended to be women, like Susan B. Anthony, Ida B. Wells, and Alice Paul. For most of the 20th century, they were mostly men in their 30s and older, like Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr. and Nelson Mandela. In the 60s, student groups became more predominant. Yet despite their differences, I noticed a consistent pattern over the past two centuries. A movement would start with a grassroots effort, begin to gain traction and then experience a tragic failure, such as the Women’s Suffrage Procession, Gandhi’s Himalayan Miscalculation and the massacre at Sharpeville. The successful movements learned from their experience and changed tactics. The unsuccessful movements never did. To this rule, there was one major exception: The Civil Rights Movement in the United States and there is a clear reason why. They learned the successes and failures of those who came before them. Some, like James Lawson, travelled to India and studied directly under Gandhi’s disciples and then trained young activists, like John Lewis, Marion Barry, and Diane Nash who became leaders in their own right. You can do the same. Every effort to drive change faces challenges in maintaining unity, but creating a “contract” that encourages people to explicitly commit to shared values is a proven way to build cohesion. Creating resources that others can co-opt to achieve their own goals allows initiatives to scale organically, while designing dilemmas offers a powerful strategy to discredit those working to sabotage and undermine your efforts. These principles are just as effective for driving organizational change. One thing history has shown is that transformational change is possible in even the most difficult contexts. The key isn’t the righteousness of the cause of even the commitment of those working for change, but the ability to learn use the right tools with skill, discipline and wisdom. Yet despite their differences, I noticed a consistent pattern over the past two centuries. A movement would start with a grassroots effort, begin to gain traction and then experience a tragic failure, such as the Women’s Suffrage Procession, Gandhi’s Himalayan Miscalculation and the massacre at Sharpeville. The successful movements learned from their experience and changed tactics. The unsuccessful movements never did. To this rule, there was one major exception: The Civil Rights Movement in the United States and there is a clear reason why. They learned the successes and failures of those who came before them. Some, like James Lawson, travelled to India and studied directly under Gandhi’s disciples and then trained young activists, like John Lewis, Marion Barry, and Diane Nash who became leaders in their own right. You can do the same. Every effort to drive change faces challenges in maintaining unity, but creating a “contract” that encourages people to explicitly commit to shared values is a proven way to build cohesion. Creating resources that others can co-opt to achieve their own goals allows initiatives to scale organically, while designing dilemmas offers a powerful strategy to discredit those working to sabotage and undermine your efforts. These same principles are just as effective for driving organizational change. One thing history has clearly shown is that truly transformational change is possible in even the most difficult contexts. The key isn’t the righteousness of the cause of even the commitment of those working for change, but the ability to learn use the right tools with skill, discipline and wisdom.
First, Try Not To Fool Yourself, Because You are The Easiest One To Fool | Digital Tonto
It would be nice if everyone could have the experience of writing a book and having it thoroughly fact checked. In each of my books, I had dozens of errors in the original manuscript. Many of the them were corrected by my publisher’s fact checkers looking online for reference materials to verify what I had written. But they can only do so much, which is I also sent sections of my work to primary sources for verification. Even then at least one minor error got through on my first book (a publicist for a source didn’t catch it when I sent the section). That’s how I caught a terrible error about Blockbuster CEO John Antioco and was able to fix it. He was also generous enough to offer additional insight and write a blurb for my book. Yet that doesn’t change the fact that I repeated the error in multiple articles, even though I had read the accurate version in Gina Keating’s book about the subject. My version was then picked up by others and repeated in their work. As the great physicist Richard Feynman famously said “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool. So you have to be very careful about that.” We need to be disciplined about what we think we know. The first step is to be hyper-vigilant and aware that our brains have a tendency to fool us. We will quickly grasp on the most readily available information and detect patterns that may or may not be there. Then we seek out other evidence that confirms those initial hunches while disregarding contrary evidence.. It happens to the best of us and, if you are going to put work out in the world you are going to have to accept the risk of getting things wrong. Once you embrace that, you have a chance to make a positive impact on the world.
Why Intention Will Be Central To The AI Economy | Digital Tonto
When Christopher Columbus set sail in 1492, he was looking for an alternative to the Silk Road to reach India. He found America instead. In a similar way, when Jennifer Doudna set out to study an obscure defense mechanism in bacteria, she had no idea that she would discover the revolutionary gene editing technology we now know as CRISPR. Yet it was their basic human yearning to explore that drove them to discover new things. Over the years, I’ve gotten to meet and learn from many genuine changemakers. Both of my books explored the question of what makes these people different. Time and again, I found that those who make an outsized impact start with a question they so desperately wanted answered that they were willing to devote years, even decades to the search. Artificially intelligent systems do exactly the opposite. They train on data from the past and are able to create answers that far surpass any living person, or perhaps all of humanity. Yet, there are lots of things machines will never do. Machines will never strike out at a Little League game, have their hearts broken in a summer romance or see their children born. Those may seem like trivial things, but genuine human experiences are crucial to shaping the yearning that forms the basis of intent. While machines are masterfully rational, humans are prosocial. We live for each other. We thrive on connection and purpose. That’s what drives us to delve into the unknown and discover new things that lead to bold, unpredictable leaps. Therein lies the enormous opportunity of artificial intelligence. It’s not that it can give us all the answers, but that it can help us explore the questions that matter to us.