Leadership

Achieving Optimal Effectiveness

Scott M Carter

• Publisher: Palmetto Publishing
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781638373476
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

This groundbreaking and thought-provoking book will require you to dig deep to rethink what you know about the concept of Leadership. Carefully researched and well-written, Scott enlightens us on the misconceptions about the concept of Leadership. Using engaging, entertaining, and sometimes sarcastic stories, Scott illustrates how organizations actually create most of their own problems, then spend time attempting to solve those same problems. Once you identify how you create many of your own problems, you can produce solutions to end that insanity. When you spend less time solving problems you create yourself, you can focus on increasing your visionary and innovative skills across your entire organization, as well as achieve better engagement and buy-in at all levels, moving your whole business toward optimal effectiveness. Are you ready to learn how your organization might be creating its own problems, which then stifle vision, innovation, engagement, and buy-in?

PART ONE

Leadership Freedom Trail Tour

CHAPTER 1

The Leadership Freedom Trail

When you visit Boston, Massachusetts, one of the many activities the city offers is the Freedom Trail Tour. A guide, dressed as one of the historical characters of that period, tells entertaining stories and facts as you stop at historical points of reference. These stories provide you with insight based on significant events that took place. Along that tour a person learns that things aren’t always as they seem or appear.

For instance, one of the stops along the Freedom Trail Tour in Boston tells the real story of Paul Revere. When we hear the name Paul Revere, we see this vision of a man riding frantically through the streets of Boston, screaming, “The British are coming! The British are coming!” The reality is quite different. The ride that night consisted of upwards of twenty men who rode to inform the local people that the “British troops” were coming. Spreading that message was done quietly in the dark of night, with the men traveling from house to house. Each home, in turn, sent people out into the countryside to inform others. Members of the British troops already sprinkled throughout the countryside, with sentries placed in critical areas, presented a great danger to all the riders and local people. Being caught spreading such news could mean death. Screaming anything while riding through the streets at night would have been suicide.

The events that night were a two-year effort consisting of many people watching every move the British Army and British rulers made, compiling information through a tight ring of trust among those opposing British rule. You see, Paul Revere and those who opposed the rule that England wanted to impose on the colonies were also British. To be riding through the streets, screaming, The British are coming! would have made no sense.

Paul Revere and others involved in that two-year effort were people with normal lives, just like you and me. After that eventful night on April 18, 1775, Revere went home to his wife, raising sixteen children, only five of whom survived him in death. Revere died on May 10, 1818. The events of that night represented the collaboration of many people over an extended period of time.

Eight-five years later, in 1860, after Paul Revere participated in a ride consisting of many men, American poet and ardent abolitionist Henry Wadsworth Longfellow immortalized Revere in American folklore. He cemented Revere's place in American history when he wrote the poem “Paul Revere's Ride.” Longfellow, a well-known poet, created the poem to use Revere as the hero, appealing to Northern readers’ patriotism. The poem created a hero but did not tell the real story.

Things aren’t always what they seem or how they appear. Your perspective regarding Paul Revere changes dramatically because of that short walk down the Freedom Trail, doesn’t it? In this book, we will walk our Leadership Freedom Trail together. Think of me as your tour guide. We will quickly learn that things aren’t what they seem or as they appear regarding the concepts of leader and leadership.

Our Leadership Freedom Trail Tour will cover the last 130 years. As we move through our 130-year history, we will take a look at three things that will smoothly guide us and help us answer the questions presented in the introduction. Those three things are:

1) Number of resources on leadership and management

2) Access to the resources (how would a person find them)

3) Content and type of the resources (theory or science-based, research paper or book)

The good news for you, the reader, is that this tour will be fun and entertaining as well as educational. Our understanding of the terms leader and leadership has grown immensely over the last one-hundred-plus years. The number of resources that provide us with information on the concept of leadership has also increased dramatically. Through advanced technology, our ability to more easily access those resources has also advanced. And the content of all the resources has changed and also increased in complexity.

Our stops along our Leadership Freedom Trail Tour will provide us the real stories regarding the following components within our organizations:

• What we measure and why we measure
• How we motivate: carrots and sticks
• How we define the terms leader and leadership
• Our beliefs about our beliefs.

These four components represent the bulk of what drives our behaviors. We will apply these four primary components to the Law of Diffusion of Innovation graph and to the Loop of Optimal Effectiveness graph. We will experience the real story of how the subject of leadership and the behaviors within our organizations have progressed. We will discover that things are not as they seem or appear. We will also see how complexity now plays a key role. Complexity has hindered our ability to reach our Optimal Level of Effectiveness.

As we move though our Leadership Freedom Trail Tour, we will also take what we learn and put our newfound knowledge to immediate use. This book is a take-action book. I promise that our Leadership Freedom Trail Tour will be as entertaining as it is factual and scientific. Let's begin.

CHAPTER 2

Law of Diffusion of Innovation

Out first stop on our Leadership Freedom Trail Tour will be the Law of Diffusion of Innovations. Diffusion of innovations is a theory that seeks to explain how, why, and at what rate new ideas and technologies spread through civilizations.

Everett M. Rogers’ Diffusion of Innovations (1962) goes into great detail on the concept of diffusion of innovations. I created a list of four attributes I believe best defines the accordant law. It's not enough to know that a concept existed. We must know

• When a concept arrived on the scene
• If we have a clear understanding of the concept
• Whether or not a concept is or was accepted by society
• What the level of acceptance is at any given time.

That's how the Law of Diffusion of Innovation works. Let's look at the graph and apply two inventions so we can gain an understanding of how the Law works.

The theory, as outlined by Rogers, is quite simple. Rogers breaks the acceptance of ideas and innovations into five segments, as illustrated in the graph below

If you look at history and many of the most significant inventions, you will see that they match the graph with respect to how society reacted to them and accepted them.

For instance, the concept of airplanes. There were early innovators like the Wright Brothers and Samuel Pierpont Langley. They made up the 2.5 percent of risk-takers who led the innovation of flight. In 1903 the Wright Brothers made their first controlled, sustained flight near Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. Once the reality of flight had been witnessed, some early adopters took the reins from the Wright Brothers and brought mass flight closer to reality. Then, as technology advanced, so did the beliefs of people, and the early majority jumped on board by accepting it as a reality. Once we reached the stage of having jet airplanes creating mass transit, the early majority and the late majority jumped on board. Soon we set our sights on the moon. Some people still had trouble believing that would happen. Those would be the laggards.

We will look at computers for our second example. Most people know the names Bill Gates and Microsoft, and Steve Jobs and Apple; they are the innovators of today's typical laptop and handheld computer devices. At one point computers took up an entire area more extensive than most people's living rooms. Bill Gates was one of the early innovators who said he envisioned a smaller computer, one that people in every home could use. Just like manned flight, the concept of computers went through all the stages of acceptance by society. It went through early adopters, the early majority, the late majority, and of course we still have some laggards who won’t accept that computers will be a permanent part of our lives.

Airplanes and computers represent some very easy to understand examples of innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority, and laggards, aligning with the graph. Everything you and I have in today's world began under the innovations model. The thing is, most people relate this concept to the innovation of products. However, it also explains the spread of ideas.

Take a look at the date of the concept of the Law of Diffusion of Innovation itself. The book Diffusion of Innovations was published in 1962. The full understanding of the concept itself probably didn’t disseminate into the masses and academia for decades after the book was written. Leader and leadership are both concepts, ideas that were invented. The terms manage, manager, and management are also concepts that were invented.

When, if ever, has anyone applied the concept of leadership to the graph? I’ve watched and listened to presentations where the presenter talks about concept of management being an invention but have yet to see one where anyone looked at leadership through the same lens.

When we apply the concept of leadership, which is an invention, to the graph, we appear to be stuck in the innovators stage. We know this to be true because of the criteria that need to be met in order to move through the stages of the graph. That's how the Law of Diffusion of Innovation works.

We do not have a clear understanding of the concept of leadership. Experts say we have upwards of eight hundred definitions of leadership. Complexity surrounding this concept hinders our ability to reach our Optimal Level of Effectiveness. One might ask, effectiveness with regards to what? With regards to vision, innovation, implementation, engagement, and buy-in. The fact is, a concept is not helpful if we fail to understand it or we misuse it. Now we will apply the concept of leadership to the diffusion of innovations graph.

CHAPTER 3

Leadership: An Invention

In chapter one, we stated that our Leadership Freedom Trail Tour will cover the last 130 years. Again, as we move through our 130-year history, we will take a look at three things that will smoothly guide us and help us answer the questions presented in the introduction. Those three things are:

1) Number of resources on leadership and management

2) Access to the resources (how would a person find them)

3) Content and type of resources (theory or science-based, research paper or book)

We will use those three criteria to apply the concept of leadership to the Law of Diffusion of Innovations graph.

NUMBER OF RESOURCES, AND CONTENT AND TYPE

Let's look at the time lines of resources about management and leadership. If you were an executive or someone striving to move into an executive position in any decade, 1900s, 1910s, 1920s, 1930s, 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, or 1970s, what resources would you draw from regarding leadership?

These people couldn’t have accessed any of the modern resources we draw from today. Have you ever looked at the years of publication of the resources that provide information about management and leadership as they relate to heading up an organization? Let's begin with some of the more easily recognized names associated with the subject of leadership.

By 1990 John Maxwell had only released four books, only one of which was available before 1982, and none of which are the most popular ones, the ones that we all read and recommend today. Developing the Leader within You didn’t come out until 1993, and Maxwell revised it in a new edition released in—are you ready?—2018. And 80 percent of the book was revised, per Maxwell's own words. The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership (1998), revised in 2007. The 5 Levels of Leadership, released in 2011. Most of his most popular works were produced in the late 1990s through today.

How about Brian Tracy's work? By 1990 he had written four books, and none were written before 1982. A fair amount were released in the 1990s. Maximum Achievement didn’t come about until 1993. The majority were written starting in 2000. And Tracy's works focused more on sales success than on business leadership. We will learn later that the sale platforms set the stage for how leadership would be defined.

How about Jim Rohn? People love to quote Jim Rohn. 7 Strategies for Wealth & Happiness (1985). The Treasury of Quotes (1993). The 12 Pillars (2005). His works focus on personal development, wealth, and success rather than organizational leaders. These are relevant to leading, but the main topic is not leadership within organizations.

People also love to quote Zig Ziglar. Some of his first books were See You at the Top (1975) and Zig Ziglar's Secrets of Closing the Sale (1982). Ziglar's early career was in sales, and he focus...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part One: Leadership Freedom Trail Tour
• Part Two: A Journey through Time
• Part Three: Stop Creating Problems
• Notes
• Index