Visionary Leaders Vs. Masters Part One

A visionary leader focuses much on vision, mission, and passion. He wants to be an inspiration to his potential followers. He is big on teams and for the members of those teams to buy in heavily to his vision. For this reason he creates as many opportunities as he can to impart his vision to the team members. Team members are encouraged to lead themselves, and change themselves as needed to be effective team members. Those team members who do not sufficiently buy in to the vision become pariahs.

Aside from evoking passion in potential followers, the visionary leader does not have much to offer. He does not necessarily know the solutions to the problems his followers will face. Nor does he necessarily have access to the resources his followers will need. Rather, he encourages his followers to deal with those issues themselves.

As so much depends on the visionary leader’s public image for his success, those followers who are best at making him look good will be the followers most celebrated and promoted.

bsmith A master, however, does not concern himself too much with vision, or at least not in the same way as the visionary leader. He is on a mission, and he is passionate, but in order for him to lead, he doesn’t require his followers to focus so much on who he is or why he’s there. A master knows what needs to be done, he knows how to get it done, and he has access to all the resources needed to get it done. He knows all the problems his followers will face before they themselves ever encounter those problems, and he is there to provide teaching and guidance.

A master requires hard work and excellence from his followers. Those who do that will be promoted and celebrated. Those who do not become the pariahs. The motivation for the followers is not passion inspired by the leader, but rather passion inspired by the work itself, excellence, and an ever increasing growth in knowledge.

I suppose a good leader will have both a visionary side to him and a master side. But, from my experience, most leaders lean heavily towards one, depending on what field they’re working in. Visionary leaders tend to be found in the business world, or in Christian growth movements, whereas masters are found mainly in the trades. But there is no reason the master has to stay there.

Personally, I prefer to follow a master, and am trying to become one myself.

Read Part Two here; Part Three here; and Part Four here

Platitudes Are Contagious: ‘Company Culture,’ Management Maxims, And Other Bullsh*t

by K.S. Anthony

The power of working for a start-up used to lie in the entrepreneurial energy and enthusiasm generated by people who, having located a novel solution to a problem or need — whether in the form of an app, a product, a website, or a service––were willing to go all-in to bring that solution to market. Facebook’s “move fast and break things” motto was the battle-cry and unconventional thinking, acting, and doing was the hallmark of the “disrupters:” high-speed, low-drag rule-breakers who meant to kick down the cobwebbed doors of stagnant industries and rebuild them in their own images of efficacy and efficiency.

Somewhere along the line, however, that mindset began to dwindle and, if articles on LinkedIn and Medium are any barometer — and I’d argue that they are — was replaced with an insipid, empty brand of magical thinking that is two parts new age and one part conventional corporate America that manifests itself in trite and ultimately meaningless platitudes and jargon. The power of imagination has become conflated with the childish notion of “if we believe in it, then it’s real” and the aggression and fearlessness of those early rule-breakers has since dissipated. There are now countless numbers of start-ups that have adopted the worst parts of conventional companies: inventing language, conflating the synthetic with the organic, and generally becoming bloated, smug, and solipsistic while wearing those tendencies as a badge of honor, as if their cheap platitudes are their gift to the entrepreneurial eco-system.

But what do these platitudes look like? While it would be easy for me to scan LinkedIn or Medium for a selection of articles that prove my point, it would also be professionally disastrous. Entrepreneurs and CEOs aren’t known for their resilience or sense of humor in the face of criticism, perhaps because they haven’t developed any platitudes that can adequately prepare them, aside from Roosevelt’s “It is not the critic who counts…” or, more likely, writing off their critics as haters, losers, pessimists, or other unmutuals.

Here’s just a quick and dirty — and by no means complete — guide to the bullshit that Platitude-lovers are slinging. Consider these red flags.

• The word “hustle” in any context, unless referring to the disco era.

• The word “mindset,” when it comes to the necessity of changing yours.

• Appeals to authority: any invocation of qualities, habits, processes, or values possessed or practiced by leaders or managers.

• Analogies drawn between business and sports or warfare by non-athletes or non-warfighters… and sometimes even then.

• Discussions of paradigms, metaphorical boxes, or other attempts to illustrate Plato’s cave as applied to business.

• Anything having to do with time, whether managing it, saving it, or stretching it: especially when it’s one simple thing you can do…

• Talk of “passion” in the workplace.

• Any top-down (and they’re all top-down) guide on how to build team cohesion or “company culture.”

• Anything that claims to be able to identify the characteristics of successful people.

• Writing that promises to redefine things which already have perfectly reasonable definitions, e.g.; “success.”

• Any article that tells you that changing your mindset/attitude/alarm/reading habits will somehow harness some type of latent superpower.

• Claims that the ‘universe’ has some vested interest in you, your company, or your business.

• Inventing new language for things that already exist: attempts to reimagine titles or spaces (including meetings).

• Anything that commands that you “dare to…”

Ever notice how everyone who challenges you to think differently sounds exactly alike? How they swap out one inane-sounding idea for another one?

That’s because platitudes are contagious. They spread easily, sharing the same power of memes, viral stories, and fake news: they’re consumable, easily adaptable, require no analysis or critical thinking, and confirm one’s biases. Self-contained, they eschew context. This is the same reason why quotes from famous leaders do so well as preludes to tedious articles. Quotes are not bad per se. They often express ideas elegantly, flavor a text with wit, or signal a theme that is to be developed. Unfortunately, with bad writing — texts that become strings of platitudes masquerading as intelligence —writers utilize quotes as a kind of literary forced teaming to prime the reader into thinking that what they’re consuming is the intellectual peer of, say, Churchill, Einstein, or Sun Tzu. Quotes also provide an instant relatability: they’re signifiers of shared cultural iconography — Oprah, Martin Luther King Jr., Gandhi — that rely on shallow understandings to create a false sense of intellectual depth and social connectivity. As Winston Churchill wryly pointed out — and yes, I’m aware of the irony here, but bear with me — “It is a good thing for an uneducated man to read books of quotations.”

Why is it good? Because quotes give the illusion of sophistication. One needn’t be Churchill or Wilde — or even have read them — to appear erudite behind a byline: one need only be able to copy, select, and paste.

This is worth a slight detour. Repurposed quotes, cut from their original contexts, become anchors for whatever bullshit people want to attach to them. For example, one popular quote by T.S. Eliot is “Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.” Prima facie, it looks like a call to action, to daring, to “disrupting.” But what most people fail to realize is that it was written in 1931 as part of the introduction to an edition of Transit of Venus, a book of poems written by Harry Crosby, a Boston brahmin and nephew of J.P. Morgan whose excesses and predilection for self-destruction led him to kill himself in a suicide pact at the age of 31 with his 19-year-old married lover in 1929. The quote refers both to Crosby’s poetry and his suicidality. It does not refer to your start-up’s value system. It is not about what you can do to make your organization a top performer. It is not about you. Because the context is either forgotten or ignored, however, it becomes another piece of malignant business drivel with all the depth and wisdom of a bumper sticker or a novelty coffee mug.

Platitudes, whether in the form of recycled quotes, articles, linguistic inventions, asinine acronyms, or simple slogans, are a quick ticket to comfort and stagnancy, all the while masquerading as being edgy, novel, or disruptive when they are anything but. What’s more is that these platitudes, socialized as ‘content’ in the form of articles shared on sites like this one — which, for better or worse, often serves as a mutual admiration society for writers of varying, often dubious, talent levels — become reinforced as part of the business ecosystem. They multiply. They infect. The creators of these platitudes get positive reinforcement by recommendations, likes, shares, retweets, and followers. In turn, they return the favor… and the cycle continues. It’s as if the Dunning-Kruger effect — the tendency of the unskilled or unintelligent to think of themselves as highly skilled or exceptionally intelligent — has been weaponized with the power of social affirmation.

If it sounds like I am arguing against democratized content, it’s because I am. I do not for a moment believe that all ideas are created equal or that everyone has a talent for writing or leadership, just as I do not believe that everyone has a talent for singing, dancing, or silversmithing. The proliferation of platitudes are, to some degree, a symptom of a serious problem: they conflate the ability to generate and publish ideas with actually having good — or at least original — ideas. More over, they confuse cheerleading with leadership, tolerance with teamwork, and brand cults with culture. Writing these things down and pouring them into the world suggests an authority, part of the issue discussed in Tom Nichols’ excellent book The Death Of Expertise. These ideas, then, serve no real purpose except to sound authoritative, influential, and intelligent. By confidently assuming the role of guru/mentor/expert, the Platitude-lover teaches one lesson and one lesson only: strike a pose and the most susceptible people will believe it. La Rochefoucauld expressed a similar sentiment when he said,

“In all aspects of life, we take on a part and an appearance to seem to be what we wish to be — and thus the world is merely composed of actors.”

The issue here is that some people are really, really bad actors in roles that they’re simply not cut out for. They continue their act as they traipse about on stage, applauded by audiences who either don’t know any better or by actors who are just as bad as they are. None of this would be a problem were it not for the fact that they negatively influence the ratio of noise to signal in the world: they dilute the world of ideas.

The “move fast and break things” ethos has been replaced by contagious mediocre feel-good bullshit. The irony, of course, is that the people spouting these inane platitudes don’t see that they’re not disrupting anything. They don’t realize that they’re simply regurgitating cheap iterations of The Secret, listicles, and the tens of thousands of management manuals and self-help books that have littered bookstore best-seller and remainder aisles for as long as anyone can remember.

So what can you do to combat platitudes? Not much. If you’re a platitude-lover, you’re probably seething right now. Good. Let this be the kick in the ass you need. For everyone else… well, bad news. There’s no evidence that simplistic thinking — and writing — is going anywhere. Don’t let it pollute your psychological space or your social media: mute and unfollow all lovers of platitudes. If you encounter it in your workplace, ignore it if you can, tolerate it if you must. Remember, bullshit artists are exceptionally sensitive about their “work” and to call out challenge a platitude-lover’s ego might put end up branding you as a non-believer. In a world where more baffle with bullshit than dazzle with dexterity, the truth is a luxury that can only be enjoyed alone.

~from Linkedin

A Critique of Conferences

Recently I listened to a conference speech online. Well, I listened to half of it. It was too boring to finish. The topic was trustworthiness. One of the points made over and over was that if you say you’re going to do something then you should actually do it. Wow! What an epiphany!

I thought, “Is this speech being give to a bunch of twelve year olds?” But no, it was being given to adults. And I thought more, “Do the people in the audience feel as though their intelligence is being insulted? They should.” The whole speech was delivered as though it was either being given to stupid adults or to inexperienced kids.

I’m usually not a fan of conferences. I don’t want to be mistaken as an ungrateful complainer though. I appreciate the amount of work that goes into organizing a conference, and I would never suggest that the organizers’ hard efforts are a waste of time (well, maybe I would). I also know that a lot of people really love conferences and truly benefit from them, and, not everyone thinks like me. In fact, I am in the minority it would seem. I understand the perceived importance of conferences. I understand people want to get together once and awhile, people who ordinarily don’t see each other, and remind themselves why they’re doing what they’re doing and why they need to help each other. I’ve met some great peo conference 001 ple at conferences; people who I continued to work with for years afterward. I understand the leadership wants conferences to set the direction for the organization, and motivate the people, and cast vision and all that stuff.

However, I’m still not a fan. There are few things more boring and pointless than sitting in a chair for three hours listening to a speech you’ve heard a hundred times already. I don’t need to listen to a lecture given by someone who has no experience in what I’m doing. I certainly don’t want to spend three or more days at a conference, away from my work and home, lying every time someone asks me about how great the conference is, pseudo-enthusiastically yelling “Hallelujah!” every time a speaker does so, and then walk away from the whole thing feeling emptier than when I showed up.

When I think of conferences I’m often reminded of a scene from the film Waterworld. The earth is covered with water, but there’s a little girl with a tattoo on her back with instructions to find dry land. Problem is, no one can read the instructions. The bad guys, called “Smokers”, capture the girl. The Smokers live on a big oil tanker and how they get it around is by rowing — hundreds of men sticking long oars out the sides and rowing, just like with the old wooden ships. The leader of the Smokers gives an inspiring speech, holding up the girl in front of everyone, proclaiming that they will find the land and create a great future, etc… After the speech the rowers are so hyped that they get to work immediately and exuberantly. Meanwhile, the leader, still not knowing how to read the instructions, in private with his closest advisors is asked, “So which way we rowin’?” and he replies, “I don’t have a g–d–n clue. Don’t worry, they’ll row for a month before they figure out I’m fakin’ it.”

I’m not suggesting that leaders in conferences are “fakin’ it”. But, I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve come out of a conference hearing attendees proclaiming all the great things they’re going to do after being so encouraged by the conference speakers, and then never doing anything. I remember driving home from a three day Christian men’s conference, my intelligence freshly insulted, and my passenger, a railroad worker, declared, “I’m going to plant a church when I get home!” And I just smiled and thought, “No, you’re not.” Because anyone making a major decision like that, in an emotionally charged atmosphere such as a conference, is never thinking straight. And he never did plant that church.

The more honest attendees will be more level-headed, or even discouraged. I’ve known several people, who were already doing some kind of ministry, come out of a Christian conference feeling small and unimportant. I’ve heard laments like, “My ministry is hard work, and I wish I would have been able to meet people at the conference who were going through the same struggles I am, so that I could have talked with them and gotten to know them. But there was no time for that. Instead we just listened to grand speeches which included things like the leader yelling, ‘This is just the beginning!!’ over and over. What’s the point in that?”

My last article, Andragogy (Adult Learning), points out how adults, when attending a class or a conference, are not interested in generalities. They want specific teaching which directly relates to what they’re doing in life. They also don’t want to just sit and listen to a lecturer without having their own life experience and knowledge taken into account. What adult wants to sit and listen to a lecture that would better be delivered to a group of twelve year olds? Adults need to engage and speak and share. I know from personal experience that I would much rather sit in a small group setting, where everyone can participate, than sit in a large conference setting where you just, well, sit.

Andragogy (Adult Learning)

adult learning ps
Obviously, teaching children (pedagogy) is very different from teaching adults. Below are some notes on how to teach adults…

Adults are self-directed in their learning. Rather than passively listening to a lecture, adults like to be engaged in the class forcing them to take responsibility for their own learning. Adults like to discuss what’s being learned and provide their own input.
Adults have a lot of previous knowledge. They need to know how this new material will tie into what they already know.
For adults, the content must be relevant. Too much useless information will just make the adult student bored and the material will be forgotten. Adults need a reason to learn this new material. “How is this class going to help me get ahead?” is what the adult student asks. The course material must be relevant to the student’s life and work.
Adults are goal oriented and want to know early on in the course how we’re going to get “from here to there.” Even if the content relates to their life and work, pointless “bunny trails” will only distract and frustrate the adult student.
Adults are problem oriented and are attending the class to find answers to specific problems. If the teacher doesn’t have those answers, the adult student loses interest in, and respect for, the class.
The class needs to be fun, but not in a childish way. Activities also should be used to engage the student, but not insult their intelligence.
The teacher should strive to use visual (charts/diagrams/models), auditory (lecture), and kinaesthetic (hands-on activities) stimuli when teaching adults.

Related links…

Malcolm Knowles

Andragogy Homepage