Tribal Effects: Leadership, People and Learning

In many organizations smart people find it difficult to learn or contribute to learning. This is usually caused by a culture that does natural selection, where people who seem not to have answers are instantly seen as less intelligent. Intelligence is good, but the winning formula in the information age is a first class temperament and the ability to discard your previous assumptions. Performance metrics that use intelligence must be reviewed to ensure that intelligence becomes more useful. People then assume that their performance metric is being intelligent. Ideally, in a world where there is so much information available to your competition, "sharing" should be the major performance metric. A sharing organization is a learning organization. A learning organization must also be a doing organization. But you must learn before you do. At Google people who keep knowledge to themselves and try to gain personal advantage are called "knaves". While people ...

I think about  the 90's a lot.  Especially the music. I once organized a 90's themed party at work. I dressed like Notorious BIG- Da Notorious. We didn't have internet, but there was so much originality. I guess we are living in the age of full blown mass production. Culture is mass produced. People are blowing the reality of their life's out of proportion. People act funny because they need to put content out there. Rebellion has become pop attitude. It hardly serves a useful purpose. It took TV 15 years to be a mass medium. That is TV hit 50million viewers in 15 years. Today, the internet took 3 years to be a mass medium. It took 3 years for the internet to reach 50million people. Obviously, Mass Medium is becoming Mass Rubbish. There is a yearning for quality, but quantity matters more in satisfying emotional demand. Today, account planners and brands are competing on an emotional turf. The era of function is dead. The winners in the infor...

We currently live in a period where machines and software is taking over many things that required manual labour. Artificial intelligence is making humans redefine their role in their current jobs. Estimations have been made about job losses and many people have caught the luddite syndrome (This means people are afraid about technology making their labour obsolete). I don’t think their fear is in order. Technology will always make life easier and better. That has been the traditional role of technology. The traditional roles of humans lie in leading the process of value creation. Yuval Harari in his book; Homo Deus talks about how mountains of data and manipulation of same is giving technology firms a chance to improve longevity for humans. At the end of the day, the good we can derive from technology must outweigh the downsides provided we lead the process using our soft skills. . The Homo Sapiens (Thinking Man) is leading the earth and other planets because of the abil...

Leadership has many definitions and perspectives. To understand leadership many scholars and managers have tried to contrast it with management. The popular distinction is that, while management is concerned with order and stability, leadership must be heavily focused on helping organizations adapt to their environment (business operational, economic, political) etc. The role of leadership has gained more prominence in a world where technical skills abounds and where worthy captains that can lead organizations are in short supply. Leadership itself is not a function that exists in a silo from where it directs the activities of organizations and nations. Leadership operates through a mediating concept called culture.\ What is culture? Here in Nigeria, many people will agree that culture “is a way of life”. I will share a definition of culture from renowned social psychologist- Hofstede. ”Culture according to him is a collective programming that makes members of one...