Technology & Leadership
Alex Soojung-Kim Pang

Participant
Alex, I apologize for my long absence from the conference and won't go into the details of why here, but suffice it to say that I've greatly appreciated your wise and provocative comments. The great thing about online conferences is that I can benefit from your wisdom even though I've been remiss in staying up to date. I hope you'll join in frequently.

A word on the difference between interactive leadership and "old style." I believe that leadership is now about enabling smart networks of people that can respond quickly, flexibly and intelligently to a chaotic environment. Individual leaders simply do not have the variety handling capabilities to cope with all of the complexity of today's business and public sector environments so they have to learn to encourage pervasive intelligence and systemic decision-making.

A word on facilitation. In my book I talk about the New Rules for facilitation. I think we've got to start thinking differently about it. The old style of facilitation is all about making sure things don't "get out of hand"--whereas the New Facilitation is about emergence--letting the group take responsibility for outcomes. Not all facilitators are capable of doing this. It takes incredible patience and restraint. And in fact I believe interactive facilitation parallels interactive leadership in many ways. I wrote one chapter on Large Scale Interventions (my own word for them is megaconversations) and I see incredible results in these meetings and see huge potential for them to be conducted online. A recent example is IBM's World Jam. Don, in my mind all of what I'm saying can be transferred to the public sector (in fact, most large group interventions have been conducted in the public sector).

We've had interactive technologies around for a long time. What we need more of are interactive attitudes on the part of leaders.

Participant As you indicate, Mary, this technology, even the conferencing/collaborative technology that would be most useful at the top, has not been of much interest to these top people. But maybe there is more at issue. I know of a board of directors that would function much more effectively if the members were able to conference online in between meetings. But I think that the staff and the executive committee believe (no doubt rightly) that this might increase the power of the board, and they are reluctant to install such a system. I think they fear that they would be creating a monster. Does that square with your research at all, Mary?

Participant
Are we talking here about two tracks for updating our decision making culture here: the business track and the governing track? Mary "seductively" mentions this in a one liner in 1:93 above: "all of what I am saying can be transferred to the public sector".

If these are two tracks, then I think it would be useful for us to recognize it here in this conference or make plans for starting a future conference on public decision making.

There is I believe a need to be more specific about the fundamental differences between the old and new styles of decision making, and even old and new facilitation. Again Mary's short intervention mentioned this profoundly important distinction.

Participant
I'm trying to catch up again after two trips to attend Board meetings. But the reason for my absences occasions this comment.

I think executives and small executive committees are right to fear the power-shift that could result from Board members coming together frequently on-line. In my experience, this power-shift hasn't happened with full Boards. But it is increasingly happening as Board committees (on "Finance, on "Program," on "Human Resources") participate directly with the relevant staff directors and learn what's worrying the staff people that hasn't been reported to the Board by the chief executive.

I have long ago observed that the hierarchical, vertical channels ("recommendations up, orders down") are practically useless to a chief executive as sources of prompt and candid information about what's really going on in his/her organization. Board committees that sit down for hours with subordinate officials, and study detailed papers, charts, and tables as part of their "Board" responsibilities, are quite likely to come up with insights which, if shared with other Board members, spell trouble for the chief executive. This is a growing trend; indeed it's one important aspect of "the twilight of hierarchy" that is leading to what I've been calling nobody-in-charge systems.

This is, come to think on it, an important clue to the fundamental implosion that results from mixing "leadership" with "information technology."

Participant
A late arrival and not well informed on the conference topic, I have at least read all the conference comments (and send greetings to old friends, allies, and adversaries among the authors of them).

I note a near exclusive interest of the conference in IT effects on how leaders (and to some extent, citizens) go or might go about making decisions or solving problems.

If, however, one were to write a history of IT effects on leadership, would one not need to pursue a wider search? Look at great historical innovations in IT: written language, pencil and paper, printing, and broadcasting as examples. They appear to have had their main effects on leadership not by their effects on decision-making procedures but on larger aspects of social organization. They made possible such aggregates as the nation-state, for example, with all of its implications for leadership (consider Stalin, Hitler, as well as Lincoln and Roosevelt).

Another example of broad effect of IT on leadership: print and broadcasting shift communication away from multilateral to unilateral, thus monumentally enlarging the possibilities of leadership (for good or bad).

Or consider that, though we speak of an information society or informatization, unilateral communication has greatly enlarged, I should think, the likelihood of a misinformation society or of misinformatization, a possibility exploited by so great a range of "leaders" as Mao and experts in public relations.

Participant
Two welcome voices:

Harlan's comments on the politics of IT and why CEOs have reason to fear it, could lead us into a useful area of investigation, because surely we have plenty of top people who have experience with such matters in this forum. To add to the complexity of this issue, I have long believed that the reason we have few, if any, examples of participative management that exist company wide, over time, (even though participative management has been taught in every leadership training program for more than fifty years--there is really no competing philosophy or approach), is that a predictable consequence of this approach is abuse of the leader.

We are also indebted to Charles Lindblom's reminder that IT extends back well beyond the computer age, and has created the opportunities not only for leadership, but for considerable misinformation, and disinformation. Ed, (I'm privileged to know you well enough to call you by your nickname)I'm so glad that you have joined us as more than a reader of this conference. Your first comment has reframed the issues quite dramatically. I would only add that unilateral communication such as broadcasting probably has no corner on the market of misinformation. I'm sure we could find plenty of examples on the Internet. We do have a number of websites, however, that quickly respond to such misleading information. Does that mean that we have more corrective power in the Internet than we do with broadcasting? Given the concentration of media power in the hands of very few large corporations worldwide, perhaps we do. Oligarchic control of the media is a subject that we are discussing in Dick Pollak's conference, which interestingly now converges on that question with this conference.

Participant
I am a President of a Company called the Common Heritage Corp which "manages innovation for the benefit of the Common Heritage. I am the author of a new book The Silent War (Terrible title forced on me by the publisher who rejected seriatim "Tales of an Ancient Mariner" and "Full Fathom Five". I am writing a follow on entitled Tales of An Ancient Mariner (Subtitled An American Odyssey) I have cell phones attached to my ears, lap tops and Palm

Pilots, I have a monthly pass on Aloha Airlines which permits me to go to any island as often as I want. I am information overloaded. I have not read any items yet. Will someone please summarize the substance of this dialog between my most favorite people (maybe once a week) and then, maybe then I spend time with the people with whom I want to spend time. Hello Harlan, Hello Mary, Hello Don Hello Doug, Hello Ray, Hello Dick: I've got something to say to each and every one but I haven't got something to say to you all at once. Oops, cell phone is ringing, telephone is ringing, Fax is ringing, doorbell is ringing, coffee is burning, microwave is burning, CD player needs changing. Oops, I have to make airplane reservations and oh yes get rental car oh yes call CPK for a pizza. Mustn't forget Dorothy who is babysitting with granddaughter Anna in Washington D. C. while daughter Sarah, working for the UN, goes on trips around the world.

Harland has made a proposition with which I concur: THIS IS A WORLD IN WHICH NO ONE IS IN CHARGE

Let me try another. THIS IS A WORLD IN WHICH EXECUTIVES ARE SO INFORMATION-OVERLOADED THAT THEY ARE COMPLETELY INEFFECTIVE

Participant
John, welcome and thanks for introducing yourself. Both form and content speak clearly about you (and about our subject, I suppose), but I'm not sure that every reader will appreciate, from that intro, what a marvelous, inventive, insightful, and wise contributor you can be.

For those of you who don't know John, he's a prominent scientist, was chief scientist for the Polaris project, and is a professor of both Law and Ocean Science at the University of Hawaii, in addition, of course, to all of the above.

We're exploring the possibility of a weekly summary statement, but as you may remember, John, from your days in our School of Management and Strategic Studies, those aren't easy to do. I think you will find that the weaving comments quite responsibly made by the moderators frequently will do much the same thing, and better.

You may get some argument about the complete ineffectiveness of executives because of information overload, but that's what we're digging into here. Didn't President Eisenhower insist that his total daily information briefing be given to him on one page with a border around it?

Participant
Harland conducted a wonderful set of seminars on Leadership at the Humphrey Institute in, I believe, 1982. There were, I believe 17 in all. Each consisted of a week on a particular form of Leadership (e.g. Leadership in the military, leadership in government, leadership in human communication, leadership in coping with complexity. Each wee a different seminar leader (names you all know) put together a book of readings connected by an interpretive essay which was fodder for the students in a week of discussions. I was present for the whole semester and was tapped for a book on "Coping with Complexity". Colin Cherry was designated for the text and lectures on Human Communication but passed away before the seminar started. I was tapped by Harlan to do the text on Human Communication instead of Cherry. Then disaster struck again when a distinguished army general whose name I cannot recall also departed this mortal sphere. Once again Harlan prevailed on me to put together readings and a text of Leadership in Military. At the end of the semester there were excellent paperback volumes on these aspects of leadership. I have them all somewhere in my archive and I think Harlan does also. After the semester a committee selected three volumes for publication. They chose my volume on the military and it appeared in a hard cover book published by University Press under the Title "Hero as Statesman" It also appeared in soft cover. The books did not sell and are out of print, At best these excellent texts are in the compost pile of relevance with respect to leadership, at worst they are flowers born to blush unseen wasting their sweetness in a rotting pile of anaerobic intellectual compost in a world of information overload. No; in my view, my text "Hero as Statesman" is far superior to my book "The Silent War" as expository of military leadership but it has already sold about 100,000 copies. The publisher modified the text to pander to the public trade. The cover is red white and blue with a subliminal American Flag in the center which appears in full glory on the back cover shining on the stream. My name is emblazoned in white for some unaccountable reason until it is realized that the middle name Pina has a tilde over the n, insuring that every ethnically proud Hispanic-American will buy a copy.

What is the moral (if any)? The Silent War emerged from out of the mass of outpouring publications because a prior publication described Craven as some sort of James Bond or as a character in a Clancy fiction thriller.

So if we are not to be a few, we happy few, we have to find some way to become a "muezzin from the Tower of Babel" crying "when all the worship is prepared within WBSI why nods the information overloaded worshipper outside?" –Craven

Participant
My attention caught the other day by a Charlie Rose interview with the founder and head of Amazon.com--a good example of a business or entrepreneurial leader--talking about his opportunities and problems. Whom did he talk about? In our terminology, whom does he lead or hope to lead? First main group: customers, millions of them; and .they owe him no obedience or loyalty and are not even in his organization. With them he plays no conventional leadership role and, of course, lacks any authority to do so. Second main group: his competitors and suppliers. Clearly they are not followers (as one might expect a leader to have) but are themselves leaders, and with whom he reacts as equal, inferior, or superior, depending on their relative strengths in mutual interaction. Striking that he hardly mentioned a third main group: those whom he leads in the older conventional sense of giving orders and expecting obedience and loyalty--that is to say, his employees. Nothing new here but a sharp-edged example of how far the concept and practice of leadership makes a long and still continuing (though weakened) tradition of leadership linked with hierarchy obsolete.

Participant
Jeff Bezo's (Amazon.com) priorities are, or should be, reflected in his communication and information system. It certainly is with his customers, and increasingly companies are finding it desirable to include their suppliers and even their competitors in their systems. We don't know how he includes his employees, but if it is like other new Internet-based companies, it is an overlapping network of collaborative, non-geographic groups, with diminished concern about formal hierarchy (but hierarchy of a sort, nevertheless).

Billionaire Michael Bloomberg, who is running for mayor of New York, is reported in today's NY Times to have devised a computer network, but, according to Maureen Dowd, is no computer aficionado. He prefers a yellow pad. A good example of the reason for this conference.

Participant
What specific recommendations would we make that would, when implemented, help to bridge the gap between top leadership and growing information technology to better serve the strategic needs of institutions and society?

Would we recommend, for example, that hierarchical organizational structures be declared obsolete and recommend the simultaneously multi-directional communication available electronically today? "Upward", "downward" and "lateral" communication in organizations reflects a hierarchical structure. Loss of hierarchy means loss of control. What recommendations do we have for leaders to cope with this dilemma and their associated fears?

Participant
Several points:

1. I'm totally at a loss to answer the question.

Utterly pointless!

3.> Loss of hierarchy means loss of control <<

Yes. And until the need for control is diminished--a psychological rather t han a technical issue--there is no hope!

I'm at a total loss . . . well, almost.

I suspect that when IT is properly implemented at low levels, or in isolated situations, and is successful, then hierarchical managers will see their absence of its use as a threat, and THEN they may pay attention.

It's an old and poor analogy, but I was once the president of an organization that had NO information technology (computers and such) at the executive level. I bought a Wang word processor and put it on my desk, and wrote my own material (which my secretary then fixed). Two years later, everyone at the executive office had done something along that line. They just got scared into it.

Nowadays, at Sprint (the successor company) the chairman uses IT all the time, and no one would DARE to not know how. That doesn't mean, of course, that conferencing (like this) is understood there, or anywhere else. That technique awaits discovery by the right person at the right level in the right organization.

Bottom line: I'm not sure that helping leaders cope with fears is our mission. Maybe it's to cause, or increase, the right sort of fears.

Participant
I resonate with Ray Alden's story about being the first executive in his company to have a word processor. I had a similar experience when I moved to Minneapolis in 1980 to become the founding dean of the University of Minnesota's Hubert H. Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs. About at that same time, Dick Farson invited me to be one of the people conducting on-line WBSI seminars with executives from Hawaii to Abu Dhabi. So I bought my first computer, not to process words but to communicate with people. I quickly discovered, as a sort of by-product learning, that the computer was a great substitute for my typewriter.

I thought that, arriving as the director of a new institute, all of the university faculty and senior fellows assigned to the Humphrey Institute would promptly be shamed into buying and using computers. Nothing of the sort happened. What happened was that we started attracting bright graduate students, graduates from many good colleges, who would come into our offices, look around, and ask "Where are the computers?" By 1983 or 84, I had to allocate a huge budgetary lump to enable the awakened members of our faculty and staff to have computers in their institute offices. In very few years, some of my academic colleagues were, fortunately, way ahead of me in the sophisticated uses of information technologies.

The use of computer-assisted teleconferencing for teaching and learning is a different story. In most organizations IT is heavily used for orthodox purposes--spreading the policy word, facilitating formal committee work, bringing recommendations "up" from "below"--but not for truly interactive, interdisciplinary, or multi-"level" communication. The WBSI experiment in which we're now involved--more or less, often or seldom--is pioneering this new frontier.

Participant
Harlan, I was dismayed to learn that you bought your own computer to participate in our School of Management and Strategic Studies. Ordinarily we gave computer workstations to all our faculty and Participants. At that time, Digital Equipment and all the other computer makers competed to put computers in the hands of people like you, and the others in our network.

On another subject, I suppose the best example of how top leaders in government are out of touch with the possibilities of IT, is in the election process. Surely it has become evident to everyone else that modern technology could serve the democratic process better. Don Straus is one who wants to combine IT with newer social technology to extend democratic participation to almost 100% of our population. While he thinks that is a long term vision, there is nothing technically standing in the way that I can see.

Participant

I have some half-baked thoughts here that I thought you chefs could assist me in completing. I'm seeing some kind of intersection between chaos theory, new forms of organization enabled by IT, post-modern philosophers like Derrida and new attitudes toward "governance" (both public and private).

If both the public and private worlds are more noise and information rich, and if decision making is speeded up, and if people are starting to recognize that they are part of a "smart network" both at home and at work, and if people realize that they have more power now to affect a system than ever before through communication as a node in that smart network, then we need the "interactive leadership" that I've mentioned earlier in this conference.

Richard, you're right that IT (and interactive leadership) is going to cause power shifts and not everyone wants those shifts (e.g. a strong board). But the irony of this is that the power has already shifted and IT just helps speed the power shift.

I love Harlan's No One's In Charge notion.

The fact is, now we're all potentially in charge at one point or another because we all have more power than we used to--both at home and at work. Matt Drudge (did I get his name right?) sends one broadcast email about Monica Lewinsky and look what it started. The security guard in a corporation is one email away from the CEO.

I think the key word here is not just power, but also RESPONSIBITY. I think that instead of "taking charge," leaders need to help others recognize both the power and responsibility they have to make the whole system work.

Now I think leaders need to "take charge" in whole new ways--by facilitating and coordinating instead of directing. I realize that this opinion may be culturally biased, but I do think it has some measure of application cross-culturally because of the way IT has changed our global culture. Even in a crisis, when we need strong leadership, we don't want Alexander Haig or anyone else to pop up and say "I'm in charge here."

I don't know if any of you have been following what's going on at the Pentagon these days, but I'd venture out on a limb to say that Rumsfeld has not been taking a very interactive approach to leadership--secret meetings, leaving top military officials out of discussions, etc. And it's creating some very interesting fallout. I've been conversing with a number of my military friends who have a real problem with his leadership style. It will be interesting to see what shapes up there. But I use that as an example to illustrate that people aren't just going to accept formal power as a reason for compliance anymore--even in the military! Instead of coming up with "The Answer"--it's my humble opinion (and Rumsfeld hasn't been breaking my door down to get it, mind you) that he needs to be figuring out how to optimize that whole system through participation rather than trying to secretly reengineer it with a bunch of consultants who, while they are highly qualified, have vested interests.

Mind you, I understand that he wants to bring about significant change and I'm not questioning his motives. I just don't think the approach he's taking is going to work.

The (public or private) leader who doesn't recognize that "everyone's in charge" to some extent is not going to be able to carry through sustained, long term change. In fact, leaders need to encourage people to "take power" because if they don't, their system won't be as smart as it needs to be to respond to a complex environment.

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