Distributed Leadership Quotes

Myth 2: Leadership is about individuals. In fact, leadership is a distributed or collective capacity in a system, not just something that individuals do. Leadership is about the capacity of the whole system to sense and actualize the future that wants to emerge.

Your energy is a valuable resource, distribute it wisely.

A lord who does not distribute wealth is a lord who will lose the allegiance of his men,

That day was an education for me. I'll never forget it. Standing in teh doorway, watching the reaction of the men and women gathered there, I witnessed the poewrful effect of unwavering, uncomplaining, uncompromising leadership. It changed me. It was one of those moments when you say to yourself, [in italics] That's what I want to be when I grow up. and you know you've grown up a little already, simply because you recognize it. Norman called Ducky-Bob's party supply and ordered chairs while I wheeled the second bed out to the hallway. Mommy, Margaret Valentine, and I rushed around, getting everything we needed to cater the cramped but memorable even, and on Tuesday morning, about three dozen top members of the Chili's team jammed into Norman's room at Presbyterian Hospital. Norman didn't what his people to see him lying down, so I'd helped him get into a jogging suit and robe, and propped him up on one of those rolling carts they use to distribute meals. He was in unthinkable pain, but he spoke to them from his heart about how much he appreciated them, how committed he was to the success of the organization, and how far they could all go together.

Meanwhile, two miles down the mine shaft, nineteen men sat in absolute darkness trying to figure out what to do. One of the groups included a man whose arm had been pinned between two timbers, and, out of earshot, the others discussed whether to amputate it or not. The man kept begging them to, but they decided against it and he eventually died. Both groups ran out of food and water and started to drink their own urine. Some used coal dust or bark from the timbers to mask the taste. Some were so hungry that they tried to eat chunks of coal as well. There was an unspoken prohibition against crying, though some men allowed themselves to quietly break down after the lamps died, and many of them avoided thinking about their families. Mostly they just thought about neutral topics like hunting. One man obsessed over the fact that he owed $1.40 for a car part and hoped his wife would pay it after he died. Almost immediately, certain men stepped into leadership roles. While there was still lamplight, these men scouted open passageways to see if they could escape and tried to dig through rockfalls that were blocking their path. When they ran out of water, one man went in search of more and managed to find a precious gallon, which he distributed to the others. These men were also instrumental in getting their fellow survivors to start drinking their own urine or trying to eat coal. Canadian psychologists who interviewed the miners after their rescue determined that these early leaders tended to lack empathy and emotional control, that they were not concerned with the opinions of others, that they associated with only one or two other men in the group, and that their physical abilities far exceeded their verbal abilities. But all of these traits allowed them to take forceful, life-saving action where many other men might not.

Qualities such as honesty, determination, and a cheerful acceptance of stress, which can all be identified through probing questionnaires and interviews, may be more important to the company in the long run than one's college grade-point average or years of "related experience." Every business is only as good as the people it brings into the organization. The corporate trainer should feel his job is the most important in the company, because it is. Exalt seniority-publicly, shamelessly, and with enough fanfare to raise goosebumps on the flesh of the most cynical spectator. And, after the ceremony, there should be some sort of permanent display so that employees passing by are continuously reminded of their own achievements and the achievements of others. The manager must freely share his expertise-not only about company procedures and products and services but also with regard to the supervisory skills he has worked so hard to acquire. If his attitude is, "Let them go out and get their own MBAs," the personnel under his authority will never have the full benefit of his experience. Without it, they will perform at a lower standard than is possible, jeopardizing the manager's own success. Should a CEO proclaim that there is no higher calling than being an employee of his organization? Perhaps not-for fear of being misunderstood-but it's certainly all right to think it. In fact, a CEO who does not feel this way should look for another company to manage-one that actually does contribute toward a better life for all. Every corporate leader should communicate to his workforce that its efforts are important and that employees should be very proud of what they do-for the company, for themselves, and, literally, for the world. If any employee is embarrassed to tell his friends what he does for a living, there has been a failure of leadership at his workplace. Loyalty is not demanded; it is created. Why can't a CEO put out his own suggested reading list to reinforce the corporate vision and core values? An attractive display at every employee lounge of books to be freely borrowed, or purchased, will generate interest and participation. Of course, the program has to be purely voluntary, but many employees will wish to be conversant with the material others are talking about. The books will be another point of contact between individuals, who might find themselves conversing on topics other than the weekend football games. By simply distributing the list and displaying the books prominently, the CEO will set into motion a chain of events that can greatly benefit the workplace. For a very cost-effective investment, management will have yet another way to strengthen the corporate message. The very existence of many companies hangs not on the decisions of their visionary CEOs and energetic managers but on the behavior of its receptionists, retail clerks, delivery drivers, and service personnel. The manager must put himself and his people through progressively challenging courage-building experiences. He must make these a mandatory group experience, and he must lead the way. People who have confronted the fear of public speaking, and have learned to master it, find that their new confidence manifests itself in every other facet of the professional and personal lives. Managers who hold weekly meetings in which everyone takes on progressively more difficult speaking or presentation assignments will see personalities revolutionized before their eyes. Command from a forward position, which means from the thick of it. No soldier will ever be inspired to advance into a hail of bullets by orders phoned in on the radio from the safety of a remote command post; he is inspired to follow the officer in front of him. It is much more effective to get your personnel to follow you than to push them forward from behind a desk. The more important the mission, the more important it is to be at the front.

Yet the deepest and most enduring forms of cultural change nearly always occurs from the “top down.” In other words, the work of world-making and world-changing are, by and large, the work of elites: gatekeepers who provide creative direction and management within spheres of social life. Even where the impetus for change draws from popular agitation, it does not gain traction until it is embraced and propagated by elites. The reason for this, as I have said, is that culture is about how societies define reality—what is good, bad, right, wrong, real, unreal, important, unimportant, and so on. This capacity is not evenly distributed in a society, but is concentrated in certain institutions and among certain leadership groups who have a lopsided access to the means of cultural production. These elites operate in well-developed networks and powerful institutions. Over time, cultural innovation is translated and diffused. Deep-rooted cultural change tends to begin with those whose work is most conceptual and invisible and it moves through to those whose work is most concrete and visible. In a very crude formulation, the process begins with theorists who generate ideas and knowledge; moves to researchers who explore, revise, expand, and validate ideas; moves on to teachers and educators who pass those ideas on to others, then passes on to popularizers who simplify ideas and practitioners who apply those ideas. All of this, of course, transpires through networks and structures of cultural production. Cultural change is most enduring when it penetrates the structure of our imagination, frameworks of knowledge and discussion, the perception of everyday reality. This rarely if ever happens through grassroots political mobilization though grassroots mobilization can be a manifestation of deeper cultural transformation.

In 2014, some 60,000 women entrepreneurs cover a population of a hundred million deep in rural India where there is poor road and media connectivity. These women doubled their household income in no time. Women started to gain social respectability and for Unilever it was competitive advantage in distribution. “What a tremendous win-win he helped us create.

The reason I am saying this is when talent becomes the critical resource for running companies and is distributed around the world, inter cultural competence, inter personal competence, the capacity to get people from different parts of the world from China, India, Germany, UK, US and Brazil all to work together requires the ability of a good sheep dog.

The firm’s employees play active roles alongside those of the client, but in a way designed to make the overall combination more effective. Typically, their employees provide either specialized capabilities too cost-prohibitive for the local force to develop on its own (such as flying advanced fighter jets or operating artillery control systems), or they may be distributed across the forces of the client, in order to provide general leadership and experience to a greater number of individual units.

But a company which wants economic results has to have leadership in something of real value to a customer or market. It may be in one narrow but important aspect of the product line, it may be in its service, it may be in its distribution, or it may be in its ability to convert ideas into salable products on the market speedily and at low cost.

Crowdsourcing is the ultimate disruptor of distribution because in a most Zen-like fashion, the content is controlled by everyone and no one at the same time.

In his book Superminds, MIT professor Thomas Malone probes what makes groups smarter than individuals. He found that one of the factors is the degree to which the words are evenly distributed among the participants. The other two factors Professor Malone attributes the superior group intelligence to are the social intelligence of the members of the group and the proportion of women in the group.

Message to Extraterrestrial Civilizations First Draft [Complete Text] Attention, you who have received this message! This message was sent out by a country that represents revolutionary justice on Earth! Before this, you may have already received other messages sent from the same direction. Those messages were sent by an imperialist superpower on this planet. That superpower is struggling against another superpower for world domination so that it can drag human history backwards. We hope you will not listen to their lies. Stand with justice, stand with the revolution! [Instructions from Central Leadership] >This is utter crap! It’s enough to put up big-character posters27 everywhere on the ground, but we should not send them into space. The Cultural Revolution leadership should no longer have any involvement with Red Coast. Such an important message must be composed carefully. It’s probably best to have it drafted by a special committee and then discussed and approved by a meeting of the Politburo. Signed: XXX Date: XX/XX/196X Second Draft [omitted] Third Draft [omitted] Fourth Draft [Complete Text] We extend our best wishes to you, inhabitants of another world. After reading the following message, you should have a basic understanding of civilization on Earth. By dint of long toil and creativity, the human race has built a splendid civilization, blossoming with a multitude of diverse cultures. We have also begun to understand the laws governing the natural world and the development of human societies. We cherish all that we have accomplished. But our world is still flawed. Hate exists, as does prejudice and war. Because of conflicts between the forces of production and the relations of production, wealth distribution is extremely uneven, and large portions of humanity live in poverty and misery. Human societies are working hard to resolve the difficulties and problems they face, striving to create a better future for Earth civilization. The country that sent this message is engaged in this effort. We are dedicated to building an ideal society, where the labor and value of every member of the human race are fully respected, where everyone’s material and spiritual needs are fully met, so that civilization on Earth may become more perfect. With the best of intentions, we look forward to establishing contact with other civilized societies in the universe. We look forward to working together with you to build a better life in this vast universe.

Message to Extraterrestrial Civilizations First Draft [Complete Text] Attention, you who have received this message! This message was sent out by a country that represents revolutionary justice on Earth! Before this, you may have already received other messages sent from the same direction. Those messages were sent by an imperialist superpower on this planet. That superpower is struggling against another superpower for world domination so that it can drag human history backwards. We hope you will not listen to their lies. Stand with justice, stand with the revolution! [Instructions from Central Leadership] This is utter crap! It’s enough to put up big-character posters everywhere on the ground, but we should not send them into space. The Cultural Revolution leadership should no longer have any involvement with Red Coast. Such an important message must be composed carefully. It’s probably best to have it drafted by a special committee and then discussed and approved by a meeting of the Politburo. Signed: XXX Date: XX/XX/196X Second Draft [omitted] Third Draft [omitted] Fourth Draft [Complete Text] We extend our best wishes to you, inhabitants of another world. After reading the following message, you should have a basic understanding of civilization on Earth. By dint of long toil and creativity, the human race has built a splendid civilization, blossoming with a multitude of diverse cultures. We have also begun to understand the laws governing the natural world and the development of human societies. We cherish all that we have accomplished. But our world is still flawed. Hate exists, as does prejudice and war. Because of conflicts between the forces of production and the relations of production, wealth distribution is extremely uneven, and large portions of humanity live in poverty and misery. Human societies are working hard to resolve the difficulties and problems they face, striving to create a better future for Earth civilization. The country that sent this message is engaged in this effort. We are dedicated to building an ideal society, where the labor and value of every member of the human race are fully respected, where everyone’s material and spiritual needs are fully met, so that civilization on Earth may become more perfect. With the best of intentions, we look forward to establishing contact with other civilized societies in the universe. We look forward to working together with you to build a better life in this vast universe.

But Anita Roddick had a different take on that. In 1976, before the words to say it had been found, she set out to create a business that was socially and environmentally regenerative by design. Opening The Body Shop in the British seaside town of Brighton, she sold natural plant-based cosmetics (never tested on animals) in refillable bottles and recycled boxes (why throw away when you can use again?) while paying a fair price to the communities worldwide that supplied cocoa butter, brazil nut oil and dried herbs. As production expanded, the business began to recycle its wastewater for using in its products and was an early investor in wind power. Meanwhile, company profits went to The Body Shop Foundation, which gave them to social and environmental causes. In all, a pretty generous enterprise. Roddick’s motivation? ‘I want to work for a company that contributes to and is part of the community,’ she later explained. ‘If I can’t do something for the public good, what the hell am I doing?’47 Such a values-driven mission is what the analyst Marjorie Kelly calls a company’s ‘living purpose’—turning on its head the neoliberal script that the business of business is simply business. Roddick proved that business can be far more than that, by embedding benevolent values and a regenerative intent at the company’s birth. ‘We dedicated the Articles of Association and Memoranda—which in England is the legal definition of the purpose of your company—to human rights advocacy and social and environmental change,’ she explained in 2005, ‘so everything the company did had that as its canopy.’48 Today’s most innovative enterprises are inspired by the same idea: that the business of business is to contribute to a thriving world. And the growing family of enterprise structures that are intentionally distributive by design—including cooperatives, not-for-profits, community interest companies, and benefit corporations—can be regenerative by design too.49 By explicitly making a regenerative commitment in their corporate by-laws and enshrining it in their governance, they can safeguard a ‘living purpose’ through times of leadership change and protect it from mission creep. Indeed the most profound act of corporate responsibility for any company today is to rewrite its corporate by-laws, or articles of association, in order to redefine itself with a living purpose, rooted in regenerative and distributive design, and then to live and work by it.

War bias comes about when the people who decide whether or not to launch a conflict have a set of risks and rewards different from the society they supposedly represent. In other words, when the leadership’s private incentives differ from the public interest. This isn’t true everywhere. In some societies, wealth, the means of production, and guns are widely distributed rather than concentrated in a few hands. Some peoples have also grown political rules and social norms that check elites, forcing them to seek the consent of the governed. These institutions and distributions of power help align the ruler’s interests with the public’s.

Leaders’ confidence is most useful when based on reality. Demagogues, fools, and charlatans may pretend they know exactly what the future holds. But the future is best thought of as a distribution of possible outcomes, some more likely than others. Mapping that uncertainty allows you to place smart bets that maximize expected value or minimize the expected loss of life. As a leader, this is how to sharpen your thinking and messaging. You should be the type of leader with the courage to admit uncertainty and use it to make wise decisions. Even so, leaders face difficult decisions about how ambitious they can be.

One of the essential factors to achieving enduring market leadership is a winning, scalable distribution strategy.

The new leadership structure in the quarter revealed the complexity of intra- (and inter-) plantation politics and economies. Diverse origins and competing ambitions fractured plantations and neighborhoods as often as they created new solidarities. Differences among slaves fueled powerful and often deadly disputes - rivalries rooted in petty accumulations of wealth or the other small rewards of plantation life. Still other conflicts arose between older residents and new arrivals. Slaveholders became maestros at recognizing and manipulating these rivalries, seizing upon their slaves' diverse personalities, abilities, aspirations, and petty jealousies to promote one individual, family, or faction at the expense of others. Planters understood that small privileges distributed to slaves could reap large advantages for themselves. But, if masters appreciated the strategy of divide and conquer, slaves also understood that, despite their internal differences, they had a common foe whose power knew few bounds and whose compunctions about using it had even fewer limitations. Fear from above, as well as common experience, compelled slaves to stand together, and as they did, the terrain of struggle between master and slave shifted once again.

District competitiveness may influence the distribution of federal funding for projects. With electoral security comes seniority and with seniority comes greater influence often in the guise of committee or subcommittee leadership so that a legislator from an uncompetitive district, all other things being equal, may be especially effective in securing pork barrel projects.60 The politically powerful who often come from secure districts and, in the past when earmarks were allowed, they could insert for projects and contracts. An alternative perspective, however, suggests that it is only the most electorally insecure incumbents who will go to the additional trouble of winning new projects for their districts.61 Many

Welch and Conaty had implemented a 20-70-10 performance ranking system, where GE employees were sorted into three groups: the top 20 percent, the middle 70 percent, and the bottom 10 percent. The top workers were lionized and rewarded with choice assignments, leadership training programs, and stock options. The bottom 10 percent were fired. Under Immelt, the forced distribution was softened and the crisp labels of “top 20 percent,” “middle 70 percent,” and “bottom 10 percent” were replaced with euphemisms: “top talent,” “highly valued,” and “needs improvement.

Value of a corporation should be distributed not only to its leadership but also to the communities in which it operates and to the world

A good leader always accepts the blame and distributes the reward.

In the late 1990s, Parachute was the market leader with more than 50 per cent market share. Fresh from its success in taking market share in toothpaste away from Colgate using Pepsodent, HUL entered the coconut oil category to take on Marico. Dadiseth, the then chairman of HUL, had warned Mariwala to sell Marico to HUL or face dire consequences. Mariwala decided to take on the challenge. Even the capital markets believed that Marico stood no chance against the might of HUL which resulted in Marico’s price-to-earnings ratio dipping to as low as 7x, as against 13x during its listing in 1996. As part of its plans to take on Marico, HUL relaunched Nihar in 1998, acquired Cococare from Redcon and positioned both brands as price challengers to Parachute. In addition, HUL also increased advertising and promotion spends for its brands. In one quarter in FY2000, HUL’s advertising and promotional (A&P) spend on coconut oil alone was an amount which was almost equivalent to Marico’s full year A&P budget (around Rs 30 crore). As Milind Sarwate, former CFO of Marico, recalls, ‘Marico’s response was typically entrepreneurial and desi. We quickly realized that we have our key resource engine under threat. So, we re-prioritized and focused entirely on Parachute. We gave the project a war flavour. For example, the business conference on this issue saw Mariconians dressed as soldiers. The project was called operation Parachute ki Kasam. The leadership galvanized the whole team. It was exhilarating as the team realized the gravity of the situation and sprang into action. We were able to recover lost ground and turn the tables, so much so that eventually Marico acquired the aggressor brand, Nihar.’ Marico retaliated by relaunching Parachute: (a) with a new packaging; (b) with a new tag line highlighting its purity (Shuddhata ki Seal—or the seal of purity); (c) by widening its distribution; and (d) by launching an internal sales force initiative. Within twelve months, Parachute regained its lost share, thus limiting HUL’s growth. Despite several relaunches, Nihar failed against Parachute. Eventually, HUL dropped the brand Nihar off its power brand list before selling it off to Marico in 2006. Since then, Parachute has been the undisputed leader in the coconut oil category. This leadership has ensured that when one visits the hair oil section in a retail store, about 80 per cent of the shelves are occupied by Marico-branded hair oil.

There are numerous other tools companies don’t know how to use or haven’t mastered. And I am not talking about “social media” as a tool. Social media is a distribution tool. I’m talking about design, color, imagery, typography, style and form (as in packaging).

the Great Man theory (that leaders are born not made, the concept closest to our idea of some people, such as Rick Rescorla, having the ‘right stuff’); trait theory (a derivative of Great Man theory, which posits that leaders are distinguished by the traits or attributes they display, such as integrity and trustworthiness); psychoanalytic theory (Freud’s idea that all social groups are representations of the family); charismatic leadership (in which a figure attracts followers purely on the basis of personality); behavioural theory (that effective leadership results from certain behaviours); situational theory (that the way leadership is executed depends on the situation); contingency theory (an expansion of situational theory, which, in addition to situation, takes account of variables such as the kind of task for which leadership is required and how much power the leader has); transactional versus transformational leadership theory (which contrasts a fairly conventional style of leadership with a more visionary, inspirational style); distributed leadership theory (which eschews a strict hierarchy for a more fluid model, in which leadership roles are shared naturally rather than being formally assigned); and servant leadership theory, in which leadership is carried out purely for the benefit of the group, often at cost to the leader himself.

The radical rhetoric of the early fascist movements led many observers, then and since, to suppose that once in power the fascist regimes would make sweeping and fundamental changes in the very bases of national life. In practice, although fascist regimes did indeed make some breathtaking changes, they left the distribution of property and the economic and social hierarchy largely intact (differing fundamentally from what the word revolution had usually meant since 1789). The reach of the fascist “revolution” was restricted by two factors. For one thing, even at their most radical, early fascist programs and rhetoric had never attacked wealth and capitalism as directly as a hasty reading might suggest. As for social hierarchy, fascism’s leadership principle effectively reinforced it, though fascists posed some threat to inherited position by advocating the replacement of the tired bourgeois elite by fascist “new men.” The handful of real fascist outsiders, however, went mostly into the parallel organizations. The scope of fascist change was further limited by the disappearance of many radicals during the period of taking root and coming to power. As fascist movements passed from protest and the harnessing of disparate resentments to the conquest of power, with its attendant alliances and compromises, their priorities changed, along with their functions. They became far less interested in assembling the discontented than in mobilizing and unifying national energies for national revival and aggrandizement. This obliged them to break many promises made to the socially and economically discontented during the first years of fascist recruitment. The Nazis in particular broke promises to the small peasants and artisans who had been the mainstay of their electoral following, and to favor urbanization and industrial production. Despite their frequent talk about “revolution,” fascists did not want a socioeconomic revolution. They wanted a “revolution of the soul,” and a revolution in the world power position of their people. They meant to unify and invigorate and empower their decadent nation—to reassert the prestige of Romanità or the German Volk or Hungarism or other group destiny. For that purpose they believed they needed armies, productive capacity, order, and property. Force their country’s traditional productive elements into subjection, perhaps; transform them, no doubt; but not abolish them. The fascists needed the muscle of these bastions of established power to express their people’s renewed unity and vitality at home and on the world stage. Fascists wanted to revolutionize their national institutions in the sense that they wanted to pervade them with energy, unity, and willpower, but they never dreamed of abolishing property or social hierarchy. The fascist mission of national aggrandizement and purification required the most fundamental changes in the nature of citizenship and in the relation of citizens to the state since the democratic revolutions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The first giant step was to subordinate the individual to the community. Whereas the liberal state rested on a compact among its citizens to protect individual rights and freedoms, the fascist state embodied the national destiny, in service to which all the members of the national group found their highest fulfillment. We have seen that both regimes found some distinguished nonfascist intellectuals ready to support this position. In fascist states, individual rights had no autonomous existence. The State of Law—the Rechtsstaat, the état de droit—vanished, along with the principles of due process by which citizens were guaranteed equitable treatment by courts and state agencies. A suspect acquitted in a German court of law could be rearrested by agents of the regime at the courthouse door and put in a concentration camp without any further legal procedure.

Today I address professionals, business leaders and researchers on how they can contribute with innovative ideas to achieve these ten pillars. These are as follows: 1) A nation where the rural and urban divide has reduced to a thin line. 2) A nation where there is equitable distribution and adequate access to energy and quality water. 3) A nation where agriculture, industry and the service sector work together in symphony. 4) A nation where education with value systems is not denied to any meritorious candidates because of societal or economic discrimination. 5) A nation which is the best destination for the most talented scholars, scientists and investors. 6) A nation where the best of healthcare is available to all. 7) A nation where the governance is responsive, transparent and corruption free. 8) A nation where poverty has been totally eradicated, illiteracy removed and crimes against women and children are absent and no one in the society feels alienated. 9) A nation that is prosperous, healthy, secure, peaceful and happy and follows a sustainable growth path. 10) A nation that is one of the best places to live in and is proud of its leadership.

Finally, for very large. organizations, and especially companies that operate in multiple locations and time zones, governance needs to move from distributing principles to collecting advice. This essentially reverses the typical central governance model. Instead of telling teams what to do, the primary role of the central governance comittee becomes to collect experience information from the field, find correlations, and echo back guidance that reflects "best practice" within the wider organization.

If….the conditions that make our volunteering what it is, that helped create do-ocracy, in our organization culture are based on do-ocratic volunteers at every level, then leadership in burning Man culture does not involve being a manager or a visionary but instead being a person who helps encourage, and distribute relevance, agency, competence, relatedness, and engagement. That's what our leaders do. They create the conditions in which our volunteers and teammates can have that experience of intrinsic motivation, developing social capital, using ther skills to the fullest, having a meaningful place in our community, where they do work that is meaningful to them and are able and encouraged to express their own voice and self.

Managers today must change from being supervisors of internal performance to being ‘curators of contribution’ from a distributed talent system.