Societies, Organizations, and Leadership
While skilled improvisation is fundamental to creating an innovative culture, there are also many connections between the themes covered in this book and cutting-edge work on societies, organizations, and leadership. Going back to our soup analogy, we are talking about the very nature of the community, restaurant, and its administration, each of which affect the quality of the soup. It’s worth taking a moment to look further outward to the incredible new work that has developed across literatures, to see the role that building a culture of innovation can play in improving our world.
First, from a big picture perspective, the dimensions of innovation soup all play into what’s been called the extraordinarily demanding “4th Industrial Revolution.”1 From technological revolutions in artificial intelligence to problems around climate justice, it’s hard to keep pace with a world spinning with so many changes and challenges. The World Economic Forum highlights that, with “the acceleration of innovation and the velocity of disruption,”
[I]n its scale, scope, and complexity, the transformation will be unlike anything humankind has experienced before. We do not yet know just how it will unfold, but one thing is clear: the response to it must be integrated and comprehensive, involving all stakeholders of the global polity, from the public and private sectors to academia and civil society.2
These developments highlight the need for skilled improvisation and a strategic responsiveness with customers and other stakeholders. Andrea Bonime-Blanc also finds that this is the fastest period of change human beings have ever confronted, where “no single genius or group of geniuses are capable of even getting their collective brains around everything that is coming at us,” so new norms for “collaborative groups of virtual and actual cross-disciplinary experts” and others will need to work together to solve the planet’s most pressing issues.3
In this environment, the demands for innovation and creativity have increased exponentially. To tackle these developments, as Albert Einstein put it, “We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.”4 This is why many thinkers have argued for shifting our lenses from traditional business as usual operations to ideas like “the purpose economy,” where morality, meaning, and collective approaches can infuse all aspects of individual, organizational, and societal life.5 This is yet another difference between Peter and David’s approaches to building innovation culture—where one business leader finds themselves stuck in habits that worked well at one time, but have now become ill suited to contemporary demands, while the other sees ideating together, employee development, and organizational well-being as central drivers for productive and novel solutions. Overall, we’re all in a situation where more and better collaboration is required to rise to the level of challenges wrought by this new wave in human connectedness and output, making the development of solidly innovative organizational cultures a necessity.
Second, how organizations are structured is no small matter, given these societal developments. Beyond examples previously presented in this book, such as holacracy, a great deal of thought and practice has gone into what it takes to move organizations from simple functional machines to outstanding spaces for innovation. Frédéric Laloux says we can think of organizations along an evolutionary scale.6 At the bottom of this scale are “red” organizations that run on power and fear, with hierarchal authority and clear divisions of labor. Gangs and militias operate at this lowest level of organizational evolution. In the mid-range of development are “orange” organizations that run on competition and meritocracy, such as large corporations or universities. At some point, everyone has likely found themselves within this type of bureaucratic organization and, from the story told throughout this book, it’s exactly the kind of organization David both inherited and managed. At the highest, most aspirational level, however, are what Laloux calls “teal” organizations that value collective and distributed decision making, self-management, continuous learning, and an incredible responsiveness to employees’ needs and external shifts in real time.7 Others have described such organizations’ operating systems as “complexity conscious” and “people positive” and grounded in variables such as “trust” and “psychological safety.”8 Connected with the work of Patrick Lencioni, these organizations build stellar teams by tending to results, making themselves accountable, committing to clear communal objectives, surfacing conflict, and creating safe, trustful spaces to have voice, as opposed to the practices of dysfunctional teams that forward poor performance, high turnover, the repetition of mistakes, little honesty about problems, and a fear of speaking up.9 Like Peter’s company, teal organizations are like “living organisms” and have the dimensions of innovation soup baked into their very DNA. Extending the analogy, they are innovative, “starfish” organizations whose internal dynamics are such powerful grounds for innovation that if one leg is cut off, not only will a new leg grow back, but the old one will become an entirely new starfish.10
While they may not use the language of “teal” organizations (again, what we’d describe as organizations that are cranking on all cylinders with the dimensions of innovation culture), many thinkers have explained in detail what also goes into highly developed organizations. For those concerned about efficiency, these are organizations that strip out the most wasteful activities employees engage in when they show up to work. This should seem like an obvious point, but simply being in an organization from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. does not equal important work getting done. The revolution in remote work forced by the Covid-19 pandemic more than proved that point—many people around the world found they were more productive working from home than slogging back and forth to a brick-and-mortar institution via train, bus, or car every day.
As Robert Kegan and Lisa Laskow Lahey highlight, many people show up to work and take on a second job much of the day: “spending time and energy covering up their weaknesses, managing other people’s impressions of them, showing themselves to their best advantage, playing politics, hiding their inadequacies, hiding their uncertainties, hiding their limitations.”11 Over time, we also know that leaders tend to give their attention and resources to some employees while ignoring others, creating subtle patterns of inclusion and exclusion that can split an organization in two.12 This can be highly demotivating for an organization and its innovation.13 All of these forces work against the transparency, accountability, and elevation of individual and collective strengths in a culture of innovation. What this puts on the table is that every organization needs a plan to shift from wasteful defaults to the type of framework we’ve offered in this book, where everyone is engaged and creating value.
Third, innovation soup connects with the voluminous literature on leadership. People and organizations that give little thought into what goes into great leadership leave far too much to chance. One exercise Don likes to run in some of his classes involves getting students to list the qualities of the best and worst bosses they have ever had. This is not an exercise that anyone hems and haws about. Everyone has something to say about their experiences with good and bad leadership. The driving question is: What makes a good leader? We’d argue that each of the dimensions of innovation soup provide a structural foundation for the exercise of great leadership. Organizations that ground themselves in the dimensions will be way ahead of the curve in providing the very places and spaces most needed to do so. They create what Lev Vygotsky called a “Zone of Proximal Development” or “the distance between the actual development level as determined by independent problem solving, and the level of potential development as determined through problem solving, under guidance or in collaboration with more capable peers.”14 Through norms of collaboration and informal networking, for instance, expectations can be set that anyone can step into a leadership role—that what an organization does is less about one great person than how a network of people have structured themselves to begin with. And this is what contemporary literature on leadership most pinpoints: leading with “we” rather than “me,” fostering distributed learning, and putting the onus for leadership on the collective over and above individual contributions.15
One type of leadership most crucial to our current moment is “leadership standpoints.”16 Standpoints refer to the many ways of looking at any issue and the many different people who should be spoken to on a continual basis, with an eye toward addressing the power imbalances, material constraints, and systemic inequalities that easily develop in organizations. While innovation soup describes the critical dimensions needed for innovation to flourish across an organization, leadership standpoints look to specific practices those leading organizations can use as parallel to this project—namely, “practicing inclusion, building spaces for performance, and thinking and acting with range.”17
Once again, the demands of the 4th Industrial Revolution are especially relevant. If we’re to tackle the world’s greatest challenges moving forward, we simply can’t be on autopilot with our leadership philosophies and behaviors. In this revolution, “the most consequential and devastating risks are the risks of bad leadership,” and in particular,
leaders and organizations that do not amplify their lens to incorporate the views, risks and opportunities and consequences of ignoring (or even damaging) their full spectrum of key stakeholders . . . run the risk of losing to competitors, engaging in misad-ventures, increasing reputation risk, liabilities and losses or even losing their license to operate.18
Greatest among these is the need for practices of inclusion too long promised but too seldom offered in practice. In this book’s terms, organizations must embrace the needs for diversity, collaboration, informal networks, resource distributions, and the offering of creativity to more people in more places than ever before.
This means that leaders should work to understand the contexts and codes that include or exclude working for both the unity and diversity possible within an innovative organization.19 They should “zoom in” and “zoom out,” or alternate between being on the “dance floor” and the “balcony.”20 We often think of Carl Sagan’s humbling “pale blue dot” speech with this kind of leadership. Sagan referred to photos of earth from afar to underscore the “very small stage in a vast cosmic arena” humans work within, which should put every leader’s grand ambitions in a humbling frame of reference.21 It is important to have leadership that cultivates learning from failure. Top leaders need to do this by taking responsibility for success and failure as the P&G example discussed.
Businesses grounded in empathy, a cornerstone of “emotional intelligence” theory, will put their focus outside of themselves to stay attentive to how people feel and not just think about their products and services.22 And, consistent with the findings in this project, emotional intelligence isn’t the only kid on the block anymore. “Cultural intelligence” constitutes an equally if not more important variable that’s been developed out in a wealth of scholarship. The variable stands as a separate competency from emotional intelligence as practices for leaders to pursue.23 And different cultural ways of leading itself become a lens that promotes organizational diversity, such as thinking about the effects that one’s leadership will have seven generations from now.24 Such “worldly leadership” should be part and parcel of the innovation soup we’ve described in this book25 and fit with the direction of Peter’s company, as an organization committed to all the ingredients of the innovation soup—especially in building informal networks, advancing diversity, and building spaces and processes for collaboration that involve different people at all leadership levels.
Skilled contemporary leaders further build spaces where human beings’ needs for autonomy, mastery, and purpose can flourish,26 manage the energy flows within an organization, not just time,27 and make conversations and transformative, positive communication central drivers for theory and action.28 They think broadly and make continuous learning a centerpiece of their organizational commitments.29 Innovative leaders engage in design thinking and how they can shape environments that foster certain actions: the very soup we’ve described in this book. Elements such as architecture, lighting, seating, and more all impact human behaviors.30 They’ll pay attention to digital and remote ecologies as much as whatever else goes on at the physical office.31
And for a subject that is vastly focused on external tasks and relationships, leaders should also give conscious attention to taking care of and developing themselves. You’re no good if burnt out all the time. Practices in mindfulness and connecting with the body can be critical to keeping leaders going during stress-filled and turbulent times.32
At the end of the day, everyone brings to work each day a set of ideas about what leadership should look like, how organizations should operate, and their impacts on society. These ideas matter. Bad ideas about leadership can create low morale among employees and affect many bottom-line variables like retention. Poor ideas about organizations can lock people into tribal and unproductive ways of organizing themselves. Companies that are cut off from all that’s going on in the world externally will fail to be responsive and reach their competitive potential.33 It’s thus now more important than ever to lay a groundwork for leadership, organizations, and societies that thrive. Using the dimensions and guidelines for innovation soup—that connect with many of the best ideas and practices that have emerged across fields—can put an organization on the path to excellence that all people want and deserve.
1 A. Bonime-Blanc. 2019. Gloom to Boom: How Leaders Transform Risk Into Resilience and Value (New York, NY: Routledge).
2 K. Schwab. January 14, 2016. “The Fourth Industrial Revolution: What It Means, How to Respond,” World Economic Forum. www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/01/the-fourth-industrial-revolution-what-it-means-and-how-to-respond/.
3 A. Bonime-Blanc. n.d. Gloom to Boom 252, p. 33; Horney, Pasmore, and O’Shea. n.d. “Leadership Agility,” p. 34. This also means that elevating the type of training staff undergo should rise to a “civic” level in this day and age. See D.J. Waisanen. 2019. “Communication Training’s Higher Calling: Using a Civic Frame to Promote Transparency and Elevate the Value of Services,” In J.D. Wallace and D. Becker, eds., Handbook of Communication Training (New York, NY: Routledge), pp. 21–35.
4 D. Mielach. April 19, 2012. “We Can’t Solve Problems By Using The Same Kind Of Thinking We Used When We Created Them,” Business News Daily. www.businessinsider.com/we-cant-solve-problems-by-using-the-same-kind-of-thinking-we-used-when-we-created-them-2012-4.
5 A. Hurst. 2018. The Purpose Economy (U.S.: Imperative), front book cover; A. Dignan. 2019. Brave New Work: Are You Ready to Reinvent Your Organization? (New York, NY: Penguin).
6 F. Laloux. 2014. Reinventing Organizations: A Guide to Creating Organizations Inspired by the Next Stage in Human Consciousness (Brussels, Belgium: Nelson Parker).
7 Laloux. Reinventing Organizations; a clear visual for Laloux’s overall scheme has been drawn from and can be found here: https://enliveningedge.org/views/reinventing-management-part-1-what-color-is-your-organization/.
8 A. Dignan. n.d. Brave New Work; Edmondson, cited in Duhigg, “What Google Learned from Its Quest to Build the Perfect Team”; A.C. Edmondson. 2019. The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation, and Growth (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley). For those working on diversity, equity, inclusion, and antiracism initiatives in and across organizations, we’d also add that the type of innovation described in this book can also have a decolonizing goal. With the objective of elevating voices across an organization while honing in on the importance of identities and the collective, there’s much about working toward the status of “teal” organizations that connects with these purposes. Some goals should be, to borrow Tiara R. Na’puti’s words, “to interrupt erasure and the logic of elimination embedded in enduring colonial violence—the goal is to denaturalize settler colonialism,” as “a radical reimagining of kinships among land, people, the state—as a process as much as a goal,” as actions that require “conversation and unlearning.” D. Wanzer-Serrano, S.K. Sowards, V.N. Pham, G.A. Asante, and T.R. Na’puti. 2019. “Rhetoric’s ‘Distinguished’ pitfalls: A plática,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 105, no. 4, pp. 504–505. In this light, meeting the demands of the 4th Industrial Revolution should be positioned at the level of what organizations do, how they operate from within and without, and as a project dedicated to overcoming centuries of injustice at the core of many of the world’s largest problems.
9 P. Lencioni. 2006. The Five Dysfunctions of a Team (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley). See also J. Palfrey on the need to build both “safe” and “brave” spaces. J. Palfrey. 2018. Safe Spaces, Brave Spaces: Diversity and Free Expression in Education (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press).
10 In Brafman and Beckstrom’s spider and starfish analogy, “If you cut off a spider’s head, it dies; but if you cut off a starfish’s leg, it grows a new one, and that leg can grow into an entirely new starfish. Traditionally, top-down organizations are like spiders, but now starfish organizations are changing the face of business and the world.” O. Brafman, and R.A. Beckstrom. 2006. The Starfish, and the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations (New York, NY: Penguin), synopsis.
11 R. Kegan, and L.L. Lahey. 2016. An Everyone Culture: Becoming a Deliberately Developmental Organization (Harvard University Business Press: Boston), 1.
12 F.C. Lunenburg. 2010. “Leader-Member Exchange Theory: Another Perspective on the Leadership Process,” International Journal of Management, Business, and Administration 13, no. 1, pp. 1–5.
13 Our thanks go to Shekhar Mitra for this reaction and insight.
14 Cited in L. Holzman. 2017. Vygotsky at Work and Play (New York, NY: Routledge), pp. 27–28.
15 P. Cecchi-Dimeglio. May 18, 2020. “In Times of Anxiety, Lead With ‘We’ and ‘Us’,” MIT Sloan Management Review. https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/in-times-of-anxiety-lead-with-we-and-us/; R. Men. April 16, 2020. “Leading in Wartime: 5 Ways CEOs Should Communicate With Their Workers During Coronavirus,” UF College of Journalism and Communications. www.jou.ufl.edu/insights/leading-in-wartime-5-ways-ceos-should-communicate-with-their-workers-during-coronavirus/; See P. Gronn. 2002. “Distributed Leadership as a Unit of Analysis,” The Leadership Quarterly 13, no. 4, pp. 423–451; C.L. Pearce, and J.A. Conger. 2002. Shared Leadership: Reframing the Hows and Whys of Leadership (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage); S. Gagnon, H.C. Vough, and R. Nickerson. 2012. “Learning to Lead, Unscripted: Developing Affiliative Leadership through Improvisational Theatre,” Human Resource Development Review 11, no. 3, pp. 299–325; U. Stephan, M. Patterson, C. Kelly, and J. Mair. 2016. “Organizations Driving Positive Social Change: A Review and an Integrative Framework of Change Processes,” Journal of Management 42, no. 5, pp. 1250–1281. There are also lots of ideas about practices like “participative management.” M. Rolková, and V. Farkašová. 2015. “The Features of Participative Management Style,” Procedia Economics and Finance 23, pp. 1383–1387. The differences that have been noted between leadership and management may also prove useful here: “Managers embrace process, seek stability and control, and instinctively try to resolve problems quickly—sometimes before they fully understand a problem’s significance. Leaders, in contrast, tolerate chaos and lack of structure and are willing to delay closure in order to understand the issues more fully. . .. leaders have much more in common with artists, scientists, and other creative thinkers than they do with managers. Organizations need both managers and leaders to succeed but developing both requires a reduced focus on logic and strategic exercises in favor of an environment where creativity and imagination are permitted to flourish.” A. Zaleznik. 2004. “Managers and Leaders: Are They Different?” Harvard Business Review, para. 2. https://hbr.org/2004/01/managers-and-leaders-are-they-different. Further dimensions of management practice can be found in R.B. Denhardt, J.V. Denhardt, M.P. Aristigueta, and K.C. Rawlings. 2018. Managing Human Behavior in Public and Nonprofit Organizations (Thousand Oaks, Sage). For a comprehensive and quick overview of the range of theories about leadership, see K. Grint. 2010. Leadership: A Very Short Introduction (New York, NY: Oxford University Press).
16 Waisanen, Leadership Standpoints.
17 Waisanen, Leadership Standpoints.
18 Bonime-Blanc. n.d. From Gloom to Boom 42, p. 25; See also M. Uhl-Bien, R. Marion, and B. McKelvey. August 2007. “Complexity Leadership Theory: Shifting Leadership from the Industrial Age to the Knowledge Era,” The Leadership Quarterly 18, no. 4, pp. 298–318.
19 For example, Arya Gray argues that, indeed, “Professionalism has become coded language for white favoritism in workplace practices that more often than not privilege the values of white and Western employees and leave behind people of color.” A. Gray. June 04, 2019. “The Bias of ‘Professionalism’ Standards,” Stanford Social Innovation Review. https://ssir.org/articles/entry/the_bias_of_professionalism_standards#. The focus on culture also aligns with much literature arguing for strategic rather than reactive approaches to the subject; See, for instance, D.D. Warrick. May–June 2017. “What Leaders Need to Know About Organizational Culture,” Business Horizons 60, no. 3, pp. 395–404; L. Dreier, D. Nabarro, and J. Nelson. September 24, 2019. “Systems Leadership Can Change the World—But What Exactly is It?” World Economic Forum. www.weforum.org/agenda/2019/09/systems-leadership-can-change-the-world-but-what-does-it-mean/. It’s critical to note that “Leadership development is context-sensitive. There is no one best way to lead or to develop leaders. In different settings, there may be different expectations of leaders and different practices that make them effective.” It’s “an ongoing process. . . grounded in personal [and collective] development, which is never complete.” McCauley, Velsor, and Ruderman. n.d. 3, p. 26. P.G. Northouse. 2015. Leadership: Theory and Practice (Thousand Oaks: Sage), adapted from P.W. Dorfman, P.J. Hanges, and F.C. Brodbeck. 2004. “Leadership and Cultural Variation: The Identification of Culturally Endorsed Leadership Profiles,” In Culture, Leadership, and Organizations: The GLOBE Study of 62 Societies, eds. R.J. House, P.J. Hanges, M. Javidan, P.W. Dorfman, and V. Gupta (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage), pp. 669–719.
20 R.M. Kanter. March 2011. “Managing Yourself: Zoom In, Zoom Out,” Harvard Business Review. https://hbr.org/2011/03/managing-yourself-zoom-in-zoom-out, pars. 3–4; Heifetz, Grashow, and Linsky. n.d. The Practice of Adaptive Leadership, 7.
21 Pale Blue Dot—30th Anniversary | National Geographic. February 14, 2020. National Geographic/Youtube. www.youtube.com/watch?v=hKFkR9yfRoY. *Note that the former link does not work, but this could be a possible new citation with video link that works: Cool Worlds, “Pale Blue Dot 2020,” YouTube, February 13, 2020. www.youtube.com/watch?v=qDjiSc_J3Ac.
22 D. Goleman. 2006. Emotional Intelligence (New York, NY: Bantam).
23 See D. Livermore. 2015. Leading With Cultural Intelligence (New York, NY: AMACOM).
24 J. Bordas. 2012. Salsa, Soul, and Spirit: Leadership for a Multicultural Age (Oakland, CA: Berrett-Koehler). “What is the Seventh Generation Principle?” Indigenous Corporate Training, May 29, 2012, www.ictinc.ca/blog/seventh-generation-principle; See also “What is Servant Leadership?” Robert K. Greenleaf Center for Servant Leadership, 2016. www.greenleaf.org/what-is-servant-leadership/; A. Arora, M. Elawar, and S. Cheng. 2019. “Socially Conscious Leadership: An Integrated Model,” Journal of Leadership Studies 13, no. 3, p. 38. What’s clear is that “what works well in one organization, culture, or country, may well produce failure in another organization, culture, or country;” G. Jacobs, A. Van Witteloostuijn, and J. Christe-Zeyse. 2013. “A Theoretical Framework of Organizational Change,” Journal of Organizational Change Management 26, no. 5, p. 775. Further focusing how leadership cannot be culture and gender neutral, Roya Ayman and Karen Korabik describe some factors making up the “labyrinth” that women and other leaders face: “stereotypes and schemes, ingroup-outgroup dynamics, role expectations, power and status differentials, and differential attributions made about, and rewards given for similar behavior.” R. Ayman, and K. Korabik. 2010. “Leadership: Why Gender and Culture Matter,” American Psychologist 65, no. 3, p. 157. Judy Rosesner also argues that masculine styles tend to be grounded in “transactional leadership,” whereas feminine styles tend to be more oriented toward “transformational” and “interactive leadership.” J.B. Rosener. November–December 1990. “Ways Women Lead,” Harvard Business Review, pars 6–8. https://hbr.org/1990/11/ways-women-lead.
25 Fitting with the demands of the 4th Industrial Revolution, worldly leadership has been described as “a pooling of the combined leadership wisdoms from all parts of the globe—whether these are contemporary or ancient wisdoms. We fear that as the world becomes increasingly homogenous as a result of the ‘flattening’ impact of the internet and advancing global communication technology, the existing dominant voices may drive out the leadership wisdoms of minority, indigenous and ancient wisdoms. It does not have to be so. With . . . new technologies, an opportunity now presents itself for leaders across the world to share and combine the leadership knowledge and practice that exist in many corners of the world: wisdoms that would otherwise remain unknown outside their community. Ancient philosophies can enable us to reframe and rethink the enormous challenges of responsible, ethical, and sustainable leadership of the world. The majority of leaders across the globe today have been conditioned in some way by western and US-centric leadership theories and methodologies. This thinking has been driven through our global business schools and business cultures, often to the exclusion of non-western traditions and cultures and the valuable insights and wisdom these may have to offer.” P. Case, S. Turnbull, and S. Khakwani. 2012. “Introduction: The Emerging Case for Worldly Leadership,” In Worldly Leadership: Alternative Wisdoms for a Complex World, eds. S. Turnbull, P. Case, G. Edwards, D. Schedlitzki, and P. Simpson (London, UK: Palgrave Macmillan), p. 3.
26 D. Pink. 2011. Drive: The Surprising Truth about What Motivates Us (New York, NY: Riverhead). We’d also add that seeing the possibilities for employees to grow and change is critical to this perspective. One of the most enduring, problematic notions in popular culture is of “hard-wiring.” Countering this is “neural plasticity,” since, “with the possible exception of inborn reflexes, remarkably few psychological capacities in humans are genuinely hard-wired, that is, inflexible in their behavioral express. . . . Moreover, virtually all psychological capacities, including emotions and language, are modifiable by environmental experiences.” S.O. Lilienfeld, K.C. Sauvigné, S.J. Lynn, R.L. Cautin, R.D. Latzman, and I.D. Waldman. 2015. “Fifty Psychological and Psychiatric Terms to Avoid: A List of Inaccurate, Misleading, Misused, Ambiguous, and Logically Confused Words and Phrases,” Frontiers in Psychology 6, p. 4.
27 T. Schwartz, and C. McCarthy. October 2017. “Manage Your Energy, Not Your Time,” Harvard Business Review. https://hbr.org/2007/10/manage-your-energy-not-your-time.
28 A. Credi, and C. Ainsworth. December 10, 2019. “Transforming Your Culture With Conversations,” Center for Creative Leadership. https://cclwebinars.webvent.tv/webinar/3545; J Mirivel. 2014. The Art of Positive Communication: Theory and Practice (New York, NY: Peter Lang). Great leaders also promote democratic discussion. See S.D. Brookfield, and S. Preskill. 2012. Discussion as a Way of Teaching: Tools and Techniques for Democratic Classrooms (San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass); J.M.G. Burns. 2004. Transforming Leadership (New York, NY: Grove Press).
29 D. Epstein. 2019. Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World (New York, NY: Penguin); K.S. Milway, and A. Saxton. 2011. “The Challenge of Organizational Learning,” Stanford Social Innovation Review. https://ssir.org/articles/entry/the_challenge_of_organizational_learning#.
30 See, for example, A. Arieff. July 18, 2011. “Beyond the Cubicle,” The New York Times. http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/07/18/beyond-the-cubicle/?hp; A. Alter. 2014. Drunk Tank Pink: And Other Unexpected Forces that Shape How We Think, Feel, and Behave (New York, NY: Penguin). See also L.G. Bolman, and T.E. Deal. 2017. Reframing Organizations: Artistry, Choice, and Leadership (San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass).
31 As some have put it, an immaterial digital surface has now been placed upon almost every part of our planet’s material surface. B. Alexander. 2017. The New Digital Storytelling: Creating Narratives With New Media (Santa Barbara, CA: Abc-clio).
32 One great concept for this is the idea of using “purposeful pauses.” J. Marturano. 2014. Finding the Space to Lead: A Practical Guide to Mindful Leadership (New York, NY: Bloomsbury). P. Hamill. 2013. Embodied Leadership: The Somatic Approach to Developing your Leadership (London, UK: Kogan Page Publishers); L.R. Melina, G.J. Burgess, L. Lid-Falkman, and A. Marturano, eds. 2013. The Embodiment of Leadership (San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass). Overall, “Research shows that the single biggest cause of work burnout is not work overload but working too long without experiencing your own personal development.” Kegan and Lahey. n.d. An Everyone Culture, 2.
33 John Maynard Keynes once summarized this perspective about how we all carry theories with us in our daily thoughts and actions: “The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed, the world is ruled by little else. Practical men [sic], who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back. I am sure that the power of vested interests is vastly exaggerated compared with the gradual encroachment of ideas. Not, indeed, immediately, but after a certain interval; for in the field of economic and political philosophy there are not many who are influenced by new theories after they are twenty-five or thirty years of age, so that the ideas which civil servants and politicians and even agitators apply to current events are not likely to be the newest.” Cited in P. Krugman. March 05, 2011. “Madmen in Authority: An Update,” The New York Times. https://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/05/05/madmen-in-authority-an-update/.