Introducing Leading Managers...
(and managing leaders) in the ideas era
This blog is built on the three great all-purpose questions “What?” “So what?” and “Now what?” – respectively: the ideas era; its significance for organizations; and practical suggestions for leading, managing, and organizing in it.
It takes the twin cults of heroic leadership and innovation down a peg, says business is a lot more like government than businessers realize, and tells managers their control is shrinking while their accountability is expanding. But then it assures them that management is noble and not just for plodders too dull to be leaders.
The blog rests on five theses
Culture may well “eat strategy for breakfast” but context is the apex predator because people think and act according to their perceived context.
Just as buildings provide climate control, the purpose of organizations is to provide context control.
Management’s job is to create a local, micro context that is productive in the macro context.
The Ideas Era is today’s macro context. The Information Age is over, but we still reply on the obsolete assumptions about leadership and management, and innovation and replication.
In the Ideas Era great managers move easily back and forth between leader and follower, and great organizations move seamlessly between innovation and replication.
What is the ideas era?
The interplay of technology and the 3Vs of ideas – volume, velocity, and vector – are the hardware and software of macro contexts. The industrial age was powered by steam and the rapid increase in the volume of ideas produced by moveable type. Electricity accelerated the velocity of ideas to light speed begetting the information age and enabling mass distribution of curated ideas – mislabelled “mass communication” at the time. Real mass communication arrived when the internet shifted the vector of ideas from vertical to horizontal, and the ideas era was born.
We have been “drinking from a fire hose” for years. The difference between the information era and the ideas era is that each of us has our own adjustable news nozzle. Information has never been a match for ideas - believing is seeing after all - but, now that we can broadcast and narrow receive, it is easier to spread fantasy and harder to explain reality. You’ve noticed.
So what?
When, in the spring of 2020, managers suddenly found themselves pondering the utility of offices all they came up with was socializing and serendipity. But Covid lockdowns did not create the “new face of work”. As is often the case, the “revolution” was the moment evolution blew up in our faces. To paraphrase William Gibson, the ideas era was already here, Covid distributed it more evenly.
Biz Lit has been banging on about corporate culture for a generation but without explaining why nurturing it has become so important. Corporate culture is the sum of all relationships. The greater volume and velocity of ideas made collaborative relationships more important, and the new vector made them more difficult to manage. Place and authority are no longer shared narrators of context to the detriment of politics and, less obviously but just as surely, all organizations. Management must create what was once granted.
Now what?
In the industrial era great leaders and managers knew what they wanted and how to get it. In the ideas era, when it is impossible for one person to know what is possible let alone how to do it, great managers get what they will want when they see it. They need others’ ideas. They need to understand leadership, not to lead but to be lead.
Leadership today is a corporate resource not a management monopoly. Great managers know they can’t and shouldn’t try to hog leadership, just as they can’t and shouldn’t try to abdicate management. When innovation is required, great managers create a micro context in which leadership flows to the right people; those with the knowledge, credibility, or personal characteristics the situation calls for. The baton will pass among several leaders. Then the manager selects a course of action and arranges a micro context that ensures its implementation.
Ideas by the number
It’s not a blog about numbers but key concepts are in sets, so they are easier to remember. From time to time you’ll encounter:
two great choices: innovate/replicate and build/buy
two contextual layers: macro and micro,
the 3Vs of ideas: volume, velocity, and vector, and
the 3Vs of organizations: vision, values, and vital information.
And you’ve already met the three great all-purpose questions.
Words of warning
One of my kids told me, “Dad, you’re not funny but you are playful” so there will occasionally be puns in the Substack Blog, or Slog.
Yes, I wrote “businessers” up top. We have firefighters, letter carriers, doctors, lawyers, and even chairs - I still feel a bit weird being a chair even after chairing hundreds of meetings - why do “businessmen”, “businesswomen”, and clunkiest of all “businesspersons” persist?
I do pretend to have all the answers but only because it’s more concise.