Values, Vision & Entrepreneurial Leadership: Lesson Two
Seismic Shifts & Truth Tellers
In our last lesson we talked about establishing a positive context for your personal values which will inform the way you lead; that possibility is a kind of insurance policy, a framework to make sure the things that matter most to you manifest themselves in positive ways for your organization. This lesson builds on that but begins to get to the actual things you value; it’s about forces you can’t ignore as you think about your personal values.
A couple years back (by now) I was working on my computer, clicked on Facebook and saw a post from a friend who lived in Los Angeles — he was looking at his pool and the water was moving. A lot. High up on a hill in Los Angeles they were experiencing a fairly significant earthquake. About 15 minutes later I flipped on the television and suddenly, “breaking news.” I already had the information (including a picture of the waves in the pool), I knew my friend was all right and I had already reached out to other friends.
Last week, in the middle of the night, I received an email from a friend with a link to an article that detailed a very bizarre angle to a big news story that has swept this country. She had tipped off a reporter by noticing a disconnect in an article a week before about a shadowy character in the strange series of events. The reporter followed it up and sure enough, it became a national story. I emailed my friend and asked her how she uncovered enough to pique the curiosity of the reporter. She said, “I have teenagers, a hunger for mystery, a strong intuition and I’m pretty good with Google searches.”
For most of you, these are probably no big deal. But for those of us who are a little older, these tiny events represented for me the incredible change that has occurred in the last few decades. It’s not just the internet, but access to the internet and the proliferation of ways in which entrepreneurs have made it more approachable and more usable that has created the information revolution. The iPhone or other device in our pockets literally puts the world at our fingertips, whenever we want it, wherever we are.
This revolutionary age we’re living through is enabled by technology, but the technology itself is not the most, well, revolutionary, part of the revolution. Instead, this massive change we are living through it about the transparency it allows. This transparency creates a power shift between sellers and buyers, between marketers and consumers, between leaders and followers, between citizens and their neighbors.
It also unleashes a dangerous force: how do you know the truth when there are so many versions of things, so many sources of things and it’s so hard to know who to trust?
What is the truth? What does truth mean? How do leaders have to change when everything they do is potentially — and probably — on camera? What do people do when there are no more secrets? How does it change how people make purchase decisions? How does that change how leaders lead? How do you defend yourself against false accusations that sprint their way across social media? How do governments defend their elections against foreign meddling? How do we even know if there was meddling or who was doing it? This revolution means unprecedented challenges for anyone founding, building or leading any organization.Technology has enabled transparency in unprecedented ways.
Truth and transparency were always important and were always the trademarks of great leadership but the fact is, they were, sadly, often an elective.
No longer is this the case. As you think about your values and what they mean for how you lead, you have to think about these things first.
How much do you tell and value the truth?
How transparent are you willing to be? It’s easy to share good news… it’s harder to share the problems.
Do you share your financials with everyone in your organization? If not, why not?
You will confront these issues sooner, not later, so you may as well make it easy on yourself and think about it sooner.
As you ponder the best way to architect, craft and lead an organization, consider carefully the implications of the information age in which we live, particularly the impact of the following four seismic shifts.
- You are not in control. We live in a world of reporters. How many of you have heard news of something important on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, or any of a hundred other sources before you heard it on a major news outlet? There are so many sources of information that it’s hard to keep up with, well, the sources of information! And, it seems, just as you get one figured out and understand how you want to use it (Twitter for your newsfeed, LinkedIn for your professional reputation, Medium.com to communicate your point of view, etc.) something new comes along and seems to change it all. Again. And then the cycle repeats itself. For centuries leaders have led from a place of control and authority. Now, leaders have to learn to exercise much more influence. You cannot control the information about your organization or your brand and you cannot control the spread of information, whether it be truth or falsehood. You cannot control the information about yourself, either.
- Transparency shapes choice. The more “the public” (your employees, your customers, the general public — any group to whom you cannot talk individually to explain tings) knows, the more they will begin to formulate deep and complex opinions about you, your products and your competition. Consumers are smarter, they know more about your competitors too. How many times — literally, today — have you seen someone in a store with a smartphone scanning prices to see if they can find a better deal somewhere else? The power of Amazon to shake up an entire industry through its purchase of Whole Foods, the power of Uber to change the way cities move around, the power of WAZE to reroute traffic…. all of this technology-driven innovation shakes up industries and organizations, creates chaos — and opportunities — and ultimately, has a tremendous impact on the importance of making the right choices.
- Choice empowers. We search for a world where there are enough jobs (and skilled workers) so workers can choose where they work and employers can have their choice of top quality employees. At the same time, technology is shrinking the number of jobs (the kind we can currently imagine) for humans. These forces battle each other; no matter how they impact your industry the fact is that people who own and manage enterprises are seriously at the mercy of the people who do the work and the people who do the work are seriously at the mercy of the breadth and depth of technology solutions that are developed to make work more efficient or productive.
- Truth wins... or does it? Whether you like it or not. While you’d think “truth is good” is a no-brainer for most people, think of all the industries that have been built on competitive insights and trade secrets. Think of the number of people who actually made careers without worrying about whether the truth would come out. Look at the number of institutions and leaders who have fallen from grace because they could no longer hide…. from the Catholic Church scandals to Volkswagon to Enron to Denny Hastert, the secrets came out. The truth will come out. And it can be a hard and painful road. How many times have you seen business value plummet due to uncovering some problem in the supply chain in a faraway land that 30 years ago we never would have even heard about?
How many times have you heard that it’s easier to tell the truth than it is to lie… because it’s easier to remember?
In the end, you — or your organization — can only be who you are. Thanks to technology and the ability of any person on the planet to search and learn and post, who you are and what you stand for will be tested every day. It’s really helpful to think carefully about transparency and the kinds of challenges it will force you to face.
Knowing your values and stating a clear vision will come next, but they should be grounded in both your sense of possibility as well as your point of view on how you will lead in a world of transparency.
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This is the second lesson in a series of nine by Jane Melvin, the founder and president of Strategic Innovations Group, Inc., a strategy and creativity consulting practice. These lessons grew from content she originally created for an online course in an MBA program.
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