'A Captain of Industry' by Graham McKean

I don’t think it’s a matter of anything ‘taking leadership’s place.’ What are we going to do, remove the word from the dictionary? Are we all going to wait around for someone else to make the first move? (Oh wait, that’s what happens now.) What leaders can do is adapt to a business environment that is different than the one that shaped the textbook definitions of leadership. This environment moves faster, with more, and more fleeting, opportunities for a generation of restless, tech-savvy players entering the global workforce. To prosper in this environment, leaders and the companies under their guidance must adapt. This is not a one-time only thing, adaptation is not a new program that that can be taken off a shelf and ‘acquired.’ It’s a way of life.

We call this new model of leadership Flexible Vision. Naturally it is informed by the principles of improvisation, among them:

Take care of yourself first. This is a phrase popularized by Chicago improvisation master, Mick Napier. It doesn’t mean be selfish, as in ‘get your golden parachute packed, and don’t worry about where the plane is going because you’re jumping off before it gets there.’  Not that. It means come prepared. Have a take. Be someone. Stand for something. Rock your style. What your style is doesn’t matter nearly as much as whether or not you rock it.

Begin with listening. How can you contribute to the conversation if you don’t know what the conversation is about?

Follow the follower. This is a Viola Spolin concept. The narrative was going on before you entered the scene, and it will continue after you’re gone. Don’t ‘try to make things happen.’ Connect with what’s already happening.

Let go of status. In the old leadership models, status followed a person from scene to scene. If you were the CEO that was your role, and you played it in every scene you were in. This model forced a lot of managers into a mode of pretending to know more than they actually did, to feign authority in subjects with which they were not familiar, just to preserve their status. These ‘false narratives’ are a big inefficiency in any organization clinging to old leadership models. Improvisers, by contrast, change roles and status freely from scene to scene. Though your title is ‘The CEO,’ your roles can be ‘Student,’  ‘Fearless Explorer,”Arbitrator,’ ‘Cheerleader,’ etc. Adaptive leaders adjust their role and status to fit the scene, not the other way around. And the higher a person’s rank in the company (however that is gauged), the more adaptive that person can be, because the range of roles he or she can play is wider than that of a lower-ranked person, e.g. a new employee.

Give gifts. This is the phrase improvisers use for supporting one’s scene and one’s fellow players. In improvisation, giving gifts is the most productive move there is. Those who do it most consistently? Those are our leaders.

'Made for Each Other' by Graham McKean

]]> http://www.gamechangers.com/index.html/archives/2743/feed 0 http://www.gamechangers.com/index.html/archives/2353 http://www.gamechangers.com/index.html/archives/2353#comments Mon, 10 Jan 2011 21:44:08 +0000 admin http://www.gamechangers.com/index.html/?p=2353 The extraordinary improviser, Paul Vaillancourt, gave me a list of sayings that have been compiled and passed around the improv theater community over the years. The great teachers Mick Napier and Del Close get some of the credit, as do Viola “The Godmother” Spolin and ImprovWorks’ Sue “Pond” Walden, though the exact origins of most of these sayings would be pretty hard to trace. What’s clear to anyone who explores improvisation is that the the meaning behind the sayings originates from the same place that accounts for such profound ideas as jazz, the Dao De Jing, Johnny Appleseed and Pixar Animation.  Here is the fifth in a series (quotes in bold):

Play against cliches. First, play with the cliches of your business.  You all know what they are.  Name them.  Call them out.  Have some fun with them.   And then go against them.  There is a lot of movement in playing against cliches.  Just doing this one thing can transform your scene into something delightful.

Think of the environment as a six-sided sphere, of which the audience is a part. What a brilliant way to determine your marcomm budget!  It’s 1/6 of your total operating budget.  Done.  Next.

The environment also has an outside and an inside. This is a good way of thinking about how your brand’s environment travels with the communication that represents it in the networked world.  Think of your network as a place.  What is that place like?  Who is walking the halls?  How is it lit?  What kind of art hangs in its offices?  What does it sound like?  All these concepts should be consistent and play off one another in virtual space and in reality. A friendly atmosphere in the office extends to the social graph.  Artfulness will be apparent in reality and in virtual space.  Clutter is as clutter does.  Etc. etc.

You don’t have to try to be funny, laughter will happen just by being human.  Being human is funny enough. A common misconception we battle all the time at GameChangers is that improvisation is all about being funny.  So not true!  Improvisation is about communication, learning, and transformation.  It is only by a quirk of genetic fate—Viola Spolin’s son, Paul Sills, brought all the games Viola had conceived with him when he and Bernie Sahlins co-founded Second City—that we in the U.S. associate improvisation so strongly with comedy.  Comedy is just a sliver of the output improvisation is capabl of generating.   It’s like saying all ice cream Praline Pecan.  Taint so.

Playful, direct, co-developed ideas, informations, and dreams will always be far hipper than one person’s alone. This is just a basic human algorithm.  The best ideas of eight people will always be better than the best ideas of one person.  Spare us your genius, and bring us something else.  Your work ethic.  Your brain.  Your smile.  Your song.  Your sense of smell.  Your experience.  But spare us your genius.  Because, you know…our stuff will always be far hipper than yours alone ; )

The challenge with people feeling powerless is this: we don’t see how we can contribute to solve problems. We believe it is “someone else’s” to own rather than something any of us can contribute to. Powerlessness leads to apathy on global issues and disdain on local issues.

Now check out this from Mick Napier’s classic book, Improvise:  Scene from the Inside Out:

Two people…staring at each other and wondering who’s going to make the first move.  Two people being nice to each other and allowing the other to start doing something.  In that short amount of time, two humans have created themselves as powerless…Who has time?  The audience is waiting.  They don’t care about your support.  They care about what you do.  What you do now.

These two statements, made miles and years apart, reflect the timelessness of the concept:  Do something!  Participate!  Add to the conversation!  When you’re just getting started don’t worry about what the solution will be, or where the scene will take you.  No one knows, and your audience doesn’t care.  The most important thing is to bring to the scene whatever you’ve got.

The saying in improvisation is ‘take care of yourself first.’  This is not the same as being selfish.  It is, rather, the recognition that making the first move, even if we are not always the one to make it, is always our responsibility.

Vineet Nayar Leads With Modesty

Nayar’s ‘employees first, customer second’ philosophy aligns with a basic concept of improvisation:  Take care of yourself first.  Mick Napier hits this hard in his book, Improvise:  Scene from the Inside Out.  If you wait for the other people in your scenes to have an idea, to initiate, you’re making yourself powerless, and you leave your scene partners and the audience hanging.  And if the other person in your scene waits on you, you’re lost, and so is the audience.  Nayar’s point is the same:  HCL can only be as good to their customer/audience as its employees are to one another.  These behaviors cannot be separated.  You cannot be one way to your scene partners and another to the audience.  It is all part of the same space-time continuum.  And productive action can only begin with you.

Other quotes by Nayar that are consistent with improvisation, and my notes in italics:

“I did not know where I had to go, and I was projecting as if I knew. I assume that you expect me to know where I am going, and you will respect me for that, and the day I tell you both of us are in the same boat, we would fail. That was a very big learning for me.”  Pretending is not illusion  if it is a step on the path to being.

“If you see your job not as chief strategy officer and the guy who has all the ideas, but rather the guy who is obsessed with enabling employees to create value, I think you will succeed.”  Support, the giving of gifts, is the most powerful tool in the improviser’s repertoire.

“How do I communicate to employees to not look up to me, but to look within, to communicate that I’m one of you, to destroy that hierarchy? So I decided I’m going to go into this big gathering of employees dancing to a very famous Bollywood song. And I can’t dance for nuts, right? I was dancing in the aisles with these employees and making lots of noises. What happened? It completely destroyed the gap.”  When you want to communicate something important, use more than information to do it.

“The failures are far in excess of successes.”  Failure is not defeat if it is a step on the path to understanding.

“I don’t want people who are coming here and teaching me something or teaching the organization something. I don’t want teachers. I want people who are not only charged up because they like it, but because they will learn from this experience. I’m looking for people who see experience as a continuum and not as an end in and of itself.”  Improvisers are not teachers.  We are builders of  environments in which communication, learning and transformation can happen.

IMPORTANT FOOTNOTE!

When we tried linking to the HCL URL with Mozilla Firefox 5.0, we got this message:

We noted this ‘FAIL’ in the post.  Within minutes of publishing the post, an HCL employee, Aruj Kapoor, wrote to say he was sorry they’d been down, that they’d fixed the bug and the site was restored.  And not only that, he ‘yes-anded’ by asking what specific information we were seeking when the site went down.  Aruj’s awareness of what my experience must’ve been when I hit the dead link–frustration, confusion, puzzlement–led him to offer his support to the scene I’d initiated with HCL. Be sensitive to your environment and it will tell you what you need to know. By yes-anding, Aruj converted a mistake into an opportunity to extend the dialogue between the HCL brand and me.  Nice move.  Every mistake is an opportunity to do something useful.

If the whole is going to be art, the parts must strive not to be.  If we strive to make everything we do precious and perfect and just-so.  If we deliberate and debate the appropriateness of our actions.  If we measure every move.  Craft and eddit every response.  The sum of the parts of what we CrEaTeToGeThEr.  Is.  Surely.  Going.  To be.  Yes.  Oh yes most indubitably and beyond repudiating to the level of a statistical certainty will most definitely be…(Say it!)  A pompous load of crap.

Always bring a brick, not a cathedral into a scene.   We know a businessperson who had built a well-deserved reputation for dropping big ideas on meetings.  That was his thing.  People were in awe of how inspired and forward-thinking his ideas were, by the compelling scenarios he painted for them with his words and emotions.  He liked this role, and didn’t do anything about changing it.  Why would he?  People called him a genius.  A visionary.  What usually happened, though, is that his big ideas died on the vine, or failed to live up to their promise.   His ideas were so big, so singular, that people had trouble adding their own bricks to his architecture.  In our friend’s mind, the cathedral had already been built, all there was for his admirers to do was worship at his altar.  We gave the genius an ‘adjustment’.  All we said was, ‘Don’t be the guy with the big idea.  Be the guy who makes other people’s ideas big.’  This has made all the difference in the world.  He has learned that it’s more satisfying and a lot less stressful to make his scene partners look good, and to not worry so much about proving his own genius  It turns out he’s just as talented at sharing his talent as he is at showing it off, and sharing has proved to be a much more productive way for him to behave.  Today, his reputation is for getting big things done.

Make the strange familiar, the familiar strange.  This is a great philosophy for keeping your brand’s culture lively.  Every business culture benefits from a flow of ’strange’ (i.e. alien to that culture) situations, environments and characters.  Likewise, if we get too familiar with our environment, our process and our fellow players–and most tragically if we quit surprising ourselves–our performance is going to get stale.  When every day is the same we lose our sense of anticipation.  If we dont’ think we’re going find anything, we quit looking, and the flow of new ideas drys up.  It is good to introduce some outside strangness into the workaday mix; it is even more potent to rediscover the strangeness within ourselves.

Don’t prolong the agony of a scene that is slowly dying.  Infuse it with the momentum it needs to end on a positive note.  There are a lot of business scenes ’slowly dying’ these days.  Meetings with HR end in pink slips.  Start-ups lose their funding.  Towns lose their biggest employer.   Often in these situations, the only feasible move is to end the scene quickly and move on.  It makes a huge difference to the rest of your performance if the bad scene ends on a postive note instead of a downbeat one.  A town that greets the news of losing its biggest employer with some kind of community celebration is already on the road to recovery while a town that gets busy telling lots of sad stories to the news about how they got screwed is going to be staying in the doldrums for awhile.

All masks are empty until they are put on and inhabited by the actor.  The same is true with job titles.

When the original idea starts repeating itself, the scene is over. The mandate of the improviser is to help the scene evolve. The great basketball player Bill Russell said he knew it was time to quit playing the game when every play gave him a sense of deja vu. He was talking about changing his career, but this bromide holds true for smaller scenes as well. When you begin your Monday morning meeting with a review of the previous week’s business, the meeting is over when the previous week’s business comes up for a second time.

Start in the middle. It is perfectly okay to begin your Monday meeting with a screening of your brand’s freshest online media.

The rule of threes is inflexible. If something is done twice, it must be done a third time. If you hold two Monday morning meetings, you must hold a third.

Remember give and take. In improvisation, ‘giving’ is the art of offering something (known in the parlance as a ‘gift’) to your scene partners that they can build upon. Initiating a scene with the line, ‘Dude, thanks for coming’ is not much of a gift. Initiating a scene with the line, “Dude, welcome to the Big Lebowski Fan Club.” is good giving. In business, initiating a scene with the line, ‘Thank you all for being here today.” is a worn cliche that does not give your scene partners or your audience anything to hang their hats on. Initiating that same scene with the line, “Lebowski Limited exists to make people happy.” is better. Good improvisers ‘take’ just as skillfully as they give. This means doing something with what one has been given so that the scene continues moving in a productive direction. It means ‘yes-anding’ your scene partners. “That’s good.” is an example of a response that does not take from the line before it. “Well alrighty then, show me the happy.” is an example of how an improviser might take, or yes-and, the ‘Lebowski Limited’ line. The most basic, most foundational, improvisation exercises are grounded in the concept of giving and taking.

Recognize the space, own it, use it, and make it yours. How many times do we ignore the space we’re in? So much of business is conducted in familiar environments — the conference room, the office, the restaurant, the convention floor — that if we do not ‘make the space ours’ we (and our brands) will get lost in the neverending sameness of it all. This is true of PowerPoint presentations, when we let the presentation shine its light on us, instead of the other way around. Maintain your vital human presence in the room. It is also true of digital space, which is a big blank canvas until we put our brands, our networks, into play. It is true of every scene we are in. Understand the space you’re in. Define it. Work it.

Adopt, adapt, improve. If there is a better way to describe what improvisation has in common with business in the Networked World, I have not heard it. This is a beautiful mantra. Scratch these words your desk with an Exacto knife. Write them on random white boards. Take down that ‘Hang In There, Baby’ poster, and have an artist friend paint this phrase in its space.

To improvise is to heighten and expand the discoveries in the moment. I call this process leapfrogging. An idea is only as good as our ability to add to it, delve into it, expand on it. Leapfrog it. This is especially true of brand strategies. To the improvisational brand, a strategy is a call for a continuous exploration of the themes and ideas the brand represents.

Everything is important. Everything matters. In the Networked World, our fates and fortunes are interconnected as never before. The multipliers are intense. It is ultra-important to be consistently aware and respectful of even the tiniest details, because today’s incidentals become tomorrow’s headlines. Ask Eliot Spitzer.

Surrender unto the loss of control. Give up; it’s ok to be confused. If you give yourself permission to wade into the unknown, you are engaging in a process of learning, knowing, creating. Industrial Age behaviors were about the fight for control. In the Networked World our success depends on our ability to create cosmos — consensus, clarity, definition, constellations of meaning! — from chaos. Accept your confusion. Work toward understanding.

Follow the process and the product will come. I was a speaker this week at the Horizons High Performance Computing Conference in Palm Springs. One of my fellow speakers was Tom Lange, Director of Modeling and Simulation for Procter & Gamble, who gave a very engaging presentation on the uses of high performance computing in his company’s manufacturing processes. Among his observations was this: “We don’t sell soap, we sell ‘clean.’” This is a very improvisational concept. Improvisation is a process for exploring themes, and it is the exploration of the theme that yields the performance, i.e. ‘product’.

Realize that the next best thing to perfection is being damn good at whatever you do. Amen.

The following list appears in my book, GameChangers. It was handed out at the beginning of a class I took at I. O. West in Los Angeles, by our teacher, Jason Pardo. The list came to Jason by way of improv legend Mick Napier, under whom Jason had studied in Chicago. (Napier is Artistic Director of the Annoyance Theater in Chicago and author of Improvise: Scene from the Inside Out. ) The GameChangers translation of each tip appears in italics .

TIPS FOR BEING A KICKASS STUDENT AND POWERFUL PERFORMER

1. Be someone who is always on time. Chronic lateness or lallygagging is a form of control, passive-aggressive behavior that’s pure ego. Being on time is common courtesy to the rest of your team, it acknowledges that time has a money value, it allows the scene to begin and end on schedule, keeping the day’s performance on track and moving in a productive rhythm.

2. Be someone who says yes. Our accomplishments, our character and our wealth are brought about by what we cause to happen, not by what we deny or keep from happening.

3. Be someone who listens more than they talk. Listening is learning, and ensures that when you DO talk, you’ve got something worthwhile to say.

4. If you must talk, be someone who knows what they’re talking about. See #3.

5. Screw your fear. Be someone who makes strong choices. Fear is what keeps us from trusting our instincts, what causes us to hold back and shy away from choices that express our fullest potential. Don’t be a wuss. Knock on fear’s door, and when fear answers, sock fear in the jaw and walk on through. A smokin’ hot choice will be there waiting for you to free it from captivity, and will forever show its gratitude in ways you cannot imagine and will never realize as long as you let fear stand in your way.

6. Be someone who isn’t tired or hot or scared. Be vital and engaging. The nature of our work experience is up to us. It is a matter of discipline and focus to discover those qualities in ourselves that are conducive to performance, breathe life into them, and allow them to inform our character and our scenes.

7. Be someone who will try anything. See if it works. As the business world evolves, the boundaries of what is and what is not possible are changing like the maps of Eastern Europe. In this environment, experimentation and exploration get rewarded much more so than when everything is static, hunky-dory, status-quo.

8. Be someone who isn’t an asshole, even if you are. We’re in this together. There’s a school of thought, forged in the ultra-acquisitive ethos of the Industrial Age, that one must take in order to have. This has resulted in a lot of asshole behavior, and some of the assholes who perpetuated this behavior are now paying the piper for it. In the Networked World, we recognize that to generate wealth, we must connect, collaborate and create. We understand that our fates are shared, and that what helps one helps all. As improv icon Shelley Berman likes to say, “The taking is in the giving.”

9. Be courteous off stage. if you interrupt, apologize. One of the most useful aspects of improvisation as it relates to business is that it gives us the keys to productive behaviors and performances. Subjective judgments give way to critical assessment. In becoming more self aware we also become more respectful and aware of others. Improvisation gives us a diopter for distinguishing between interruption and interjection, between diversion and digression, between conflict and contribution.

10. Be honest. There’s no substitute. If we are honest with ourselves and others about our motives, desires and dreams, our behaviors will be authentic, our goals achievable, and our contributions unique and therefore valuable. The road to wealth and well being begins with an understanding of oneself.