Monty is appointed Ryder Cup captain: A curious king-making process

Colin Montgomerie is appointed Europe’s Ryder Cup captain to wide acclaim from players and pundits alike. By the manner of his appointment reveals a curious king-making process

The right man, it seems. The right stuff. A great competitor. The best player never to win a golf major, and Europe’s top ranking player for nearly a decade. And he also lifts his game for Ryder Cup competitions. So it seems these facts make him the ideal captain for the Ryder Cup. Or, maybe, the best captain that the selection process could come up with.

Colin Montgomerie is as well-known a public figure as almost any in the sporting world. His exposure to the general public has been huge through televised records of countless tournaments and interviews. A turbulent private life has brought further and unwelcome publicity. A few years ago, a breech of rules blew up into a Jakartagate incident for which he was censored heavily. Even this week there is a little matter of an appeal to reverse a driving offence conviction [30th Jan 2009].

Over a period of years he has presented himself as a person of towering rages, at caddies, press, and in reports of alleged violence in his private life). The symptoms are not unknown in leaders in all walks of life. They may well be part of the dark side of the charismatic personality documented by such leadership experts as de Vries, Kellerman, and Kotter. Our correspondent Jeff Schubert has a lot to say on boardroom and political dictators, and of the effect they have on their close associates.

A powerful need to achieve in a leader is not infrequently associated with aggression, ideally channelled into performance. It is tolerated in the successful leader, but it is also then cited subsequently by those who were silently compliant if the leader loses the battle to retain the top job.

In some cases, the selection trade-off is clear but the risk is judged to be worth taking. This may be because of conditions of crisis, or the absence of one ‘safe’ candidate above others.

In this case, details reported of the decision-making have been reported the general public. The process is an interesting one, and worth considering by students of leadership and ‘king-making’. We know that there is considerable amount of consensus-seeking among the leading European Tour players. We know that a group of king-makers including representatives from the players arrives at a decision over a series of meetings. The process is very thorough. We know that Monty was an influential member of the selection group, and that for the most part was not considered as the (traditionally non-playing) captain. He had made it clear that although declining from his peak he intended to fight for his place as a player in the forthcoming Ryder Cup, in Wales.

Another candidate, Olazabal, was a far greater favourite, with Ian Woosnam as second favourite, someone who would have the additional attraction of added support from Welsh audiences at the Celtic Manor course. The Times on line has a good background to the tortuous reasoning around the decision which went against the Spaniard.

Montgomerie himself suggested that in these discussions, that ‘it became clear that my time had come’ [my recollection of his words in several interviews in the days after his appointment ]. Other reports suggested that another player had put Monty’s name forward. That sounded as if the selection had become mired-down, and that the various claims for the (one-off) appointment had managed to neutralise one another, and weaken the prospects of the front-runners.

In this version (not discouraged by Monty subsequently), onee his name was suggested, it made sense, to the selectors. It had a similar effect on Montgomerie. Scales dropped from his eyes (so to speak). A moment of insight.

And so it was that a decision was reached. After a few weeks and in a subsequent meeting, the appointment was confirmed publically.

The appointment is greeted with considerable enthusiasm by the press (and not just the report in The Scotsman). I expected a few high-profile dissenting voices in the press. It was also greeted with enthusiasm by the players. Not so unexpected, as the captain gets to chose two players for the team, (the others appointed by their places on the European Tour order of merit. That fact, and Monty’s expressed view that he would like to pick all sixteen, makes it a bit more difficult to find players willing to offer churlish remarks about the newly appointed captain.

Colin Montgomerie has managed to present himself as a person who can show a loss of self-control under stress. This may be a price worth paying. Players explain why they need someone vastly experienced in winning as a player in the Ryder Cup. After the last match they qualified this in remarkably ageist terms to exclude otherwise outstanding candidates It seems they would be less overawed by a contemporary figures with whom they has played, than say a Nick Faldo who was a great player froman earlier generation. Ah, that’s OK then. Over fifties need not apply.

I’m not convinced by the rationale of this (or is it a rationalization?). That is not to say that the result may be alright. In which case everyone will feel comfortable about preserving not just the selection process, but these assumptions that accompany it. And if Monty’s team lose, there will be plenty of denying that the captaincy emerged within a rather curious king-making process.

Postscript

The king-making was also marred by leaks which produced betting irregularities.

TAGS

Davos and the underworld

Davos is an annual top-level business and political networking event. For some, it is a place which symbolises the ultimate conspiracy of global domination. Whatever. A version of the drama is being played out on Second Life

The little Swiss community of Davos attracts over 2000 leaders from many walks of life for an annual conference. The event also attracts protestors, and much intense blogging about global elitery, and global conspiracies, although not attracting as many conspiracy theorists as the even more elite Bilderberg group meetings .

The BBC loves a swanky conference but tends to play down the international conspiracy side of things, and presents Davos as a bit of a junket for global high-fliers

This year, leaders of global finance institutions were rarer than usual, perhaps not wanting to be accused of reckess spending habits.

Davos and Second Life

It is not surprising that the protests at Davos are also played out in second life

During a series of interviews conducted in the online universe of Second Life — in which a digital persona of Reuters’ Adam Pasick questioned the digital personae of various Davos attendees — a man carrying an anti-Davos placard apparently sauntered right into the virtual auditorium.
On its Davos blog, Reuters reported Friday [Jan 2007] that the interloper was Iuemmel Lemmon of the protest group DaDavos. His avatar, or online personality, sported a beard and what looked like a blue beret.
Did virtual guards leap up to eject Mr. Lemmon from the scene? Hardly. Reuters said that he “sat politely with his banner in the front row.”

Second Life protests have considerable appeal. There are no broken heads the next day in a little Second Life island high in the Swiss alps.

Verdasco beats Murray: How grooving can fragment

Fernando Verdasco

The Murray Verdasco match in the Australian Open illustrates the way in which sportsmen can lose performance standards. An explanation based on the nature of learned routines is offered

Before the match ended it was clear that Murray had lost much of his high performance standard maintained over a period of six months. Commentators were shocked at what was described as a loss of concentration.

He was in two minds

He was in two minds, a commentator observed after another poorly played point during the match. That reminded me of a whole slew of conventional wisdom of how sportsmen play in a trained mode or groove, and then how from time to time they lose it, drop out of the groove. One popular idea is ‘self one and self two’. Self one is in the groove, self two where attention is too diverted on keeping bad play at bay. The self one/ self two explanation describes what was happening as Murray’s self two crept in.

The Murray Verdasco match up had particularly clear swings of performance standards, and is worth careful study. (Swings of momentum, as the commentators called it).

The locker room phenomenon

A different explanation of form comes from the locker-room phenomenon. A player acquires a reputation that sets the beliefs before a match. There is an edge to the player assumed to be in form.

The track records

A version of the locker room phenomenon is track record. Murray’s great record against left-handers is good. Against Verdasco it is a whopping 5:0. Doubts can creep in at vital stages of the match.

Visualising for better or worse

Other folk-lore is the importance of mental rehearsal. The benefits of visualising for winning can be lost. Murray was musing on the possibility of having to win a match when he was not playing at his best. Federer himself had had to do that the previous day, coming back from two sets down. I wondered if Murray had noted that, and internalised a bit of it.

Standard operating procedures

I want to suggest an explanation from organization theory. In particular, the work on performance in high performance teams which suggests that ‘dream teams’ transcend ordinary or standard performance, by learning to develop routines or standard operating procedures beyond expectations. That work can be traced to an earlier idea that routines in individuals and teams can be changed (and improved) by a special kind of experiential learning known as creative analysis.

It is a bit of a jump to say that what applies to in business team also applies to a tennis player. But I believe it does. I also believe it applies to golfers, who seem to be grooved to improve natural talent, and for whom that grooving also breaks down and requires regular regrooving.

The fifth set

After four sets of wildly swinging moods, the score is two sets apiece. Would more mood swings decide the match?

Murray’s routines unravel

Murray’s routines unravelled. Elements of more cautious routines appeared at vital and close points. Verdasco grabbed a service break and avoided the dips in play shown in sets one and three to serve out. Murray declined in a way he seemed to have overcome.

Much more to learn

There is much more to learn about standard operating procedures but I suggest that attention to the nature of routines and their weakening would be worth while considering as ways of studying high performance and its decline under pressure

To go more deeply

I will add more technical details to this post or in a future post

Dolphins reveal dangerous leadership patterns

Dolphin training for defense duties

It has been suggested that Dolphins are prone to flock towards a pod member in distress, sometimes risking the entire pod. Is there a message for humans in times of crisis?

The plight of the dolphin is both sad and rather puzzling. It was brought to mind by an article applying evolutionary psychology to explaining leadership and followership. I wondered if the article might throw light on leadership patterns in dolphin pods and dog packs, as well as in business, political, and social organizations.

The article, in American Psychologist, has captured the attention of organisational theorists such as Bob Sutton.

The study is entitled Leadership, Followship and Evolution: Some Lessons from the past. It provides an evolutionary perspective to leadership. The thrust of its analysis is that leading and following
are

strategies that evolved in ancestral environments … with potential for exploitation … [and that ] modern organizational structures are sometimes inconsistent with aspects of our evolved leadership psychology [p182]

And so to human behaviors under stress

Homo economicus shows signs of distress. Like the Dolphin, many utter those distress signals, and attract other pod members to their call.

This week [January 22nd 2009] you could hear the distress calls from Jim Rogers, a former partner of George Soros, picked up by The Independent newspaper

When asked his advice for a young person growing up in Britain, Jim Rogers, former partner of George Soros and one of the world’s most successful investors, is forthright. “Move to China; learn Chinese.”

Beware of dirty dolphins

We humans may be prepared to train up dolphins for our security needs, but by and large we hold them in high regard. Unfortunately, many animals, maybe even dolphins, may resort to devious behaviors to help their selfish genes.

The cry from Jim Rogers seems to be that of the dirty dolfin in action.

He has sold all his sterling assets and has “no position” in sterling, but Mr Rogers reveals that he had been planning to short-sell sterling in the present financial crisis, before recent disparaging remarks about the pound’s prospects from his own lips had put paid to those plans. “I should have kept my mouth shut.”

Mr Rogers had in mind a repeat of his previous coup, when he and Mr Soros’s Quantum Fund famously “broke” the Bank of England in 1992, when sterling was forced out of the European exchange rate mechanism, costing UK taxpayers $1bn and making Mr Soros and Mr Rogers correspondingly wealthier.

The moral of the fable

When you hear the cry of a distressed dolphin, be careful how you respond. You may just have heard a dirty dolphin engaged in dastardy behavior.

Acknowledgement

To Earth to the ground website for the dolphin image drawing attention to a story of how how dolphin flocking behaviors may be deployed for security purposes.

Barack Obama’s inauguration: meaning more that he says, saying more than he means

Well over a million people, almost universally supportive of Obama, had crammed into the Mall for his inauguration on the steps of the Capitol this week [Tuesday Feb 20th, 2009]. His arrival was greeted with such acclaim by the crowds that someone watching with me muttered about historic precedents (at least that’s what I thought he said). Part of my mind flashed back to the adoring crowds of similar scale erupting with joy at the public appearances of the Ayatollah Khomeini.

What would Obama’s dazzling rhetoric do today? What would the world think? Would this democratically appointed president demonstrate such charismatic power over his people, that the watching world would be reminded of the power of other, less democratically-elected charismatic leaders?

I need not have worried on that account. The speech was more than adequate for the crowd to celebrate their witness to an historic moment. But there were no transcendent flights of rhetoric. The words had been carefully chosen, and were not chosen to sweep up a crowd to the emotional heights. The inaugural speech of an incoming President is going to become part of history. The new leader is aware of the multiple audiences in time and space. So he (always he for the time being, although Hillary may have cracked that particular glass ceiling a bit further) treads carefully, picking his words and tone with those audiences in mind.

Did Obama flunk an historic opportunity?

Some reporters later damned the speech with faint praise. And it is also true that he fluffed his few lines in the swearing-in ceremony, and was clearly ill at ease. So much so, that a rather clandestine repeat was quickly held with a minimum of witnesses later, to head off future stories of a lack of legality in his appointment.

But did that did trigger an unintentionally low-key performance? For me, the tone fitted the intended message. The words effectively said. We are in deep trouble, deeper than we may like to accept economically, environmentally, and as part of a squabbling community of nations. The tone was about right.

The challenge he confronted was to perform a metaphorical juggling act on a high-wire. Would he avoid saying some things that had to be said, or say things that were better left unsaid? How to call for collaboration and reassure all parties of his good intent. How to reassure, while maintaining his can-do message of rapid change, now increasingly delivered with the implications of personal hardships to come. How to seek unity and be gracious to the outgoing administration and its leader George Bush, while making it clear that it had contributed to problems that now had to be tackled big time.

The touchstone is the alignment of the words and mood with actions. He may have a great wealth of goodwill, but he also has to demonstrate quickly that “yes he can”. Within 24 hours several symbolic actions suggested to me he was a step ahead of the commentators. He signed an order effectively leading to the closure of Guantanamo Bay prison camp.

He also announced an effective pay freeze for White House officials. A waste of time, one former Bush aide called it. But he missed the point.

Another statement of intent was to deal with the culture of lobbying at the heart of Washington’s political life. That would be a great political change. I don’t know what it will take, but he’s passed the first credibility test in committing himself by speaking about matters which a more cautious leader might have left unspoken.

For students of leadership (the academic bit)

Barack Obama’s inaugural speech will be analysed as much as any text in contemporary history. We must we forget that it was a speech and a speech act through which we mean more than we say, and say more than we mean. Study it for examples of dilemmas of leadership.

Since the evolution of post-modern man we have acquired skills at taking a speech and deconstructing it to arrive at meanings that are not grounded on authority, not even on the authority of the author of the speech. If, like Chip Morningstar you are not totally convinced by postmodernism you may want to take a different approach.

This not just a speech, but a speech act. A friend who is a gifted figure in the world of linguistics has tried from time to time to help me understand speech acts. I may not have got it right, so anyone trying to extract some of this post for an essay, be warned.

For what it’s worth, my understanding is that a speech conveys social actions, and so can be studied as a social act. Now that sounds pretty modern, but you can go back to the time when America’s first President was polishing his famous speeches for that idea. The English philosopher Thomas Reid wrote in his Active Powers of the Human Mind (1788, chapter VI, Of the Nature of a Contract).

“ Between the operations of the mind, which, for want of a more proper name, I have called solitary, and those I have called social, there is this very remarkable distinction, that, in the solitary, the expression of them by words, or any other sensible sign, is accidental. They may exist, and be complete, without being expressed, without being known to any other person. But, in the social operations, the expression is essential. They cannot exist without being expressed by words or signs, and known to the other party.”

Which still serves as starting point to studying a social act today.

Where were you when Barack Obama became President?

I will be at a meeting checking to see if it will finish early enough for us to get to a TV screen to watch the momentous occasion. The meeting is necessary and at the same time routine. Obama’s inauguration is necessary and a unique event.

The suspension of disbelief

Drama and creativity work because they help us suspend disbelief. That is why they work so well together. Each dramatic performance involves its own kind of creative encounter. Hope is not just audacious, as Obama wrote in his biography. Hope is indivisible. It exists or it vanishes.

But the emotional deal is this. Hope does not persist, it needs to be renewed. Great leaders find ways of reminding us of that. And, as usual, great poets also find ways. Alexander Pope wrote as few lines nearly three hundred years ago that are worth remembering today.

Hope springs eternal in the human breast;
Man never Is, but always To be blest:
The soul, uneasy and confin’d from home,
Rests and expatiates in a life to come.

So today let there be hope unconfined.

Acknowledgement

The image of hope by Randy Wang comes from a brilliant website which invites contributions to a good cause. It seems an appropriate day, somehow, to donate to it. If you have enjoyed Randy’s picture, please consider supporting an innovative education project led by Randy and others, for the poorest children of rural India

Andy Murray and Roger Federer: How role models work

Update note

Updated on the eve of Wimbledon, June 2009. Six months later, Murray had climbed to No 3 in the World. Federer had recently won The French Open fulfilling several personal goals. Murray has won the Pre-Wimbledon tournament at Queen’s club.

Nadal, last year’s Wimbledon winner pulls out, leaving Federer as favourite, Murray as No 2 seed. According to seeding they will meet in the final … [Update ends].

Andy Murray owes a lot to Roger Federer. Their relationship gives an insight into how role models work to sustain motivation in athletes who want to become No. 1.

In the first weeks of 2009, Andy Murray defeated Roger Federer twice on the way to winning two tennis tournaments.

Federer, who had been No. 1 has recently slipped to No. 2 and Murray climbed to No. 4 Federer is still regarded by many experts as the most complete tennis player of his generation. Yet Murray, the in-form young contender, was installed as favourite for the upcoming Australian grand-slam event.

Andy Murray like most (all?) top athletes has a fierce competitive drive. This may be triggered by some important events in childhood, and it is probably genetically determined, at least in part.

My contention is that motivational drive can become anchored and focused by the influence of a role model.

How a role model helps shape behavior

Sometimes the wannabe champion has feelings of admiration and awe towards to the former No.1. That seems to have been the case for John McEnroe. On court, when competing with Borg, Johnnie Mac was a paragon of well-behaved virtue. But the influence of the role model did not extend far beyond their few hours on court.

Murray has also been better behaved while playing Federer, and was closer to the rebellious McInroe when playing almost anyone else.

I speculated elsewhere that an athlete may admire someone for qualities they would like to possess, but feel they do not. My earlier example was from Cricket, and Boycott’s respect for the on-field persona of Pietersen, all flair and aggression, and a near identikit version of Boycott’s suppressed shadow self.

Murray and Federer

Andy Murray is arguably heir to McEnroe. Both were precocious brats as teenagers. McEnroe eventually became a much-loved senior citizen. Murray seems to be emerging from teenage bratdom although the aggressive and sometimes obnoxious side still simmers away not far from the surface.

And Murray admired Federer initially from afar. His view on the new No 1., Nadal is quite different (although he still has been less prone to uncontrolled outbursts in matches against Nadal). The two spent a lot of time togther as juniors.

Federer’s response to Murray’s victories

Federer now to cope with a tough challenge to his own self-esteem and self-belief that he is the best tennis player in the world. still No. 1 image. Roger, a most graceful person in public has had to struggle to acknowledge the progress Andy was making towards that top spot. Recently [Jan 10th 2009] he more or less said that Murray might be a very good player one day but he would have to win a few Grand Slams on the way. Murray continues to refer to Federer with great respect, suggesting he is still the greatest player in the world. Such graciousness by Murray is helped by the fact that he is now well ahead on head-to-heads against the great man, and so his statement is also a nice bit of self- promotion.

Role Models, Motivation, and Learned Need Theory

The general issue of ambition is captured in the theory of needs generally attributed to Harvard psychologist David McClelland.

Need for achievement, (N ach) is typified by a fierce motivational drive towards achievement. The high N-ach individual seems driven by deep personal needs which McClelland believed were acquired or learned by early life experiences.

The high-achieving individual

I will return to the broader issue of the high achieving individual in a later post. Here I’ll just mention a few interesting ways in which Murray may be reinforcing his need to achieve, suggested by aspects of the theory.

High N-ach personalities seek, and thrive on, rapid feedback towards identified goals. In Tennis, after each stroke there is feedback in the win/lose result. There is further feedback in everything that connects to a perfectly hit winner, or a badly executed shot, from the body position, to the noise of the ball off the racquet, and the applause of the crowd. After the match there are the rituals of winning and losing.

So will Murray win the Australian Open?
Murray is now close to the finished article technically and psychologically. My Delphic prediction for the Australian Open is that if Murray remains fit, a great victory will take place.

Life with the Rugby Lions: Background to the 2009 Tour

The British and Irish Lions are preparing for the 2009 tour against the South African Springboks. Ian McGeehan is off-field leader of a team which will compete against the current world champions of rugby. He will also have to deal with the ‘mid-week team’ problem, and the potential off-field clash of Celtic and Anglo-Saxon cultures

The tour has echoes of the famous 1997 tour in which the Lions had also visited South Africa. Coincidentally, the Springboks had at that time too been current world champions, and McGeehan had been chief coach of the Lions.

Background to the Rugby Lions

The British and Irish Lions reflect a cherished rugby tradition with a team assembled representing the members of the Home Nations championship (England, Scotland Ireland and Wales). The Lions players still come from these nations, although the original championship has long been extended to include France, and more recently Italy.

Anglo-Irish Politics and the North South divide

It should be noted that Ireland in this tournament is represented by a combined team with players from the Irish nation, and from the British and unionist province of Ulster. The issue of governance of Ireland has been one of the historically important ones for Ireland and the United Kingdom for many years, and became particularly intense and bloody over the period of The Troubles in the mid 1980s to the turn of the century. This was followed by a period of implementing the aspirations of the Good Friday Agreement, which continues to the present time. We have reported this in an earlier post.

In popular shorthand, the North of the Island is the geographical core of the battle for a united Ireland, with cultural, geographic and religious tensions between North and South. Although a dangerous over-simplification, the ‘two cultures’ are often stereotyped as a Protestant North, and a Catholic South.

In a host of daily experiences, the citizens of Ireland co-exist within all-Ireland Institutions. In sport, the institutions include Rugby Union and League, Cricket, Hockey, as well as traditional Irish sports such as Hurling. Football is governed, in contrast, by Northern Ireland and Republic of Ireland Bodies. Religious institutions are all all-Ireland in scope including the influential Roman Catholic Church, the Methodist Church in Ireland, the Anglican Church of Ireland and the Presbyterian Church in Ireland.

In any study of sports management such cultural differences are likely to be a consideration. An obvious source of tension will be the inescapable fact that in most instances, the leader will be be drawn from one of the communities, and faces the challenge of creating and retaining team coherence, and of loyalty and respect from those coming from the other cultural traditions.

Distributed leadership and the midweek team problem

Over various tours, midweek matches have been played by a group of players considered less gifted than the squad playing the test matches and week-end matches. While in principle, mid-week players can ‘play their way’ into consideration for selection for the test-matches – the ultimate personal achievement – the reality is dealing with the presumption that they are second-best. This is a morale problem, which has deepened over time as the mid-week role has become increasingly recognised in these terms.

Disenchanted players find it easy to attribute non-selection to wider cultural preferences by the tour leadership. Clive Woodward’s lack of success as a Lions’ manager in 2005, after his world-championship success as England manager in 2003, was attributed, in part, to his failure to resolve the mid-week problem. The media (and players subsequently) made it a major issues, as week by week, the Lions limped through their New Zealand itinerary to humiliating defeat after defeat, losing the test series 3-0. Woodward’s coaching methods, man-management, and extended loyalty to the English players he knew well, all came under intense scrutiny..

Cultural symbolism

By the 1930s cultural diversity was implicitly and symbolically acknowledged in the team colours: red jerseys, white shorts, blue socks and green stocking-tops, (to represent Wales, England, Scotland and Ireland respectively). Recently, senstivities over labels had rresulted in an official name The British and Irish Lions, as well as the pithier label of The Lions

Follow the tour

Leaders we deserve will be following the 2009 tour, drawing on the views of sporting administrators and rugby experts. We hope the posts will interesting, enlightening, and maybe providing material which throws light on leadership issues in and beyond the world of rugby football. Quick polls will make for interesting evidence of changing views as the tour progresses. We welcome comments, and the wider distribution of the posts, to enrich discussions even further.

Polling your views

Toyota’s Business Model on Trial

Toyota’s business model comes under increasing scrutiny as auto sales plummet around the world. Its reaction to a forecast billion-dollar loss suggests it has a promising long-term survival plan that contrasts with its American and European rivals

Update

This gloomy report [Jan 2009] was followed by a more upbeat one six months later.

Original Report follows

Leaders we deserve has made no secret of its respect for the creative management shown by Toyota over the years. We even helped coin the term Toyotaoism (with Professor Xu) for its unique management philosophy.

The sternest test of a business model is when it has to deal with external threats to its core products. That is the situation facing all auto-manufacturers. Toyota is hurting, and Company chief Katsuaki Watanabe recently announced a projection for a first annual trading loss in its seventy year history.

And what a loss: 150bn yen (£1.1bn) in yearly operating profits from its core operations, attributed to an unprecedented global financial downturn coupled with a rising yen. Its December 2008 US sales fell faster that than those of GM or Ford

But Toyota’s pain still seems likely to be more sustainable than that being suffered by its rivals, whose fate is one of the urgent problems facing incoming President Obama, and who are pressing (begging?) for state bale-outs. For Chrysler, and GM, job losses are inevitable, while even survival in their present state seems increasingly unlikely.

In contrast, Toyota appears to be confronting its short-term problems in light of a longer-term strategy. Its reaction to over-supply is to announced a temporary suspension of production for 11 days [in Feb-March 2009] in all its 12 Japanese production units.

The old and the new

In some ways the response is one consistent with the Japanese cultural tradition which regards employment as a life-long two-way contract. Toyota’s business model preserves that deeply-held cultural value. On the other hand its success is strongly linked to its capacity to innovate. Innovation has been incremental and remorseless, and at time radical. Professor Xu’s analysis of creative organisations in China and Japan identifies Toyota as an example of a one such organisation.

The creativity is manifest in a culture within which ideas are expected from all employees, and reinforced through leadership support providing both intrinsic and extrinsic rewards. A worker in an automotive plant is still expected to pay vigilant attention to repetitive regimes and demanding quality targets. However, the creativity (that word again) which establishes teams with a degree of involvement and control over their activities (for example through the cell system, and its quality circles) comprise a genuine innovation which contrasts with the celebrated Fordist production line, with its direct connection to Adam Smith’s principle of division of labor.

Built to last

To use the terminology of American business theorist, Toyota is a built to last company. Its leaders may or may not be charismatic, but the results speak for themselves. Toyota has to be studied in the context of its cultural setting, and care must be taken in making comparisons with firms such as GM. It is even more difficult to make a simple comparison with Marks & Spencer, which according to Sir Stuart Rose [7th Jan 2009] faces its financial crisis by closing 27 stores, 25 of which were the Simply Food group opened recently, and quickly recognised as ill-matched to the company’s strategy needs (too small, poor and locational access).

What is no longer in doubt, is that the longer-term perspective offered by the Toyotaoism model provides a compelling case for creative leadership of creative organisations. Curiously, the current financial crisis may also bring (force) opportunities for new organisational structures in the future. That is the implication of the notion of innovation arising from what Schumpeter called creative destruction

Leaders we Deserve: On Becoming a King

Art reflects life. Hints from great actors like Meryl Streep and Antony Sher help us understand how a leader creates a role in the eyes of their audience.

“If you always do what you’ve always done, you always get what you’ve always got”. Regular subscribers will expect no great transformation in the interests of Leader we deserve bloggers in 2009. There will be stories about leaders and what they get up to. Maybe a few lessons suggested for leaders and aspirants.

One regular contributor is Jeff Schubert, who recently sent news of the king-making process (to be precise, it was queen-making). Jeff, reporting an LA Times account, writes:

Meryl Streep loves to tell the story about how one learns to be king.
It dates to her days at Yale Drama School, when the instructor asked
the students how to portray a monarch. “And everybody said, ‘Oh you are assertive,’ and people would say, ‘Oh you speak in a slightly
deeper voice.’ And the teacher said, ‘Wrong. The way to be king is to have everybody in the room quiet when you come in.’ The atmosphere
changes. It’s all up to everybody else to make you king.

I thought that was really powerful information. It’s “up to everybody else” to make you “dictator” – the leader you Deserve.

Year of the king

Jeff’s story brought to mind another on king-making (suggested to me some while ago by anothe Leaders we deserve contributor Susan Moger). It concerns Antony Sher and his magnificent account of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s production of Richard the 3rd in the book The Year of the King . The entire book is worth studying my anyone interested in drama or leadership (are they all that far apart?)

Sher shows that playing the king is not a simple matter of moving from reality to acting. It is a creating of a new kind of reality. A great read.

Now wait a minute …

I don’t think it’s simply a case of leaders being created by other people. We still need to know what it is about the leaders we (help) create which makes them special.

Maybe Meryl Streep’s teacher explains partly what happens when someone walks into a room and achieves high impact in doing so. That’s important in understanding the notion of charisma in as much as might be related to the notion of on-stage presence.

The anecdote about Yale drama school hints at how some of the behaviours of leaders have been observed, and how ‘schooling’ can help develop the same kind on presence on-stage. How, more specifically to make a decent impact on an audience

The anatomy of a high-impact entry

I suspect we need to think carefully about high-impact entry of someone arriving on stage, or entering a room. One situation would be the entry of a complete stranger to those in the room (whom we might want to think of as an audience). The arrival of a mysterious stranger is one of the elements of dramatic action. In contrast, there is the impact of someone with a reputation which accompanies him or her, for better or for worse, when they enter into the room, or arrive on stage (every child is already schooled to boo and hiss the Pantomime villain, and cheer the hero and heroine).

The lure of the marketing promise

We may not believe ourselves to be natural leaders, but many of us are still willing to buy the idea that products help us make that high-impact entry. In the factory we make perfume, as someone said, but in the store we sell hope.