Management Leverage Blog

Looks like the top brass at USAA saw my first video blog about how smoking can help your career. And now their poor smokers can’t even smoke outside the building.

I guess they will have to network like the rest of us.

I first saw this video on Jeet Blog. I have since seen it around several other places (here is the original TED talk). The general message is that this guy is a leader, as

1. he has “the guts” to stand alone and look stupid
2. he wasn’t a leader until he had at least one follower

And I can’t really disagree with any of it.

I can’t help but wonder, however, what we could learn  if we took the discussion in other direction.

This leader is one type of leader. He is front in center–a classic LAME (Look AT Me, Everyone!) leader. Even those who aren’t dancing, can’t help but watch him. As crazy as he looks, he has a certain charisma, albeit possibly drug induced.

Thanks to the media, this video is not inconsistent with how many think a leader should behave. It may be a caricature of reality, but it rings true.

And it is. Some very effective leaders are LAME leaders. Steve Jobs and Herb Kelleher come to mind here.

But there are other styles that are equally effective. And if you only consider the charismatic to be leaders, then you may never reach your true leadership potential if you didn’t happen to be blessed with the charisma gene.

Who else could be a leader in the video?

1. The Participative Leader: Maybe the girl in the white skirt and yellow top dreamed up the entire stunt, fully delegating responsibility to the first dancer as to where, when, and how to dance in order to get the most people to join him.
2. The Servant Leader: Maybe the videographer charged the dancer with the stunt and posted the clip on YouTube in order to help him achieve his dream of appearing on Dancing With The Stars (see Steve Farber’s post for a wonderful example).
3. The Situational Leader: Maybe the real leader is actually working the crowd, adapting his or her style from participative to autocratic (and everything in between) to the style to which each individual dancer is most receptive, beginning with the very first dancer.

Who else could be a leader in this video?

Edit: Rosa’s new post puts us smack dab on the same page

“Someone’s been sleeping in my bed and she’s still there!” exclaimed Baby bear.

Just then, Goldilocks woke up and saw the three bears. “Sorry for the intrusion,” she said, “but I needed a little rest after eating all that porridge.”

Unable to resist the power of the magic word ‘because’, the bears apologized for waking her and quietly closed the door.

Or how about this one…

“We will wait for until Wednesday for BP to again attempt to stop the oil that is flowing into the gulf, because they are ultimately responsible for this disaster”.

Maybe the story about Goldilocks doesn’t end like this because it is much less believable than the ending we tell our children (but talking bears are somehow believable?) And maybe if the world’s greatest scientists met to plug the leak, they would have already solved the difficult problem at the bottom of the gulf.

But witness the power of the word ‘because’.

It’s the difference between “I deserve a 5% increase in my salary” and “I deserve a 5% increase in my salary, because that would bring my compensation in line with what people with my qualifications earn with my responsibilities.”

When it comes to asking for a raise, we are all salespeople. And the power of ‘because’ works like a charm when people

1. Are looking for an excuse to help you. In a now famous research study, Ellen Langer and her colleagues asked the Harvard librarian to turn off all but one of the Xerox machines. They then instructed a student to try and cut to the front of the line that formed in front of the one Xerox machine that remained operational. When the student asked, “Excuse me, I have five pages. May I use the Xerox machine?” Their fellow students granted their request 60% of the time.But they were able to cut in line 93% of the time when they said “Excuse me, I have 5 pages, may I use the Xerox machine because I have to make copies”. Here ‘because’ is powerful enough to work even when the justification is utterly stupid. Of course they have to make copies. That’s why they wanted to use the photocopier. Consistent with Cialdini’s principle of liking, when it comes to favors, these students were just looking for a reason to help each other. Even when the justification was stupid.
2. Aren’t knowledgeable about your subject. According to MSNBC, the stock market is in a correction phase, because of uncertainties surrounding the Greek debt crisis. Most of us, including me, don’t fully understand the complexities of the world financial markets. But there are so many variables at play that a single factor, that we have known about for months now, is unlikely to be the single cause of this correction phase. Yet unless we take time to educate ourselves, we nod dutifully at this explanation when given reason to believe. At least I do.

But if I justify my requests at work, won’t they just use it as ammunition against me?

In other words, if I offer data to support my request for a raise, won’t they just cite examples to show how my case is different?

Maybe. Which is why the more sound your justification, the more likely you are to get what you want.

But don’t overestimate the knowledge and hostility of your audience. Rarely do we encounter man-eating bears with a thorough grasp of the English language.

Photo by Horia Varlan

While in Beijing with the University of Texas EMBA class of 2010, I found a great example of why Santa should sit on your personal board of directors.

There is quite a bit of traffic noise in this one, so turn down your volume.

I first experienced what I now think of as real French bread at a German Market. In Munich I lived about 6 blocks from Viktualianmarkt , where I often purchased the ingredients for one of my many dinner parties. These parties would continue until well into the night, where we would boisterously defend our ideas and pick at French bread crumbs that had embedded themselves into our elbows.

Though likely not under-appreciated, there is still much we can learn about our ideas from French bread.

1. “Hurry, while supplies last”-French bread grows stale in less than 24hours. You really have to eat it immediately or it hardens into crumby toast. Like French bread, you are more likely to have your best ideas implemented when you give them a limited shelf life. It’s the difference between “I think we should do X” and “I think I can squeeze in X if we start before the recruiting cycle picks up again in a couple months.” Think of it as a culinary implantation of the scarcity principle.
2. Reduce, Reuse, Recycle: My bread pudding recipe (or bread puddin’ as I was often corrected) remains one of  my prized accomplishments in the 10 years I spent in New Orleans. Like they do with Gumbo, most New Orleanians have completely different ideas as to what constitutes the perfect bread pudding.My hypothesis is that the perfect bread pudding is the one most similar to the one mother’s. Despite the variety, all bread pudding recipes start with the same ingredient: stale French bread. That’s right. You intentionally let perfectly good bread grow stale. Like French bread, your ideas may be best saved for a sweeter use at a later date. The trick is to find some way to organize them. I use delicious and Evernote.
3. Pride goeth before fall: French bread is pretty boring by itself. But it is the perfect consistency for sopping up sauce, or the supreme vehicle for a slab of cheese. Our ideas aren’t much different. As proud as we are of our ideas, we can always improve them when we mix them with  someone else’s. You can also add flavor by paying attention to domains unrelated to your idea. The ingredients of this post came from a combination of the hunger pangs of first day of my diet (again) and seeing a picture of French bread.

Photograph courtesy of ianturton