Mike Bell's Leadership Wisdom

Reducing CO2 – the ‘Social Change’ solution

Household CO2 emissions offer the greatest opportunity to make significant reductions in community CO2 emissions now. The biggest challenge is moving beyond awareness and education to empowering a significant percentage of households to make major changes in their behaviour.

If “change” is the mantra of our moment in history, Social Change is our greatest challenge and opportunity.

David Gershon—described by the United Nations as a “graceful revolutionary”— is leading a one day workshop in the UK on his recent climate change work helping citizens, cities, and entire states measurably reduce their carbon footprint using his book Low Carbon Diet. His goal: empower change agents to tackle pressing social problems or unmet social needs by providing them strategies and tools to effect transformative change at any level of scale.

See www.thewisdommeme.com/LCD  for more information.

In his new book, Social Change 2.0, introducing his internationally acclaimed “Empowerment Model for Social Change,” Gershon illustrates each of his five core principles with poignant vignettes from his personal journey as one of today’s most accomplished change agents. He offers an original and comprehensive roadmap to bring about fundamental change in our world. More about this later.

Households achieve 22% reduction in CO2 footprint

Latest data from the US shows that households using the 'Low Carbon Diet' have reduced their carbon emissions by an average of 22%.¹

These results come from the Empowerment Institute where David Gershon, founder and president, and author of the best selling book Low Carbon Diet: A 30 Day Program to Lose 5,000 Pounds, has successfully implemented and continuously refined this behavioural change strategy through action research over the past 30 years with 20,000 people in the United States. This approach has been described by one academic research study as: "unsurpassed in changing behaviour."

Currently the state of Massachusetts is adopting the 'CoolMass' programme led by David, and attracting communities to participate. Judith Van Damm, Director, Sustainable South Shore, Massachusetts says:

"We are one of 11 cities in Massachusetts creating a Cool Community campaign because it boldly sets the high bar needed to shake people and institutions from business as usual. While the minimum goal of 25 percent of households participating in three years is ambitious, it is at the scale that stabilizing climate requires. If we are successful, the culture of our communities will be transformed. Beyond our town, it shows the world that the American people are willing to provide positive leadership in reversing past trends of our unsustainable resource use."

David will be leading a workshop in the UK in May 2009, "Empowering Communities to Reduce their CO" Footprint" - more details at www.thewisdommeme.com/LCD

1. Low Carbon Diet Case Study, Portland, Oregon.

INSEAD study shows benefits of meditation in business

Recent research lead by INSEAD concluded that while a standard executive education approach failed to increase the likelihood of managers making socially responsible business decisions, meditation based coaching programs showed a significant impact on the probability to act in a socially responsible way.

Read the Executive Summary, Conclusions and to access the whole report here

A brief selected summary of key findings and recommendations:

• This was part of a three-year study into the alignment of society’s expectations with managers’ understanding of their company responsibilities.

• The study used randomised matched pair samples with control and placebo groups and looked at the effectiveness of different types of training in “facilitating the development responsible behaviour in [93] managers [in four companies]”.

• The meditation part involved six weeks of two-weekly sessions of 45 minutes at the office – a total of 9 contact hours, plus recommended daily practice.

Results suggest that:

• “The standard executive education approach based on engaged discussion and case analyses fails to facilitate managers to shift towards higher probabilities to make socially responsible decisions.”

• “On the other hand, coaching programs based on introspection and meditation techniques, without any discussion about CSR topics, exhibit a significant impact on both the probability to act in a socially responsible way and on the factors that influence the probability to behave that way.”

• Particularly significant was the move from seeing responsibility as ‘avoiding harm’ toward seeing it as pro-actively ‘doing good’.

• Decision making criteria showed a significant shift from “broadly self interest minded” (e.g. firm, profit, reputation and personal interests) towards emotional (“shows caring and compassion”) and ethical (“breach of an implicit social contract”) strands.

• General decision making criteria related to possible trade offs in day to day work and decision making showed significant shifts:
  • From focus on economic profit toward social welfare
  • From focus on internal audiences toward external audience’s interests
  • From focus on productivity toward impact on the natural environment

• A significant shift in personal values report from: “preserve my public image” to “self transcendent values (e.g. wisdom, responsibility etc).

[Overall this does suggest that meditation has a number of implications and applications in organisations beyond the simple ’stress reduction’ approaches that many people associated it with.]

Leaders Stumped by Innovation

A survey published Accenture shows that the biggest challenges facing businesses who need to innovate is not just releasing creativity, it is taking the ideas generated by the creative spirit and nurturing them until it can be successfully implemented.

This is not surprising when you think that the left-brain logic that dominates most leaders thinking in today's organisations has difficulty comprehending creativity and nurturing which required more right brain understanding.

We need to develop balanced leaders to meet todays challenges.

Serial Management Innovation

A recent HBR article, Gary Hamel suggests that to stay successful it is not enough for companies just to keep thinking up new ideas that competitors quickly copy, they need serial management innovation.

"The keys to serial management innovation? Tackle a big problem--as General Motors did by inventing the divisional structure to bring order to its sprawling family of companies. Search for radical management principles--as Visa's founders did when they envisioned self-organization--and created the first non-stock, for-profit membership enterprise. Challenge conventional management beliefs, which Toyota did by deciding that frontline employees--not top executives--make the best process innovators."

Mindfulness Meditation at Google

High flyers demand love and nurture

This interesting article from the Sunday Times suggests “the new generation expects a lot more support and personal development in their careers.”

The head of consulting at DDI says that bosses need to be “smart with heart” and “the new generation of high flyers will demand the kind of training with kid gloves used for the stars of the sports and entertainment worlds.”

To me this sounds neither smart or caring (heart). It sounds like a call to spoil high flyers and pander to their petty ego-based needs.

If they really want love (tough love?) and nurturing, would it not be better all around to help them develop the self authority, self responsibility and integrity and the full range of their potential that’s needed to be successful leaders in these complex times.

I would have thought the last thing we need in business is more prima-donnas. We need wisdom not celebrities.

Do Women Make Better Managers than Men?

"Women have for centuries been recognized as talented listeners, nurturers, motivators, excellent communicators. These very qualities that we once were told were unbusinesslike are precisely the qualities that business needs most to tap human potential." Mary Cunningham Agee

The new gender gap puts women in front of men, at least in school. So says Gary Becker, the Nobel Prize Winning economist, in a post on the blog he shares with Richard Posner. Ultimately, says Becker:

Whatever the explanation for the remarkable shift in college attendance rates of men and women during the past 40 years, this shift is likely to have major implications for future changes in the gender gap in average earnings, the fraction of heads of business that are women, and other measures of gender differences in achievement.

Here are four other reasons why the glass ceiling is breaking:

Where business meets jazz

“Born in a different time, Dizzy Gillespie, John Coltrane and Miles Davis might have been known as the most successful corporate leaders in America instead of the most well-known jazz musicians. Why? Because of the incredible overlap between the worlds of jazz and business. The elements that make a jazz group phenomenal are similar to those that make companies great.” from CLO magazine

We think jazz is a great metaphor for jazz also - see jazzLEADERSHIP for information about our innovative leadership learning community.

Getting Unstuck

“We have a tendency to make assumptions about what might happen based on imperfect information and our natural ‘confirmation bias’. That is we look for data that confirms our beliefs, unconsciously dismissing anything that counters them.

We also tend to fall into the ‘narrative fallacy’ trap - building up a model or theory in our minds based on past events (which are static) and applying it ad infinitum to a dynamic process we call life.  We help people access more information through structure, conversation and visualization, providing greater clarity, not only of what the individuals and teams want but also of how they think about what they want. We help them think more clearly and design a better future.” - Group Partners with a nod to Nassim Taleb.