Leadership - From emotional Intelligence to emotion inducer

"I think the big transformation for business is, not that hierarchy is going to crumble, but rather many of the relative advantages of hierarchy are now reduced.
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The habitual 20th century norm is: institutions enjoy a relative monopoly on tight management of information and tight co-ordination of action and big distributed groups (like your customers), don't have that." - Clay Shirky

If you want a quick peek on how leadership would manifest in this Century, take a look at this Video (in full-screen mode).


Take a special look at the conductor, Ethan Sperry, who conducts the Collegiate Chorale.

He not only sets the tempo and shapes the sound of the ensemble, he does one more crucial thing.

Ethan infects the air around him, with a liberal dose of his enthusiasm.

The emotion required is dependent largely on the context in which collective action happens, but the principle remains.

In this age of Social Media, the leader is not the one who inducts a tribe for collective action, but one who inducts the relevant emotion (enthusiasm, anger or whatever the context needs) at the right frequency, to his Tribe.

RIP - C.K.Prahalad

C.K.Prahalad is best known for Core Competence, that he developed along with Gary Hamel, in the Pre-internet Era.

Core Competence takes an 'introvertish' view of business, looking at the core competencies of the enterprise, that are not easy to imitate and are pivotal to business success.

Prahalad revamped his model of the Enterprise in Co-creation, in which he acknowledges the limitations of the Enterprise in this Internet Era.

Co-Creation is about creating products and services along with customers as companies no longer owns enough resources to invent products on their own.

Most importantly, he posited the revolutionary theory of Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid.

Here is BOP, in his own words,

"Because consumption can and does increase income. Consider health care. If you are legally blind with cataracts, you can't work and neither can the family member who cares for you. But if you get access to inexpensive cataract surgery, now you can see and both of you can work. Have you consumed eye surgery or increased the family's earning power? You've done both. It's two sides to the same coin."

Candido and his 'micro-interests'

My friend Candido sounded very frustrated yesterday. The prime reason is that, in every water cooler conversation, people instead of using, "The weather is warmer today" conversation starter, resort to, "I love mexican food".

He goes on, "Caucasian, black, chinese, indian, doesn't matter, they all start with the same thing, "I love mexican food". These folks are not intending anything bad. But, he hates being stereotyped, even in water cooler conversations.

Society has a million stereotypes, which function as cognitive shortcuts.

"You are a boy. So, you must like to play only with cars and trucks."

"You are an engineer. So, you cannot be an extrovert."

This percolates all the way, from society to capitalism. The products sold, the recommendation engines, a vast majority of them, want to box you in into neat categories.

Nothing wrong with categorization, but most of the time, it is way off, if categorization is based on broad categories.

So, for relevance and recommendation engines to be meaningful, they ought to have fine-grained interest categories. I call it the 'micro-interest'. But these are wicked hard for machines to derive from, as they lack the richness of interpretation of human beings.

Knowing Candido, I know he is interested in a wide variety of things, from Michael Buble to Tintin Comics, the delicate tango of privacy and publicity to Entrepreneurship.

Yet, most of the Systems have is, a myopic view of him: 35-year old Professional Single Male from Spain (yes, he is actually not from Mexico, but from Spain).

When the machine 'learns' his subtle micro-interests, he is ready to check out relevance engines. BTW, he does not want to have yet another online account.

The Last Mile Problem

Hookworms are a major cause of ill-health globally. In children, they cause intellectual, cognitive and growth retardation.So, eradicating them seems to be the "Solution".

Wrong!!

Eradicating them could cause an outbreak of Asthma. Hookworms secrete proteins that dampens the hyper-immune response of the host they reside,that causes asthma.

In the business context, the word solution evokes a false sense of security, for it is a partial and temporal phenomenon.

So, folks like David Gurteen are suggesting that there could only be responses to business problems and not solutions.

However the word response lacks the "accountability".

The middle ground could be, to identify the relevant scarcity in the context and design a solution that completely addresses it.

The relevant scarcity in the world health case is lack of good health in a wide population and not eradicating hookworms.

The bridge in the picture is almost complete, except for the "last mile". Identifying relevant Scarcity is a last-mile problem.