Alien asked:


You’ve probably wondered how in the world managers like yourself are going to accomplish all these difficult innovations. The ideas may make sense, but how will you restructure today’s bureaucracies into market systems? Unite diverse interest groups into a political coalition? Reorient sales to serving people? Organize work teams that manage themselves? Transform operations so that they are ecologically benign? And keep this entire system constantly adaptive to change?

You are not going to do it using authority, but by drawing out the talents of others. I was privileged to witness a vivid demonstration of this type of leadership when visiting a manufacturing company. In contrast to the antagonism between various groups that was once rife in industry, this organization had learned to work together by confronting its differences in a constructive spirit. Seated at a conference table were managers, labor leaders, suppliers, distributors, and even officials from the local government. Most striking was that the president of the company did not seem a particularly imposing person. He had no commanding presence, was not a genius, and showed little charisma. How, I wondered, did he manage to pull this diverse group of big egos together into a harmonious team?

As the meeting progressed, it became apparent that this was a different type of leader. He saw his role as encouraging the talents of the people in the organization, and so he rarely spoke himself but was more intent on asking others for their views. Remarkably, he really listened. Unlike almost all other leaders one usually meets, this man was genuinely humble in the sense that he focused on understanding the reality of the situation. It was like a breath of fresh air! A leader who cares what people really think? Who wants to hear the messy truth? Who does not impose his solutions? Surely this was either a ruse or it didn’t work, I thought.

But it did work. It energized the meeting. People brought out their problems, their ideas, their doubts, their misunderstandings, and all the other hidden agendas we normally keep contained within us. The president simply asked an occasional question, made a few suggestions for the group to consider, and tried to clarify what they were doing. Otherwise, the group controlled the meeting. Most importantly, the meeting affirmed that this was their organization. They were responsible for its success or failure, so they did whatever was needed to make it work.

OK, this humble approach really works, but what about the leader, I worried? He was obviously not “in charge’ and in fact he seemed a bit awkward and uncomfortable at times. Little wonder when people would say harsh things directly to him, such as complain about some aspect of the company and criticize his behavior occasionally. They even called him by his first name! How could he possibly maintain his dignity and self-respect, much less the power needed to be effective?

Beneath this appearance of casual disregard was a deep sense of respect and affection. Not because this leader held the power of the president, but precisely for the opposite reason. He had voluntarily yielded his authority. The heart of this relationship was that the president was genuinely concerned about the needs of the people in that organization, and he provided a subtle, supportive guidance that helped them find the way ahead. Ironically, by giving up his formal power, he was given far more real power. They would do things for this man that no ordinary boss could even ask for.

He was not simply another member of the team, however. At times he had to bear the responsibility for taking some difficult action on their behalf, such as asking for discipline or bringing up a serious issue. But because he was a true leader rather than a boss, he was able to do this with their willing support, rather like a “servant leader” or a “good father.”

This is only one example, of course, of the many different ways that good leaders work. But I think it highlights a key principle of leadership today: In a world of escalating complexity and empowered people, leaders must cultivate the art of helping others to share the responsibilities of management. And the price of their support is to relinquish that comfortable old sense of control.

Genuine participation is an intense, creative act in which people step out of their comfortable roles to engage their differences. If this painful exploration can be sustained through its twists and turns, a new clarity of awareness, or a “vision,” may be given us to guide the way ahead. Because this process involves nurturing an expanded sense of awareness, it can be said to be “spiritual.” Participative leadership, then, is the fusion of human spirits that releases new energy and vision.



Caffeinated Content for WordPress

Bill French asked:

A blogsite (like a Lexus) must be durable.

Very few people think about their blog content or blog architecture in the context of durability. When I mention it to people they say –

“What? How can you wear out your blog?”

Understanding blog and content durability requires a deeper understanding of the likelihood of future changes that would constrain or otherwise obsolete your content.

There’s no question there will be future innovations that will render the way blogs work today, as obsolete in a future context. Durable blogs will possess attributes that allow them to transform and reshape themselves with little effort. Non-durable blogs will require complete rethinking, rewrites and reformatting of large portions of content and application code bases; non-durable content will require significant reshaping to migrate into new use cases.

Your blogsite platform should be agile and buil;t on XML and XSLT services that are completely unrelated to blogging or blog architectures. Your advertorial marketing platform based on sound information architecture design.

One example of content durability is how MyST melds Captyx components into blog posts. By using embedded XML components components (for things such as embedded videos), we can [optionally] prevent them from displaying in RSS feeds. This is intentional and done so for many reasons – not all subscriber devices can display embedded videos, thus your blog content soon becomes less durable. But the behavior is critical to creating and managing a durable content system because it makes it possible to create, manage, and integrate content items with (and without) embedded objects.

This agility is critical to future requirements that have not [yet] been invented. Imagine the day comes when you have 10,000 posts and you suddenly need to utilize your content in ways that heavy objects (such as video components) are not able to be included. Your competitors (who have embedded video code directly into their content) will not be able to participate in such a new use case without significant friction – they are busy creating non-durable content that assumes all objects in a post must be included in that post regardless of the use case.

Examples of durability abound in MyST Blogsite® – from the native MyST-ML [XML] markup language available universally across the platform, to the URL-based XML API from which a variety of XML formats can be accessed. In between we find filter patterns that allow you to scope RSS feeds and subsets of your content as HTML, Topic Cloud, which dissects all keywords into a relational map to your posts, and Link Properties that can exist as reference bibliographies in HTML or free-standing syndication feeds.

Your blog content platform and posts should be designed with one assumption – change is coming.