Sheep, Tribes and Leadership: book reviews, March 09

March 13, 2009

Throwing Sheep in the Boardroom
Matthew Fraser and Soumitra Dutta
John Wiley & Sons, 2009, $42.95
Two stars

Tribes
Seth Godin
Piatkus, 2009, $22.99
One and a half stars

The Leadership Code
Dave Ulrich, Norm Smallwood, Kate Sweetman
Harvard Business Press, 2009
$29.95
One star

Business book publishing is a funny old game. It takes at least six months to write a decent book, and – goodness knows why it takes so long – usually six months or longer to get it from final draft to an actual product that can be shipped in boxes out to bookstores and publicised in magazines.
So the “new releases” table at your local Borders is actually an insightful snapshot into the mindscape of the publishing industry 12-18 months ago. Clearly publishers thought Web 2.0 or social networking was going to be hot.
Despite the onset of the most significant economic downturn in living memory, they may have been righter than they can imagine. If we’re entering a period of massive creative destruction, then perhaps the single most important foundation on which the new world will be built will be the social network, the ties that bind us all together across companies, industries, and geographies.
As Matthew Fraser and Soumitra Dutta write in the garishly titled Throwing Sheep in the Boardroom, sociologists have been aware that “weak ties” – those social connections whom we sort of know, perhaps through others, but have never actually gone drinking with – are perhaps the most important network we have. As the waves of redundancies roll through the global economy over the next twelve months, those who retain their employment can expect ever more “Hi, I’m a friend of Joe” type contacts getting back in touch to see if there just might be some value they can add.
Social networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace, Bebo and specialist networking sites such as LinkedIn, for work networking, aSmallWorld, for the rich and famous, and Reuters social networking site specially for hedge fund managers (membership presumably shrinking) provide incredibly powerful tools for network management.
These tools not only provide a new foundation for what it means to manage ones personal career, but also for developing entirely new forms of organisation. If an organisation is a mechanism for pulling together resources to produce outcomes, using LinkedIn to gather together the best brains for each task from the far reaches of your personal network might just be the new multinational.
Fraser and Dutta delve deep into the social networking phenomenon, showing how the Web 2.0 will inevitably lead to a power shift away from vertical hierarchies to horizontal social networks. The consequences will be real. They also explore the consequences of a world in which your past is indelibly imprinted on a globally accessible database, and workplace conundrums such as what to do if one of your subordinates is tagged in a photo sucking on a bong.
Although Tribes hits all the Web 2.0 social networking buttons, it is perhaps less a reflection of what was in publisher’s minds a year ago than what was in author Seth Godin’s mind for a non-specific nano-second sometime in 2008. Godin is a mega prolific marketing guru whose dozen or so books, including Purple Cow and Permissions Marketing, and are written in the breathless style of the breed. Godin’s mission is to convince you (yes you!) to pick up the mantle of leader of the tribe…and then convince your followers to buy your stuff.
Think of the Grateful Dead. The band had just one top 40 album, but managed to gross over $100 million, not from record sales but from gigs, T-shirts, and skimming (in the hippiest possible way of course) the tribe that followed them around from festival to festival. The internet makes it possible to build tribes in many different ways: bigger tribes across more geographies, smaller tribes of more specialism, tribes you work with, travel with discuss with. Tribes are facilitated by social networking sites – Ning, for instance, makes it easy and instant to set up an entire social networking site for people who like cooking with white chocolate, for instance, or panel beaters in the south east suburbs.
Godin’s call to arms is often motivating, occasionally annoying, and jumps from pillar to post with exhausting speed. Be a heretic! A change agent! Don’t settle! But if you are in an industry that is changing fast or dying faster – think music or (yikes!) the media – there are ideas here, and many of them.
Would it were so in The Leadership Code. Ask yourself: What makes a great leader? Now ask yourself: Is there a question more tired than that?
Publishers know there is always a market for those who want to look deep inside and find the kernel of a great leader. Or even a competent manager. This book attempts to provide it by “capturing the essence of good leadership” in five rules. It asks: “Does an effective leader at Starbucks or Whole Foods in any way resemble an effective leader at ExxonMobil? … Does an effective leader in organised crime in any way resemble an effective leader in organised religion?”
Staunchly ignoring the comedy potential of that last question with a lack of irony that runs throughout, the authors press on through a swamp of tired business clichés to their precise conclusion: the five rules of the “leadership code” represent about 60 to 70 percent of what makes an effective leader.
Even if such a claim sounds preposterous, you can see how any leader who manages to consistently do what the leadership code suggests will meet with success. The five rules are:
•    Shape the future: Make strategy – understand where the organisation is going and how it is going to get there. Communicate this to people and make sure they understand it too. Be a “practical futurist”.
•    Make things happen: Execute. Translate strategy into action.
•    Engage today’s talent: Motivate people to join and build the business now.
•    Build the next generation: Figure out what the organisation’s human capital needs will be tomorrow, and make sure they will be fulfilled. And,
•    Invest in yourself: Don’t lose the plot under the burden of leadership. Make sure you stay grounded, fit and are in a position to handle the inevitable stresses of the job.
The authors recognise that not everyone will be equally good at each of these, but that’s where rule 5 comes in.
The lead author, Dave Ulrich, is something of the HR guru, having helped Jack Welch mould GE. The thesis provides the basis for a model of leadership that is at least easy to understand and intuitive – the kind of thing you could put on your office wall and look at every now and again when things are getting out of control.
Which in the world of Web 2.0 is likely to be more often than not.

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