The Leader of the Future: from the Drucker Foundation
Leading Learning Organizations: The Bold, the Powerful, and the Invisible
Peter M. Senge
“The evidence of top-management impotence is abundant.” (42)
Effective leadership thinking should emerge from a more humble view of the power of top management. Why?
1.
Cynicism exists in most organizations following years of management fads and “flavor of the month” initiatives
2. There’s a large difference between
compliance and commitment – that is, a value is only a value if it is voluntarily chosen (43)
Let’s take a look through the lens of systems thinking- look at improving mental models, fostering dialogue, nurturing personal vision, and building shared visions. (45)
Three essential types of leaders in building learning organizations:
1.
Local line leaders: sanction significant practical experiments and lead through active participation in these experiments. Caveats:
“Improved results are often threatening to others.”
“Complex organizations have complex forces that maintain the status quo and inhibit the spread of new ideas.” (49)
2.
Executive Leaders: support line leaders, develop learning infrastructures and lead by example.
“When executives lead as teachers, stewards, and designers, they fill roles that are much more subtle, contextual, and long term than the traditional model of the power-wielding hierarchical leader suggests.” (51)
Executive leaders build an operating environment for learning in several ways:
1. articulate guiding ideas – “The power of guiding ideas derives from the energy released when imagination and aspiration come together.” (51)
2. Conscious attention to learning infrastructure – ask yourself “why should successful new practices spread in organizations?” Use scenario thinking to create multiple plans to fit multiple possible futures.
Said Shell Oil’s CEO Phil Carroll: “Perhaps my real job is to be the ecologist for the organization. We must learn how to see the company as a living system and to see it as a system within the context of the larger systems of which it is a part.” (53)
3.
Internal networkers or community builders, “seed carriers” of the new culture – operate as “free radicals” within the organization (only good free radicals).
“The only authority possessed by internal networkers comes from the strength of their convictions and the clarity of their ideas.” (54)
“What matters is that effective internal networkers are seen as credible, knowledgeable, committed individuals who are not a particular threat to anyone.” (55)
All of them have something in their backgrounds that predisposed them to the systems perspective, to a deep curiosity about learning or mental models or the mystery of profound teamwork. (55)
Optimistic conclusion:
“The challenges of systemic change where hierarchy is inadequate will, I believe, push us to new views of leadership based on new principles.” (57)
