Over at the ASAE & The Center for Association Leadership, we are discussing transforming volunteers into leaders. A professional-development expert offered the tangential idea that individuals are born with the qualities that make an effective leader. I think this assertion is bogus in light of the fact that leadership is all about nurture, not nature. I started something with a simple truism: leaders have followers.

One cannot be simply born a leader; one must become or be made a leader.

What we call leadership is actually a relationship. After all, what is a leader? A leader is someone who people follow for whatever reason. There is a perception of authority, there is communication, and there is an alignment of interests. Without any of the three, there can be no leadership. Without any followers, there can be no leader.

The success of a leader depends on the progress toward completing a mission, or realizing a vision, that can be attributed to the leader. The greatness of a leader, however, depends on the degree to which followers perceive the leader as authoritative. In effect, a leader who overdelivers is said to be great whereas a leader who overpromises is said to be poor.

Leaders who are concerned about their legacy are often careful to balance the two.

The expert that had instigated this passage countered with a set of attributes that are commonly said to be leader-like: integrity, courage, humility, imagination, ability to inspire others, empathy, etc. The problem is that defining leaders in such a way is overly complex. I feel that a minimalist approach is best, especially when you consider that someone who inheres all of those attributes would probably be stowed away in an asylum. Marsha Rhea, president at Signature i in Virginia, agreed and picked up this line of thinking in her blog today:

Leaders have followers when they take the time to create relationships with others. They keep followers engaged by communicating openly and consistently about the work the organization wants to do. These leaders know how to organize their followers to get critical work done. They stay focused on goals and have the optimism to keep their followers believing in what they can do even when the initial results are discouraging.

Leaders have followers. Defining what makes a leader should not be any more dramatic.

One of the most influential figures in modern history, Peter Ferdinand Drucker was said to have invented management. Drucker was a writer and teacher, whose legacy — thirty-eight books, an abundance of writings, the Presidential Medal of Freedom and similar awards around the globe, over twenty-five honorary doctorates, and protégés whose names include many of the world’s most celebrated leaders — was of little consequence to him in the years before his death. From his youth in war-torn Europe to the home he later made in 1970s California, the philosopher Peter F. Drucker was shaped by many great forces throughout his life.

Drucker grew up privy to the intellectual elite, having been raised by highly educated parents: his mother studied medicine and his father was a lawyer and civil servant. “Remember, today you have just met the most important man in Austria and perhaps in Europe,” his father alerted him following an introduction to Sigmund Freud, who founded psychodynamics. Drucker was immersed in the culture of critical thought, surrounded by many of the most famous thinkers of the time, at an equally critical point in his cognitive and moral development. Freud’s psychodynamics might suggest that Drucker internalized his parents’ values and altruistic quest for knowledge.

A survivor of Nazi Germany, Drucker once attracted the ire of Adolf Hitler, resulting in two of his essays banned and burned; he was educated at the University of Frankfurt, where he studied under the economists John Maynard Keynes and Joseph Schumpeter. As an adult, Drucker verified the philosophical (in the classical sense of the word) drive he learned as a child and adolescent. When Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany in 1933, Drucker moved to London as an economist and then to America as a news correspondent. “America was terribly exciting. In Europe, the only hope was to go back to 1913. In this country, everyone looked forward,” he remembered. From then forward, he would be known as a writer and educator. Drucker, however, had not embraced his calling as a “social ecologist” until 1950 when he heard his old mentor Schumpeter speak, “I know that it is not enough to be remembered for books and theories. One does not make a difference unless it is a difference in people’s lives”. At that point, his work as a consultant began.

During his time as a student at the University of Frankfurt, where he earned a doctorate in international and public law in 1931 at the ripe age of 21, Drucker was also working as what would be the equivalent of an adjunct professor. Drucker met Doris Schmitz, a student two years his junior, who he eventually married in 1937. Although the Druckers were intensely private people, what is known from Doris’ memoirs is that she formed an integral part of Drucker’s social support system. She wrote to him, “I love you in the morning when things are kind of frantic. I love you in the evening when things are more romantic”.

Drucker was also the sort of man who was at ease with his colleagues, completely open and sometimes even completely naked! Charles D. Ellis, an investment strategy thought leader and trustee at both Harvard and Yale, recalled meeting with Drucker at his home in California, “‘You don’t need swimming suits because it’s just men here today,’ replied Drucker. And we took off our clothes and went skinny-dipping in his pool”. Drucker’s self-deprecating humor, nonchalant demeanor, and stylistically unique presence served him well over the years as his work was constantly belittled and criticized as lacking the rigor expected of academia. A colleague, confidant and critic, James O’Toole, wrote, “With all those books he wrote, I know very few professors who ever assigned one to their MBA students. Peter would never have gotten tenure in a major business school”. Drucker jested, “There are many books I could have written that are better than the ones I actually wrote. My best book would have been ‘Managing Ignorance,’ and I’m very sorry I didn’t write it”.

While many facets of Peter F. Drucker remain unexplored (and unexplorable), he has provided us with the inimitable Drucker, a prestigious man who dedicated his life to changing the way the world works for the better, and the humble Drucker, who believed himself to be “totally uninteresting”. A world away in the early 1950s, the psychologist Carl Rogers was developing a humanistic person-centered approach to personality, an alternative to Freud’s psychodynamics that claimed people are inherently good but that they are shaped by their life experiences, often counter to that natural goodness. Around the same time, Drucker was undergoing a philosophical transformation and discovered that merely sharing his thoughts on paper and in the classroom would not sustain him for much longer.

In his youth, Drucker had been nurtured by parents who believed in leading lives full of meaning to themselves and those around them. When Drucker began his career, he worked as an economist for a London bank, where he dryly studied the numbers and trends. Reinvigorated by 1930s America, he changed course, deciding to instead involve himself in looking to the future and helping bright-eyed and bushy-tailed students look forward as well. By that time, Drucker was ready for more and he set out to apply his insight as a consultant.

As Drucker was settling in California, the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre had already lived a lifetime, developing and cementing the existentialist school of thought into modern thinking which posits that human beings can enjoy lives full of meaning as long as they recognize their responsibility for creating that meaning. The meaning of life is thus whatever one wills into existence. Existential psychologists assert that

“the dilemmas at the heart of existential philosophy are central to personality. Although many different theoretical perspectives have developed within existential psychology, they diverge on several key issues: the importance of the subjective experience; the centrality of the human quest for meaning in life; the dangers of losing touch with what one really feels; and the hazards of conceiving of oneself as thing-like, rather than as a changing, ever-forming, creative source of will and action”.

Drucker was no stranger to these issues and often emphasized these issues in his work. The existentialist theory of personality best describes Drucker. In fact, “he originated the view of the corporation as a human community […] built on trust and respect for the worker and not just a profit-making machine, a perspective that won Drucker an almost godlike reverence among the Japanese”.

As one of the first social entrepreneurs, individuals who create or develop corporations to create meaning, Drucker wrote, “Profit is not the primary goal but rather an essential condition for the company’s continued existence. Other responsibilities, e.g., to employees and society, exist to support the company’s continued ability to carry out its primary purpose” where primary purpose meant the provision of value or meaning to society. Later in his years, Drucker carried his ideas to nonprofit corporations, consulting pro bono, believing that what he called the “social sector” stands a better chance of making a real difference in the world.

Despite the challenges and criticism he faced in academia, Peter F. Drucker changed the world through not only his ideas but also his actions. He was a modern-day fortuneteller with many of his so-called prophecies having came to pass, from the emergence of Japan as a world power to the supersession of knowledge over “raw material as the essential capital of the New Economy”. Peter F. Drucker might have seen himself as “totally uninteresting” and unworthy of further inspection, but that was not for him to decide.

Read more…

Do you wish that you could get anyone to do whatever you want? You can. You can get anyone to do whatever you want as long as you give them something of great value at no expense to them. Free is a powerful word, a magical idea.

LinkedIn users invest heavily in the success of LinkedIn. They view and respond to ads, buy premium services, maintain profiles, answer questions, promote LinkedIn on business cards and in e-mail messages, and invite colleagues to make LinkedIn a part of their professional lives. In return, users get a platform for self-promotion, job hunting, recruiting, networking, and staying connected with colleagues.

Applications, or what you might call widgets, were recently introduced. These widgets include Reading List by Amazon, which allows users to share what books they’re reading and what books they’ve read. They can even recommend books to other professionals! Sounds great, right? All this for free? Well, the catch is that every recommendation is linked to the Amazon.com online store — and LinkedIn appends a referral code to every link. LinkedIn receives a cut of every sale made on the basis of user recommendations.

Remember what I said about free? Nobody even blinks. No double takes either. In fact, users even believe they owe LinkedIn for providing them something of great value with no price tag attached. This behavior can be related to the finding that generosity, even if only perceived as such, breeds both guilt and motivation to buy out of responsibility, or a sense of duty to pay back a favor. “Oh, sure! Go ahead! You’re welcome to profit from my work, my network, and my influence as long as I don’t have to pay $19.95 per month.”

Appearances are deceiving. Simply because there’s no price does not mean that there’s no cost. But who am I kidding? Although I know the game and although I’m familiar with the tactics, I can’t say that I’ve never subscribed to a dozen free magazines I’ll never read…

Capitalist philanthropy — the phrase is almost a heresy, pitting greedy pigs and their code of sins against honest paupers and their labors of love. With a hint of good versus evil and a touch of ugly, the concept, being not without controversy, is practically alien to everyday life. How could such a thing exist, especially in a time when the corporate scandals at Enron and Arthur Andersen still linger in recent memory? How could McDonald’s and Halliburton even be considered humanitarian, when one makes the world fat and the other gets fat off the world? How could the line between doing business and doing good possibly be blurred?

Be more like a for-profit. […] What does that phrase mean? We should put all white men on our board? We should measure the impact of our company in dollars only? We should spend millions of dollars on a Superbowl ad with monkeys in it to get our brand out there? … [W]hen they say to me, “I’d like you to behave more like a for-profit,” I’d like to say to them, “I’d like you to behave more like an ATM with legs.” — Nancy Lublin, chief executive officer at Do Something, in her keynote for Craigslist Foundation’s 2007 New York Tri-State Nonprofit Boot Camp.

In the world of charities, commerce is the enemy. Many people in this line of work have adopted an us-versus-them “we have a mission but they have a bottom line” orientation, a sort of nationalism for promoting human welfare. This culture is illustrated in the literature written to educate readers about nonprofit management. Thomas Wolf, chief executive officer at Wolf Brown and author of Managing a Nonprofit Organization in the Twenty-First Century, asserts that “[a]n essential difference between profit and nonprofit organizations centers on the concept of mission. The ultimate mission of the profit-making entity is to earn money for its owners.”

Bridging the divide between commercial and noncommercial attitudes first requires understanding three critical issues: the consequence of noblesse oblige as a motivation to act; the effects of volunteerism on managing for the mission; and the business language barrier.

In ancient Rome, the people were segregated into two distinct classes: patricians and plebeians. Patricians, whose noble ancestry granted them special privileges, were sensitive to their duty to the plebeians. The old French word noblesse oblige describes this principle, now popularly understood as “with great power comes great responsibility.” In today’s largely classless society, people are free to embrace that noble duty as either volunteers or philanthropists. While positions of social responsibility serve to motivate acts of kindness and compassion, noblesse oblige as a driver of good behavior effectively asserts that other activities are less important and ignoble.

Over 75 million people living in the United States received no pay for work they performed in 2007, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. They were volunteers, people who contribute their time and energy and resources to noncommercial organizations and expect only progress in return. Many such organizations, however, treat volunteerism as their business strategy, relying exclusively on free labor to advance their missions. These organizations achieve too little and thus fail to meaningfully recognize volunteers for their participation.

A quick “thank you” and a pat on the back are hardly sufficient to invigorate people to continue volunteering, indicated by the unsurprising fact that the number of volunteers in the U.S. has declined every year since 2005. Volunteers are burning out, their commitment siphoned by mismanagement and misuse. As a result, increasingly more organizations are receiving increasingly less active, engaged support from volunteers, which only strengthens the attitude among organizational leaders that their work is more noble because they work to realize great visions without much help or compensation. Furthermore, leaders are facing the growing problems of demonstrating and funding progress, often resulting in significant changes to the missions of their organizations. The taste is bitter.

Adding fuel to the fire, commercial and noncommercial organizations communicate in different languages. All organizations are formed in furtherance of the interests of people. Organizations are established for various social benefits, such as to

• fulfill familial obligations, such as the survival and growth of children;
• satisfy the economic needs and wants of individuals, such as the need of food and the wants of entertainment and information;
• further the shared interests of a community, such as the development of knowledge, professional expertise, and trade skills;
• advance causes relevant to large bodies of people, such the worldwide eradication of polio or the legal defense of the poor; and
• facilitate communication and collaboration between organizations and individuals, such as public agencies.

All organizations are fundamentally humanitarian. The differences between these organizations are largely operational and sometimes legal, but often scale matters most to the perception of why these organizations exist. Whereas the family serves the least number of people, a government will serve the most. The reach of an organization, however, does not correlate with impact. A small organization can produce as much or more value for a community than a large organization. Where the relationship between scale and impact is of concern, how an organization serves constituents is vital to what an organization achieves.

Unlike charitable organizations, such as the Salvation Army or a local animal shelter, commercial enterprises exist to fulfill the economic demands of individuals. Contrary to popular opinion, businesses do not exist merely for profit or equity. Peter F. Drucker, the premier business thinker of the century, once wrote, “Profit is not the primary goal but rather an essential condition for the company’s continued existence. Other responsibilities, e.g., to employees and society, exist to support the company’s continued ability to carry out its primary purpose.”

In addition to the role of profit in sustaining corporations, the requirement of profit is a result of governmental regulation. Public agencies provide unique advantages to organizations that incorporate and operate in certain ways. Indeed, some organizations that would normally have been incorporated as nonprofit corporations and exempted from taxes were instead incorporated as taxable ventures. Profit is required for certain corporations to continue operating because profit is a powerful incentive that drives people to organize and provide social value.

Capitalist philanthropy describes the current environment, suggesting that the distinction between for-profit and not-for-profit is a fantasy. Invented to protect the faint of heart, the distinction has proven useful for only advocacy reasons. Society needs corporations to work together, to form healthy and fruitful partnerships for the betterment of mankind. Perhaps through understanding what keeps the two sectors separated, people on both sides of the fence can assume responsibility for establishing connections.

Capitalist philanthropy. Almost a heresy.

From an online professional forum:

The Wii is an awful name.

Wii for an entertainment platform is no more awful than Yahoo! for a search engine, Google for an online ad agency, Twitter for a microblogging service, and Alltop for a blog directory. Wii, however, is arguably more potent than many of those names.

• Wii is playful. You can do things with Wii that you can’t do with International Business Machines. “Would you like to play with my Wii?” The derivative is great, too. “Touch Mii.” There’re also “Wii win” and “I’m just a Wii lad.”
• Wii is happy. You can’t help but smile when you say Wii aloud. Smiling does have a psychological/physiological effect. Do you smile when you say American Institute of Certified Public Accountants? How about The Institute of Internal Auditors? I didn’t think so.
• Wii is eye-catching. The only other word with the letters “ii” that you might see in a shop window is Hawaii. Subconsciously, you can bet that there’s some association going on there. Who doesn’t want to go to Hawaii, right?
• Wii is one-of-a-kind. Xbox 360 says, “I’m too sexy for my chassis.” PlayStation 3 says, “For the third time, I am the one-and-only total home entertainment center!” Wii says, “Unlike everyone else, I’m not a sequel!”

There are more reasons why Wii is not an awful name. Wii is an absurd name though. And that’s okay.

PS. “IBM. UBM. We all BM for IBM.” But that’s not nearly as cool (in certain circles.)

Guy Kawasaki, the entrepreneurial humorist, recently spent 26 hours aboard the USS John C. Stennis. While his post contains “over 130 posts and 5 videos” — and I highly recommend you read the entire thing, too — one of the comments on the article struck me as, well, odd.

It would be very easy for this thread to rip the military, because Guy’s readers most likely … [a]re technology and marketing gurus, and not really into guns, loud noises, nuke power, Ducatis, weapons systems, and Republicans.

First, what are guns, Ducatis, and weapon systems? Technologies. What produces loud noises and nuclear power? Technology. Who spends a lot of money on these technologies? Republicans.

Second, I’d say that most marketers, regardless of whether they’re gurus, are attracted to guns, loud noises, nuclear power, Ducatis, weapons systems, and… become Republicans whenever their clients need them to be. Just like mercenaries. Why?

• We compare customers to targets, methods to tactics, tools to weapons, and campaigns to, well, campaigns.
• We aim to crush, kill, or eliminate the competition.
• We liken ourselves to Rambo-like heroes fighting the good fight with guerilla marketing.
• We even liken ourselves to revolutionaries who use whatever means necessary with viral marketing.

Marketers are clearly obsessed with battle and war, but you can’t really blame us: we’re bastards.

Adam McClard and I were talking last night about different topics. The subject of International Game Developers Association’s Memorials project came up. I remembered a quote from a game developer’s blog, a game developer who was undergoing cancer treatment several years ago.

One out of seven people will die of cancer. Only heart disease is more likely. Overall, seven out of seven people will die of something, eventually.

We’re all mortal. And yet a lot of us live like we’re immortal. Days come and go, and we assume they’ll keep on coming. There is no sense of urgency. We treat time like water; so cheap that we can pour it on the ground.

Most of us have a vague sense that we’ll eventually die, but it’s not something we tend to think about often. We assume that we’re entitled to our 75 years, which invariably seems like it’s a long way off, so we forget about it and go back to our day to day routine.

— John Reeves Hall

Back then, that quote kicked my ass into gear, set me on the right course in the right direction. We should all remember to not squander our most valuable asset.