As I discussed last week, I feel there is variability in these types of assessments and if I re-took the assessment a week, a month [etc.] from now, I would score differently. Nevertheless, at this point in time the results are clear, I value people, enjoy pleasing them, and value loyalty among coworkers. From knowing myself better than anyone else, I’d have to agree with the values a high LPC score denotes. However, my competitive side also values completing a task and desires competence in my coworkers. Looking at my satisfaction with types of work I’ve done over the past one and a half years [at State Street], I know I prefer long-term projects over repetitive short-term tasks. In fact, a few months ago I moved over to a processing team, where the tasks are similar, day in and day out, and the volume is high. Although I derived pleasure from finishing a high volume of these tasks, I found myself making mistakes as the tasks require an attention to very minute details. Part of these tasks involves applying tax rates to a client depending on their residency, account structure and other details. I found I would constantly apply the wrong tax rate [luckily, our auditors caught all of these before they went live] or make a small typo. Overall, my quality of work on this task-processing team was good but not exceptional.

Meanwhile, I was working on multiple projects before joining the task processing team, and earned an Outstanding Performance award for my devotion to the project’s goals. On these projects, I would have to build a good working relationship with coworkers in the office and in outside organizations. I excelled at building these relationships, which allowed me to push my coworkers and contacts when necessary without damaging the relationship. I also paid more attention to the details of the project, and made fewer mistakes as I had a commitment to my coworkers and contacts to ensure quality work. Also, the details in the projects were of a much more complex nature and dealt with client and market situations, rather than minute details.

So even though I fight the results of these assessments, it does seem, compared to my actual experiences, that I am a high LPC, at least more than I am a low LPC. Rather than being heavily tilted to one side, I feel that I use aspects of both, depending on the situation and my mood, to accomplish my and the organization’s goals. It also does not surprise me that my LPC shows I am motivated by relationships right now. I work in the typical corporate office setting, where networking plays a much larger role in promotions than performance.

There is a leadership situation in my past, which goes counter to my current LPC score. In this situation, I was the formal and informal leader! A brief background, in the 6th grade, I gained admission into the prestigious Boston Latin School, a public exam school [you must pass a test to enter the school], for the 7th grade. In the 8th grade, I tried out for and made the freshman football team. Although there were tryouts, in essence everyone was able to play for the team who had a modicum of desire or bare minimum of skills. At Latin, our athletic teams are not the focus of the school, and are quite often the last area to receive funding. We still do not have a home football field and instead share White Stadium with the other city schools. The lack of funding and focus on academics has negatively affected the football’s teams performance. The freshman team had a longstanding tradition of winless seasons, a tradition which repeated in my first year on the team. In the 9th grade, I was appointed to one of the two co-captain positions for the freshman team.

Accepting my responsibility as a captain, I was extremely motivated to win at least one game. That was my goal, and I viewed each game as a task with a clear success/failure evaluation. If we won, we succeeded; if we lost, we failed.

Self-Rating of Effectiveness

Score: 5/10

Although the freshmen team did not win a single game under my captaincy, I still feel the group and I had a few moral victories. For one, right from the start we were behind all of our competitors. Rather than playing against other public high schools in the city of Boston, we played in the Dual County League, playing teams from rich suburban neighborhoods, with a lot more resources and focus on their athletic success. Many of the kids on these suburban teams had been playing together since their early youth, so they not only had more experience playing football, but also more experience playing together. There were more than a few games where we were simply blown out.

Another disadvantage which directly affected our group performance was our lack of a home field. Whereas the varsity team played at White Stadium, a shared home stadium among city teams, the freshman team traveled to our competitor’s field for all of our games. Not only did we not have a home field crowd to motivate us, we also experienced biased referees who would clearly make calls to help the home team. If we could have played all of our games under unbiased referees, we definitely would have won at least a couple of games. Even though we failed my goal of winning one game, under the circumstances we performed admirably.

Leader-Member Relations

Score: 19/40

The fact that this was a high school football team helped and hurt leader-member relations. For one, we were all less mature then, and petty differences between people would cause fights between individuals occasionally. I didn’t help matters much either, as I led by a decidedly authoritative style, often yelling at my teammates after we lost games. In particular, a lot of my teammates didn’t seem to care as much about the end result of the game as I did; conversely, I cared too much about the end result in the grand scheme of life. I really wanted our team to break the winless tradition and my teammates understood that no one would blame us for not winning a game. Neither side was right, and a healthy medium existed which would have benefited everyone if both sides drifted more to that healthy middle ground. Hence, even though I led with a strong right hand, I also was friends with many of these people on and off the field, which helped me avoid physical harm from my leadership style. My friends and teammates understood I just wanted us to win, but then and now they think I would have been more effective if I relaxed my style a bit. The other co-captain led more by example and less by actual leadership. He was calm and stayed back often, but at times would also yell and shout at our teammates; the difference is when he yelled our teammates knew he was dead serious and it was time to shape up immediately. He still should have been more vocal, and several of our friend-teammates encouraged him to talk more often. We all had our faults back then, hind-sight is great now but at the time we tried our best and still often failed miserably.

Task Structure

Task Structure Part I: 16/20
Task Structure Part II: (-) 3/9
Task Structure: 13

Any sports team has to be structured to ensure all of the players and coaches are on the same page, hence why every sports team has a playbook. The playbook is the blue-print of the team’s strategy. Plus, the goal is obviously clear, win. The team’s schedule also has to be structured to ensure everyone is at the same place at the same time. If the timing of the players is off, the play usually won’t work and might even result in penalties. On a successful team, everyone knows their role and understands the step they need to take to fulfill that role. In this way, our team was like the majority of teams. Timing and adaptability were the two big shortcomings of our structure. As I said before, we were at a disadvantage since all the other teams had years of experience of playing with each other, and had all of their plays and timing and style down quite well. They were also able to adapt plays to the talents of their players, since the coaches had plenty of time to evaluate their players and adjust their strategy accordingly. On the other hand, our team’s coaches barely had enough time to implement our playbook, yet alone start changing it to fit the unique skills of our players.

I had one year of formal experience and training over the rest of my teammates, so I chose a moderate level of training and experience. I didn’t choose very little because our academic program was much better than any of the other schools and trained me to critically analyze situations, which comes in handy on a football field, where you have to quickly analyze and act on a huge number of factors during every play. My obsession with football also helped analyze game film and adjust my game accordingly.

Position Power

Score: 6/0

As a co-captain I had some power over my teammates, but the coach is the dictator in this situation, and at best I could only offer recommendations on players and strategies.

Did my leadership style fit the situation? At the time, no, if I was in the same situation now, yes. At the time I was much closer to an a low LPC than my current high LPC. A low LPC thrives in situations with high or low control, whereas the co-captain of a high school football team has moderate to low control over the situation, requiring a high LPC for success. My co-captain was closer to a high LPC at the time, but he too struggled with the low control portion of the situation, whereas I was a low LPC at the time, and struggled with the moderate control of the situation.

The results of my low LPC style in this moderate control situation match the predictions of Fiedler’s Contingency Theory on the surface. Below the surface, we had a few moral victories which just do not show up in quantitative analysis of the situation. The next year, our junior varsity team, earned a 4-6 record, and still all of us objectively agreed we should have been 6-4, if a very few factors were flipped. Of course, the opposite is also true and we could have also ended up with only 1-2 wins too. The junior varsity team kept the same two captains from our freshman year and added two additional captains. I also matured greatly and focused much more on relationships, for instance making sure my teammates didn’t play hurt and that everyone got a chance to attempt a position they wanted to play. I also had a lot more input with the coach on how our team should be managed. Although I was still focused on tasks, the fact that we were succeeding at these tasks took the edge of my authoritative style and I gradually moved to the middle of the LPC scale, where expecting competence and loyalty from my teammates greatly improved my leadership effectiveness.

If I knew what I know now, about football and leadership, I am quite confident that if placed in the same position, I could share enough knowledge and help my teammates by leading them on the path to (at least one) victory.

Bill Drayton is one such individual; his attention to micro situations such as the “bubble”¹, an air zone that allows us to associate pollution to a polluter, and searching for individuals, “…who will become references in their field, who will set or change patterns at the national level or, in the case of a small country, at a larger regional level²“, led to macro-level improvements in environmental standards and growth of social entrepreneurship.

Through a majority of his professional career, Bill has shown a passion for innovative ways to infuse ethical values ["the language used by Drayton...is caring, compassionate and moral"³], and positive change into society.

At a time when socialism has been proven to be a dismal failure, and government programs have created as many problems as they solve, Ashoka may well be showing us the path to a better world.⁴

At the Environmental Protection Agency, Mr. Drayton championed a trading system for environmental credits, which companies could buy to offset their negative impact on the environment, or sell for profit, if they produced in an environmentally friendly manner. Bill recognized that financial incentives are a crucial motivating factor for American business and that combining economics and environmentalism would lead to fruitful results for companies, government, and society as a whole. At the time, his idea was unpopular among environmental groups

‘Concepts that Bill was advocating twenty years ago, that were considered radical cave-ins by the environmental movement, are today advocated by nearly everybody as better ways to control pollution’ explains Jodie Bernstein, the director of the Bureau of Consumer Protection, who worked with Drayton at the EPA.²

By the late 1990s, emissions trading had drastically reduced sulfur dioxide pollution and was implemented in the European Union’s strategy for complying with the Kyoto Protocol.¹ This visionary ability of Drayton’s would carry over to Ashoka, where he worked to empower social entrepreneurs to affect change in their communities by first changing the perception of non-profit organizations, from purely looking at organizations to searching out individuals. To do so, Drayton first instilled other social entrepreneurs into Ashoka, to increase the efficiency of finding new socially driven individuals.

Every aspect of Ashoka exudes change, from the transformations in society that allowed for the birth of Ashoka, to the mission of Ashoka of empowering social entrepreneurs to enact improvements within their communities, Ashoka is in the business of change.

Drayton sees Ashoka’s success as coming at a critical time. ‘The last two decades have seen the emergence of a competitive citizen sector,’ he says, ‘a rapid multiplication of the number, size, and skill level of citizen organizations. It’s as important as the emergence of the competitive business sector many centuries ago.’⁵

We especially see this emphasis on change instilled into Ashoka’s vision and mission.

Vision:

Ashoka envisions a world where Everyone is a Changemaker: a world that responds quickly and effectively to social challenges, and where each individual has the freedom, confidence and societal support to address any social problem and drive change.

Mission:

Ashoka strives to shape a global, entrepreneurial, competitive citizen sector: one that allows social entrepreneurs to thrive and enables the world’s citizens to think and act as changemakers. ⁶

It comes as no surprise then, that Bill Drayton heavily utilizes change-oriented leadership to accomplish his and Ashoka’s goals. When describing Drayton, Michael Northrop and Julien Phillips are amazed at Bill’s “…unshakable faith in what’s he’s doing and in the value of each person’s life toward effecting change…That’s a tremendously powerful combination.”⁷

Michael and Julien, an Ashoka employee and an Ashoka founding director (respectively) witness the supreme self-confidence and concrete belief Dayton places in himself and his ideas, a telling sign of charismatic leadership. Northrop felt that Dayton’s charismatic leadership made it seem he had a whole army of supporters, when in reality he only had a few individuals, and that the sheer force of his belief in his ideas seemed to lend them a quality of inevitability.¹ In addition to this super self-confidence and conviction in his ideas, Bill displays the other characteristics of charismatic leaders, defined by Afsaneh Nahavandi as high energy and enthusiasm, expressiveness and excellent communication skills, active image building and role modeling.⁸

In an interview with U.S. News & World Report, Bill shows us his high energy and enthusiasm for social entrepreneurship while answering a question about difficult times at Ashoka, How could any entrepreneur, confronted by such amazing opportunities to help transform the world and to do so with such extraordinary colleagues, be tempted to lose focus?⁹ Mr. Drayton clearly loves his line of work and is able to utilize his full energy and utmost enthusiasm to distribute the Ashoka vision and mission because of his belief in the virtues of Ashoka and the satisfaction he gets from working to distribute the Ashoka vision.

Muhammud Yunus and Bill Drayton [left to right]:

Role modeling is also very evident at Ashoka and in Bill’s leadership style:

When Drayton calls someone a ‘social entrepreneur,’ he is describing a specific and rare personality type–someone, in fact, like himself…Ashoka’s social entrepreneur is a pathbreaker with a powerful new idea, who combines visionary and real-world problem-solving creativity, who has a strong ethical fiber, and who is ‘totally possessed’ by his or her vision for change.²

These are characteristics evident within Bill Drayton, and characteristics which Ashoka seeks to find in other social entrepreneurs, after all Bill Drayton is, as David Bornstein describes in an interview with David Creelman of HR.com…the social entrepreneur of social entrepreneurship.¹⁰ Bill saw a gap between the commercial and social sector and realized social entrepreneurs could bridge that gap. Before anyone heard of micro-finance or sustainable investments, Drayton acted to aid individuals in solving social issues through good business logic and sense.

Traveling around the world he began to see that the most valuable resource are the people whom he called ‘social entrepreneurs.’ People who decide in their hearts that they want to effect a certain kind of change and because of the quality of their motivation and their particular brew of talents they actually do go out and build organizations…Drayton’s insight was that if you want to cause system change, you have to move away from the mentality that we should support projects. Ultimately, the seed for all change is in the heart of a person. His goal was to create a selection system to find this kind of person early in their careers.¹⁰

Yet, charisma on its own will not necessarily succeed. Bill and his followers are crucial to the successful use of charismatic leadership, but so is an amicable crisis situation; in the case of Ashoka, the crisis involved a growing gap in productivity between the consumer sector and the social sector. We see a sense of real or imminent crisis in Bill’s time at the Environmental Protection Agency [EPA], where he uses contacts in the media to publicize harmful budget cuts and gain support for the EPA and at Ashoka, where social entrepreneurs are helped at their most critical moments.

As he conceived of it, Ashoka would be the most ‘highly leveraged’ approach to change possible, intervening at the ‘most critical moment in the life cycle’ of the ‘most critical ingredient in the development process’²

Bill also clearly articulates followers’ roles in managing crisis; for instance he put together a strong case to show that the [budget] cuts would effectively double Americans’ exposure to toxic pollutants by 1990 to aid journalists in writing sensational articles about the Reagan administration’s planned budget cuts for the EPA. At Ashoka, where the very vision of the organization is to empower individuals to solve societal problems, Drayton and his followers push potential fellows to formulate logical plans to affect change.

For Drayton, social change isn’t romantic. “It’s not a poem; it’s not like Xanadu,” he says. “There are many people who are creative and altruistic, but they are never going to change a pattern across a continent.” In other words, a vision of Xanadu is nice, but it won’t happen without a transportation plan and a sewerage system.¹¹

We also see the three tenets of transformational leadership in use at Ashoka, charisma and inspiration; intellectual stimulation; and individualized consideration. Bill’s charismatic leadership inspires followers, fellows, and supporters to believe in Ashoka’s goals and continuously seek to improve society, as shown by half of Ashoka itself containing social entrepreneurs. People seamlessly volunteer for projects as “…Drayton’s enthusiasm for a project has a way of sweeping up bystanders who question how they end up laboring in the eye of his storm.”¹¹The nature of the work Ashoka volunteers and staff perform requires constant use of emotional intelligence and analytical logic to decipher the probability of success when evaluating social entrepreneurial ideas and individuals.

In Ashoka each member of the selection panel interviews each candidate independently. Then Ashoka asks the “jury” to essentially decide whether they trust the person. As a test, they are told to close their eyes and imagine something they find fearful, like walking near the edge of a cliff or holding a snake, and then imagine that this person is with you. Do you find yourself feeling uneasy or relaxed? For many, the test provides a sense of whether you trust the person or not. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn’t. It’s an appeal to the gut, not the intellect.¹⁰

Ashoka fellows and staff are also encouraged to find the hidden networks amongst the fellows that will allow all fellows to share in the collective wisdom of the Ashoka family and to pass on efficiencies gained in their own communities. For individual considerations, Ashoka reviews each potential fellow on an independent basis and provides unique support. For instance, rather than awarding a set stipend to each fellow, Ashoka matches the…social-sector salaries in each country, with some flexibility to accommodate fellows’ specific needs, such as if a fellow needed to hire a special care worker to look after a disabled child.¹

The class of 2003 at Ashoka’s School for Young Social Entrepreneurs in Poland.

Based on Bill’s role models, Mohandas Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr.,1 Thomas Jefferson, and Jean Monnet¹¹ [among others] it’s clear to see why and how Bill developed as a charismatic, transformational visionary. Just like Gandhi’s supreme belief in the need for change in India; MLK Jr.’s desire for equitable civil rights; Thomas Jefferson’s battle for a free nation; and Jean Monet’s vision of a united European economy, Bill’s aspirations of empowering social entrepreneurs with the funds, resources, and connections they need to enact their paradigm shifts shows his confidence that the time was right for social entrepreneurs and the need was real.⁷

Bill appreciates that Gandhi showed himself and the rest of the world that change comes faster and far more permanently by helping people understand when their behavior contradicts what an empathic response would dictate.⁹ Bill understood that utilizing the principles of free-market economics to make profit, while discouraging competition and innovation in the social sector led to great disparities in the ability of the social sector to help others, when compared to the commercial sector.

Bill showcases his self-awareness when admitting he is “…modestly an introvert, yet Bill also motivates himself to…spend most of my days dealing with people.”⁹, as he understands entrepreneurship relies on relationship building. Bill is willing to step outside of his comfort zone and interact with new individuals, a sign that Bill is a creative leader⁸. His kind descriptions of the individuals he interacts as “…wonderful, caring, creative entrepreneurs…” shows Bill’s exemplary leadership by “encouraging the heart”⁸ and his high-LPC side. However, Bill also has low-LPC side, as he enjoys accomplishing his goals, as shown through his fight to keep his improvements intact at the EPA.

Bill Drayton is able to promote Ashoka ideals among businesses, governments, non-profit organizations and communities by exerting his expert power; as Bill is the “social entrepreneur of social entrepreneurship”, he has verifiable proof that his ideas work.

Marmor went on to describe Drayton as a ‘wispy, carefully controlled, blue-suited fellow [who] has got enormous power. And connected to it is a shrewdness about the way institutions operate and the world really works.’²

The massive adoption of emissions trading as an effective method of reducing pollution also verifies his visionary ability in seeing and creating new ideas before they’re ready for the rest of society. For Ashoka staff, their ability to help social entrepreneurs cope with uncertainty by providing stipends to support themselves provides the staff with power to execute Ashoka’s vision and mission. The social entrepreneurs in turn hold centrality power⁸, as they are the achievers of Ashoka, without whom the vision and mission would crumble. These are the classic sources of power at Ashoka, but much more emphasis is placed on total empowerment.

Drayton declares that Ashoka:

…must be an integrated/decentralized organization that in every way enables and strongly encourages each of us to fly and yet that channels all that energy to serve the organization’s goals….Ashoka’s job and, indeed, our field’s most important job is to empower people. Our ultimate objective is everyone a changemaker.⁹

By empowering Ashoka fellows, socially entrepreneurial leaders are created who act as role models for other social entrepreneurs. Drayton truly believes that the power of Ashoka is in the ability to empower social entrepreneurs to not only pursue their goals, but to also gain experience and help other social entrepreneurs to change their own communities and societies. In this way, everyone across the world eventually becomes a social entrepreneur and is able to change their local surroundings to better match their needs, thus creating a world where each local community acts to improve itself, thus eliminating the need for large-scale organizations to pursue micro-philanthropy, which is pointed to by Ashoka’s critics as a negative aspect of Ashoka, when in fact it is the very aim of the organization and Bill Drayton’s dream.

The second bias that comes from focusing on individuals is a tendency to ignore the role of organizations and the resources they provide for pattern-breaking change. Researchers have long known that successful ideas require a mix of talents that is rarely found in one person. Indeed, the most compelling research on business entrepreneurship suggests that successful change requires a stream of capabilities including leadership, management, marketing, organizational design, and finance. Whereas philanthropists almost always focus on the individual, venture capitalists almost always focus on the leadership team and the organization to back it.¹²

Ashoka is empowering individuals and creating families of social entrepreneurs who help each other, rather than teams that defeat each other. Ashoka utilizes consensus building as a method of making decisions.

They generally have three to five people in a jury. After each candidate has gone through individual interviews with each juror, the panelists come together as a group. They score each factor on a three-point scale: one means excellent, two means ‘meets our standard,’ and three means ‘doesn’t meet our standard.’ They put their scores on a chart and have a discussion about it. The discussion is not just based on impressions, it’s based on the analysis. All decisions have to be unanimous. There is no voting. Generally speaking they are able to achieve consensus.¹⁰

This normative decision making style⁸ works at Ashoka because the leader, Drayton, has insufficient information on all the social entrepreneurs around the world and must rely on his followers to gather information. The followers of Ashoka also generally agree with the goals of the organization as shown by the majority of followers who are also social entrepreneurs. Bill’s “most important measure of organizational success is the proportion of my staff colleagues who have in fact entrepreneured something in the last year. We’re over 50 percent.”⁹ Though Ashoka focuses on empowering individuals, their true goal is to create enough communities of change-makers that other individuals will be inspired by them, much in the way Drayton was inspired by Ghandi. Once everyone understands their ability to create change, a giant global network is created, through which participative decision making can take place.

To empower social entrepreneurs, Ashoka relies heavily on the path-goal contingency theory⁸, which is basically a leadership model under which leaders remove obstacles so that workers can successfully accomplish their tasks. Adapting this theory to Ashoka, Bill and his colleagues find individuals working to improve an aspect of their community and assist them via financial support or entrepreneurial advice or connecting them with the right people to help achieve their goals.

The tasks Ashoka fellows attack are often unstructured, complex and novel, and Ashoka helps the fellows by repeatedly asking them logical questions derived from Bill’s favorite how to¹ questions, which poked at the holes in the social entrepreneurs’ plans and encouraged them to rationally think how to fix them. Bill picked up this tradition of asking how to from one of his role models, Ghandi. Though Ashoka did not directly provide instructions to the fellows, they did encourage the fellows to analyze the obstacles in their way and create procedures for removing them.

Though there are many reasons for the success of Ashoka and Bill Drayton, his belief in himself and his ideas allowed Bill to seize an opportunity and create an organization that empowers social entrepreneurs around the globe to improve their societies via business logic. Much like Bill’s vision of emissions trading took hold twenty years after the original idea, Ashoka’s vision of a world where individuals have the power and confidence to change their own communities and society at large is gaining ground quickly. Soon, hopefully, people will laugh at the thought of I’m just one person, I can’t change the world.

Wrong!

You are not just one person, you are a whole entire human being! Throughout history we’ve attributed monumental achievements solely to one person. Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves, Hitler killed millions of people, and Ghandi liberated India. These men did not achieve these huge shifts in society all by themselves, but through a great confidence in themselves and, more importantly, their ideas they were able to lead movements that turned their ideas into results.

The great power that coursed through these people runs through each and everyone one of us. Young or old, male or female, black or white or in between, we all have the potential to change the world. This week, we’ll be taking a look at this potential and how to tap into it. Hopefully you and I utilize it to positively change the world, as Bill Drayton did.

Who is Bill Drayton?

Bill is a social entrepreneur who changed the world by empowering others to change the world. Stay tuned later this week for a paper I wrote on Mr. Drayton and his world-changing ideas and results for the graduate level Perspectives on Leadership course at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. By the end of this week, we’ll turn this potential for change into energy and drastically improve the world!

Here’s a list of 14 15 accomplishments:

• Quit smoking
• Started and finished reading The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress by Robert A. Heinlein (awesome book)
• Finished a graduate class, Small Business Formulation and Development at Umass-Amherst, with an A grade
• Acquired full-time freedom by quitting my full-time paid, voluntary, cubicle entrapment
• Started a business (details to come)
• Lost some weight
• Started reading Smart Start-Ups: How Entrepreneurs and Corporations Can Profit by Starting Online Communities by David Silver
• Bought a bicycle
• By the end of today (if not already), eclipse 100 miles biked in my first week
• Surpassed $20,000 in liquid, financial assets
• Started and fFinished reading Starting From Scratch: Secrets from 21 Ordinary People Who Made the Entrepreneurial Leap by Wes Moss
• Decluttered my e-mail inbox
• By the end of the day, attended my first Boston Celtic playoff game!
• Improved my life by about 1000%
• Edit: (Added this one just before the Celtics game) Just picked up adamp.com at about a $420 savings! (~$40 for a five letter name domain name!)

Have you accomplished any significant goals or done something you’re particularly proud or pleased about in the past 3-4 months? If so, do share below.

Here’s to a great middle and end to the year!

Earlier this week, this post about authenticity in the modern sales industry was listed in the Carnival of Sales & Management Success. There are literally tons of articles listed in this carnival so if you’ve got some spare time or are really interested in sales and management, check out some of the carnival’s posts.

In all honesty, at first glance I thought the study of leadership was a bit of hogwash, and wasn’t planning on taking the course at all. Then I started thinking about my personal leadership experience, and the importance of leadership knowledge and skills in the corporate world, and our society at large. Remembering personal leadership inadequacies in the past, and seeing ironic representations of leadership in the media and society, encouraged me to pursue the study of leadership. For instance, with the New England Patriots, a lot of media outside of New England focused on Bill Bellichick and Tom Brady as the catalysts for the Patriots recent success, yet those two individuals (as well as the rest of the team) repeatedly placed responsibility on the whole team, rather than just a few individuals. Personally, the Patriots style of self-management and teamwork is the ideal system of working and should be replicated by other teams and businesses.

Through this course, I’ve realized that such a team oriented environment does not rise up out of nowhere, rather it is instilled, enforced, and supported by a few team-leaders. For example, Tom Brady’s willingness and ability to spread the football around, and his teammates ability to catch those footballs, enforces and supports the team environment. On the other side, Bill Bellichick’s game plans, also enforce the idea of spreading the football around, while also alternating focus to ensure that the team wins. This system of sharing the work and credit instills in everyone that in order to succeed the team must come first, and all personal achievements will fall into place later.

All of the new and unique ideas on how to lead raised during the course also showed me that there is an artistic and creative side to leadership. For instance, a charismatic or visionary leader must utilize their creative sides to think of strategies to instill change in organizations. Though some aspects of charismatic leadership can be learned, a portion of this style depends on the personalities or current situations of individuals. Someone could have a very low self-esteem, but could portray themselves as being very self-confident. Yet a high energy or enthusiasm is tough to fake, someone must believe in their mission and believe they are carrying it out correctly to exhibit true enthusiasm. Finding a task that you truly believe in is the artistic aspect of leadership.

From prior classes, I feel I had a strong understanding of traits, thus the most beneficial aspects of the course were the ones which focused on theories and strategies for leaders to implement, such as the path-goal theory, LPC model, cognitive resource theory, and other contingency models. The chapters on participative management and the use of teams was also very applicable to my current situation, and many situations I will encounter, as the corporate world has greatly undertaken the use of teams as an efficient and cost-cutting measure. There is a lot of power in teams, to unite workers and to share resources; I’ve already begun using delegation and empowerment at my job, albeit in a limited role as I do not have as much power to delegate and empower as my manager and others further up the hierarchy of the organization.

I also particularly enjoyed the chapter on upper management, as it provided an in-depth perspective on the often secretive world of executives. This course has definitely shown me that the study of leadership is in fact both a science and an art, and that relying on both (rather than relying on purely one side of leadership) leads to success more often. I have a lot more respect now for successful leaders and am able to better pick up on the details that lead to successful leaders. A few days ago State Street (my employer) announced their earnings, which were following by an internal speech by our top executives. Though I’ve listened to Ron Logue’s speeches before and laughed at some of his humorous comments, I truly understood this time why his charisma and empathy led him to his current position as CEO of State Street. He’s also displayed knowledge of our global environment, while also understanding that employees fear globalization. To this extent he continuously re-assures employees that they will continue having jobs at State Street, but that we must also instill a performance culture and expand globally.

Another change this course has inspired me to is to institute an environmental employee group at State Street. I’ve discussed this idea with coworkers, and they were all supportive, but the example of Anderson at Interface and the use of all employees’ ideas has truly inspired me to pursue this idea to fruition.

Yes, yes, my GPA is still an impressive 3.86, but the dream of perfection is gone. Ah well, there’s always graduate school.

Ray Anderson also acts as a servant to the general public, by producing goods for society in an environmentally friendly manner, but also by spreading the message of environmentalism to other companies and organizations. For instance, Ray has a lengthy speaking part in the Sundance award winning documentary, The Corporation, where he discusses his shame at not initiating a green movement at his company much sooner, not just because of the effect on the environment, but also because his customers (whom he’s supposed to be serving) were asking him about environmental programs at Interface and he was absolutely clueless about what to tell them as he had not yet thought about such matters (this was in 1994). The fact that he then began to institute green programs at Interface shows his listening, empathy and awareness characteristics.

Ray also shows conceptualization, building community, and commitment to the growth of people via his empowering employees and also through his commitment to an organization that can serve a purpose without harming the environment. His belief in the good of a green company has led Interface to adopt numerous environmental initiatives and has encouraged employees through the organization to think green.

One of the main signs of Ray’s servant leadership is his stewardship over the environment. In the movie, The Corporation, Ray discusses how people like him have abused environmental resources for the benefit of their companies while causing immense damage to our environment. Ray has now completely flipped around and is a role model for all companies to follow in pursuing a green way of operating. Ray understood that the environment does not belong to businesses but rather is a part of the earth and belongs to every human, animal, plant and all other life-forms presently living on the planet and who will live here in the future. Especially noteworthy, is Ray’s openness on the damage companies like his had already done to the environment and how if they continued abusing the environment they would inevitably fail, as such disproportionate relationships with the environment are simply unsustainable. In the movie, The Corporation, Ray compares his early management of Interface to the ways of a plunderer, stating he took what’s not his (the environment) and used it to his own benefit without returning an equal benefit to society. He then goes on to state that a day will come where people like him (a plunderer) will be sent to prison! This type of blunt openness and authenticity is rarely seen but immensely treasured.

This authenticity also shows that Ray’s sudden change is not a marketing scheme, but rather is an honest disgust at his old way of managing and genuine desire to change his business (before he dies) into a fully sustainable organization.

As the paper on Ray Anderson shows, he has an immense ability to heal his employees and the environment through his initiatives. Several employees of a firm Interface bought out were absolutely amazed that they were encouraged to think about the environment at Interface and were re-invigorated by being able to work without plainly and obviously harming the environment.

Ray also shows foresight in that he understands that if companies do not change their ways and focus on sustainability, that the environment will be irreparably damaged and that these companies will simply cease to exist as they would have taken so much from the planet without giving back that there is simply nothing left to take.

Finally, Ray definitely shows persuasion characteristics, perhaps not at Interface (or at least the case study did not show signs of it), but definitely in his speeches to other executives (see the below excerpt from The Corporation) where he lambastes himself and his “fellow plunderers” for ruining the environment to the point of unsustainability. His use of statistics about the financial success at Interface while implementing sustainability, and his passionate words act as a very persuasive tool to alter the perceptions of other executives focused on pure profit.

In terms of ethics, I feel it’s quite plain to see the ethical values of Ray Anderson. Before he was aware of the true consequences of this company’s practices on the environment, he acted ethically by pursuing the best interests of his employees and Interface’s other stake-holders, to the best of his knowledge. Once he became aware that Interface was severely harming the environment, he understood the moral implications of his business. From there he made a moral judgment that his company and other similar companies simply could not continue down this environmentally harmful path. He put together task-forces and empowered employees to enact changes at Interface to lead them up Mt. Sustainability. He further implemented plans at Interface and set about preaching to the rest of the corporate world on the morally correct way of doing business, while still remaining profitable. He himself states that ensuring Interface does no harm is a core value of his and Interface’s. His plans for creating a green Interface also have a huge benefit to the rest of society and can be seen as just (by removing the plunderer actions, whereby Interface takes more than it deserves) and authentic, as Ray pursues green goals in his personal life (as noted in the Grist Interview, where he notes that he drives a Toyota Prius).

I also see aspects of Path-Goal Theory, Visionary, Charismatic Transformational leadership, and Participative Management. By providing suggestion boxes, Ray enabled his employees to put into action their ideas, his recognition and plans to change Interface into a sustainable organization shows his visionary and transformational leadership strategies, while his belief and confidence that sustainability is important shows his charisma. The use of teams and employee empowerment are signs of participative management at work at Interface.

Ray Anderson is a fitting end to our discussion and is an immense role-model for future leaders. Though Ray himself admits he has not always led a green personal or professional life, the fact that the recognized the immoral way of his past and has worked feverishly to enact changes at Interface and in the business community as a whole shows signs of values-driven, charismatic, visionary, servant leadership. The ability to recognize just how wrong one’s past actions were, and the ability to openly admit it to the entire world shows immense self-confidence as well as authenticity, which help Ray spread his beliefs in sustainability to the rest of the corporate world.

Outside Sources:

Greenleaf, Robert. The Servant-Leader Within: A Transformative Path. New York: Paulist Press, 2003.

Komives, Susan and Nance Lucas and Timothy R. McMahon. Exploring Leadership: For College Students Who Want to Make a Difference 1st ed. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1998.

Russell, Robert F. and A. Gregory Stone. A Review of Servant Leadership Attributes: Developing a Practical Model. Leadership & Organization Development Journal. 23.3 (2002): 145-157.

Rosenberg, Beth. Case study of Interface Carpet and Fabric Company. Tufts University School of Medicine: Department of Public Health and Family Medicine. Boston, 2005.

Ray Anderson, “Ray Matter: Ray Anderson, Sustainable Biz Pioneer, Answers Grist’s Questions,“ interview by Grist (Nov. 8, 2004). Grist

Mark Achbar, Jennifer Abbot, Joel Bakan. The Corporation. Zeitgeist Films. 2003.

Note, The Corporation was released for free by the filmmakers.

Below is a ten-minute excerpt from the film featuring Ray Anderson:

Below is the entire film, posted to Google Video by the filmmakers:

Also, here is the torrent link to the full-quality official shareware release of the film.

Meanwhile the anticipation over every Steve Jobs speech at MacWorld creates a similar fury to the rumor-filled waits for the next Robert Bonner advertisement. Likewise, trailers for movies and video games are anticipated and marveled over, similar to the awe of Bonner’s use of iteration to create images.

Similarities aside, today’s marketing has grown so intertwined with media, physical structures, clothing, and even people that it’s become difficult to distinguish between advertisements and authentic messages. For instance, Sony was slammed last December for starting a blog touting the PSP as the greatest thing since sliced bread. Sony has since deleted the fake blog, but the internet archive still holds a copy of it. Wal-Mart was accused of starting a fake blog about a couple driving around America, staying at Wal-Mart parking lots.

With advertisers now attempting to create marketing messages that mimic authentic media distributions, there’s really no way to determine if a message is genuine, or a coy attempt to instill authenticity into it’s brand. At least when advertisers plaster their logos and messages on stadiums, clothing, even city streets and people, you at least know it’s an advertisement.

Viral marketing better attempts at creating authentic experiences for visitors, such as the blog possibly related to the new J.J. Abrams movie, which creates a storyline possibly relating to the movie and its storyline. At least here, the advertisers are not shamelessly touting their product, but rather trying to create an experience for the fan. Still, these blogs are a form of media, in and of themselves, while also possibly being marketing strategies for a movie, another form of media. Are we consuming advertising by following these viral marketing stories, or are we simply consuming media, that happens to be related to another form of media? The answer is hazy and shows the near total disintegration between consumption and marketing. Where does one start, where does the other begin, nobody can really pinpoint anymore. In fact, how do you know this post wasn’t sponsored by J.J. Abrams? And by raising the question myself, do I instill more authenticity into this message, or detract from it?

The above post is the second part of Discussion 13. Has advertising become too integrated with the rest of society? Is advertising a form of media all on its own? Is that OK?