CHAPTER 12
Leadership: Reframing Influence
Balancing Paradoxes
Throughout the course of writing this book, we have met some remarkable people. Dynamic and imaginative individuals with uncanny insight who were moved and sufficiently worried by the crises we face to change the trajectory of their regions, institutions, or businesses, preparing them to steer through a difficult and disrupted future and improving the social conditions of the many people dependent on them. By varying degrees, these leaders took the time (or in some cases even made it their life’s work) to understand the crises’ origins and their threats. And ultimately they provided creative solutions when others were still struggling with identifying the problem. Reflecting on these leaders and why they have been so effective and visionary in the most challenging situations, an unlikely common leadership profile emerges. Each leader reconciled (and used to their advantage) two distinctive characteristics that on the surface seem quite at odds.
Vice Mayor Jin Naibing is steadfastly devoted to Kunshan—where she was born and raised—and yet is globally astute. Marjorie Scardino daringly embraced century-old core traditions at Pearson Plc as the basis of out-sized modern innovation. Dennis Snower used remarkable political skills to revive the G20 process, giving it a relevance it had lost, yet somehow maintained a high level of integrity as his primary strength. Jim Danko had the brassy courage to demand that a somewhat sleepy Midwestern university change and modernize quickly and yet relied on deep currents of quiet humility to gain consensus at the school. Microsoft’s Satya Nadella has led a company dedicated to software, platforms, and machines and still is a dyed-in-the-wool humanist. And Ravi Venkatesan showed that he is a bold and visionary strategist in designing an organization, the Global Alliance for Mass Entrepreneurship (GAME), that aims to kickstart and train ten million entrepreneurs in India by 2030, yet he also has intense, dynamic, roll-up-your-sleeves executional capabilities.
By deftly integrating opposing traits to fashion a more cohesive, productive, and effective leadership style, these people applied an aspect of what I call the Six Paradoxes of Leadership. In the course of trying to address a complex problem in their context, these leaders learned how to comfortably inhabit both elements of at least one paradox. This is not an easy undertaking. Many leaders—indeed, all of us—gravitate toward our sweet spots; to what we do well. But by definition, leadership paradoxes require that we use our best skills while also improving those traits we would prefer to avoid.
The Six Paradoxes of Leadership work as a system, forcing us to balance competing characteristics, abilities, and beliefs. At the heart of each paradox is a core tension that involves contradictory-yet-interrelated elements that exist simultaneously and persist over time. When these characteristics are out of sync, the outcome is almost always disappointing. Think of the high-profile executive hero who saves an organization from the brink of disaster but lacks the humility to seek advice or the ability to change course; more than likely, that campaign will end in failure.
The six paradoxes explored in this chapter are not the only ones leaders will encounter as they take on the challenges of ADAPT. But I believe they are the most urgent ones for leaders to embrace in today’s environment. They represent a fresh approach to leadership utterly necessary for the unique and formidable threats we face and this will likely be true well into the next decade. It probably shouldn’t be surprising, considering the contradictions inherent in the crises we are confronting, that these paradoxes have emerged as by-products of a global system that had improved economic and social prospects for millions of people and then suddenly was no longer effective. Great leadership now requires dancing on both sides of a sword.
Paradox 1: Tech-savvy humanist
Competing Capabilities
Tech-savvy: Use and understand technology to drive future success
Humanist: Understand and care about people and organizations and how they function as well as human effectiveness in systems and situations
When you spend some time with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, it is striking that in many ways he is a humanist first and a technologist second. He prefers to discuss the purpose of Microsoft and its role in the world and the countries in which it operates and pepper these conversations with comments about technology. Since Nadella became CEO in 2014, Microsoft has consistently been named to numerous “best places to work” lists and he has implemented a new culture at the company that focuses on encouraging employee innovation, breaking down silos and opening doors to communication, offering employees a transparent career path, and linking executive compensation to diversity progress. “If we are going to serve the planet as our mission states, we need to reflect the planet,” Nadella has said. To capture his leadership philosophy, he offers this equation:
Empathy + Shared Values + Safety and Reliability = Trust over Time
Of course, Nadella is equally practiced as a technologist. Recently, he has steered Microsoft to new heights in revenue, earnings, and market valuation mostly by remaking the company into a leader in cloud-based networking and software, erasing the memory of the many years that Microsoft floundered around without an Internet strategy. The humanist side of this paradox is a complex quality that includes but also goes far beyond encouraging positive experiences in the workplace. It involves fully understanding how people operate, the impact of systems on them, and how their lives can be augmented rather than diminished by technology. At the same time, it requires caring enough to assess how a technological advance will affect—improve or harm—the people who will be impacted the most by it. This demands an enormous amount of empathy, particularly in predicting the effect of technology that is still on the drawing boards. And it takes a high degree of self-discipline for a technologist to consider and eliminate the negative consequences of technologies they build and put into the marketplace.
It may be tempting to think that having humanists at the top of tech companies will be enough to ensure that these firms are good global citizens, but that is not sufficient. Indeed, the importance of the tech-savvy side of this leadership paradox should not be understated. Technology dominates our lives and affects us in ways previously unseen. Our privacy, livelihoods, quality of life, and social relations are dependent on technology being implemented with care and sensitivity and not malevolently. It is no longer okay to assume technology is benign, nor to hold naïve theories of what technology does to our thinking, emotions, communities, and nations. Only tech-savvy leaders have sufficient technology expertise to build systems that anticipate the future—and thus make sure they are attentive to improving lives, not threatening them. Indeed, leaders fail when they apply technology that solves yesterday’s problems and are a detriment to the well-being of individuals and organizations in the years to come. They are not doing their jobs when they lack proper judgment about the consequences of technology or don’t take the issue seriously enough.
Paradox 2: High-integrity politician
Competing Capabilities
High-integrity: Maintain integrity and build trust in all interactions
Politician: Accrue support, negotiate, form coalitions, and overcome resistance to create and maintain progress
Dennis Snower, the president of the Global Solutions Initiative whom you met in Chapter 9, took on what could be called an impossible task. And yet he made it possible. To breathe new life into the annual G20 summit—making it worthwhile again as a venue for critical global issues like climate change, resource shortages, and wealth disparity, rather than just host politicians’ pet issues—Snower created a framework for continuous agenda building that took into account new and urgent problems and progress made in dealing with past concerns. Putting together this group took remarkable political skills because the range of stakeholders that Snower had to gain agreement from was enormous. He had to make this approach acceptable to political leaders and leading economists and political scientists, all of whom have quite different views on the shape of a new global order. Snower also placed corporate voices into the mix among academics and thinktanks, who are typically highly distrustful of corporations. And he did this in an environment of increasing antagonism and nationalism among many of the G20 countries themselves.
A tough effort, but it was successful only because in the midst of all the political persuasion, negotiation, maneuvering, debate, and deal-making, Snower brought an unwavering sense of purpose, clarity of goal, honesty, and fairness to the process. His political skill produces agreements among many competing interests, but his integrity brings people to the table in the first place and keeps them there. They trust that Snower has everyone’s interests at heart and will not lie or mislead just to reach an accord. No one, among the many people involved in this effort, doubted his selflessness or his intentions. How many exceptionally skilled politicians can be described as having an unshakeable sense of integrity and fair play?
Snower’s adroit political skills on the base of a foundation of deep integrity serve as a model today as the number and diversity of constituents needed to respond to the issues arising from ADAPT and the four global crises have grown immensely. These issues are increasingly complex and interdependent, which means that solutions depend on corralling a much broader set of stakeholders with a variety of legitimate points of view, diverse considerations, and underlying assumptions. To drive execution in this context, leaders are expected to accrue support, negotiate, form coalitions, anticipate counteractions, and overcome resistance. With more parties at the table, political competence becomes more important than ever before. However, people rarely stay if there is not trust in the process or a mutual belief in the fundamental intentions or that their voice will be valued. To create and sustain such belief requires a high level of integrity.
Often would-be political consensus builders fall short because they forfeit their integrity in deeply political environments. So much time may be spent meeting the needs of everyone and managing the countervailing forces that leaders may sacrifice their core principles for expediency. But precisely because the political landscape today is so polarized and distrustful, only leaders who exhibit transparent integrity and a commitment to the group’s goals, rather than individual constituent self-interest, can hope to produce a successful outcome.
Paradox 3: Globally minded localist
Competing Capabilities
Globally minded: Be agnostic about belief system and market structure and be a student of the world
Localist: Have a deep commitment to a place and understand and successfully navigate local market issues and nuances
I introduced you to Jin, vice mayor of Kunshan, in Chapter 4. From our first meeting, it was clear that Jin was deeply devoted to her city and relished showing it off. I was taken to the restaurant that makes the Ao Zao noodles Kunshan is famous for; back in the Qing dynasty an emperor in Beijing sought to steal away the chef who first made these noodles, but the chef, like Jin, loved Kunshan too much to leave. I saw the theater where Chinese opera originated and the art gallery featuring projects from students throughout the city. Jin had me try her favorite local dish, the famous hairy crab fished from the waters of the nearby lakes. She was an unrelenting localist, focused on combining a growth economy with a strong education system and cultural offerings to keep Kunshan thriving.
Jin was also an astute student of the world who saw mounting political fracturing, economic competition, and income disparity well before they were obvious to most of us. She was determined that maintaining Kunshan’s success was predicated on attracting Duke University to the city. A world-class school would solidify Kunshan as an innovative region, able to attract students, teachers, researchers, and entrepreneurs from around the world. There would also be increased access to capital and upscale housing and commerce development surrounding the university. In short, she knew that by aligning Duke with Kunshan, the local city would become a global entity.
Jin was prescient in observing that in the early twenty-first century the global worldview was becoming local. People around the world are generally more anxious and concerned about their own and their children’s future. In such times, people’s focus becomes narrower; they seek others like themselves and turn their attention to issues closer to home. Many of the issues raised through the ADAPT framework are best solved locally. At a national or international level, they seem intractable, or at least opinions are so polarized that it is hard to get agreement.
However, there are momentous challenges that cannot be addressed at a local level: atmosphere, oceans, and pathogens are indifferent to borders. There still remains significant economic interdependence; how we reshape technology to help us be more human is a pan-national issue and there are dramatic disparities across the globe that we should not neglect. This last point is not just a selfless concern. Very poor countries have citizens who emigrate, legally or not, and tend to engage in wars that cross their own borders. We cannot escape each other’s problems. Thus it is important for leaders to be able to hold two apparently contradictory mindsets: a local preoccupation with an astute global awareness. Indeed, the ramifications of not embracing both facets of this paradox are palpable. Overemphasis on the global side of the equation results in essentially managing to average—similar to using GDP as a proxy for economic equality across a nation.
On the one hand, it may be obvious that job training is necessary throughout a large region, but individual local areas will have different employment needs and skills; a generalized upskilling program would leave many areas no better off than they were. In fact, it might ignore the places that have the greatest employment needs. On the other hand, diehard localists without a global vision run the risk of neglecting the fact that we live in a world now built upon interdependence—and while it may be somewhat comforting to believe that local regions can act independent of activities elsewhere, that’s a naïve notion. Although local initiatives can drive the growth of local economies, local economies cannot operate on their own. Moreover, global or national economic and social campaigns often have substantial resources to test out a variety of strategic and tactical models, the best of which can be emulated by locally minded innovators.
Paradox 4: Humble hero
Competing Capabilities
Humble: Foster resilience in self and others, recognizing when they need to help and be helped, and demonstrate humility in listening to others
Hero: Make decisions in times of uncertainty and exude confidence with gravitas
Jim Danko, president of Butler University, was highlighted in Chapter 9 for his stunning campaign to move the school forward, out of its inertia, by originating a largely independent arm of the university that could quickly design whole new models of education. In doing this, Danko was courageous enough to ask profound questions about the future of universities and whether it was possible to create the capacity to respond fast enough to the dynamic changes confronting them. These are big, weighty questions, but Danko didn’t want to impose his answers on the university. Instead, he listened to responses from the school’s board, alumni, students, professors, and other constituents, and he would adopt good ideas he heard even when they opposed his own. In addition, he was willing to admit that he was unsure about his plan, since it was new and untried, and he promised to assess, report back, and fix parts that were broken.
Danko’s heroic effort stemmed from the realization that he had to rise up and provide daring leadership to preserve the institution he led. His humility, though, was the reason this effort succeeded. It enabled him to bring the other constituents along, to convince them to collaborate and to have an ongoing plan with university buy-in to assess whether the new initiative needed improvements in the future. His gift was in embracing the humble hero leadership paradox, which can be described best through the question, How do we help leaders to have the fearlessness to act with confidence in an uncertain world and the humility to recognize when they are wrong or haven’t asked the right questions to get the optimal answers?
Given the number of fast-changing variables that leaders face today, taking action becomes incredibly difficult. The tough challenge is for the leader to provide clarity in the moments when, even for them, things are least clear. Yet, more than ever, leaders feel as if they need to behave like heroes, exuding self-assurance in anxiety-inducing times. That’s okay as long as they don’t combine this heroism with the arrogance to presume that they know all the answers and to be unwilling to change course when insurmountable challenges arise or others in their orbit offer helpful suggestions. The speed and enormity of change today requires leaders who can decide and act with alacrity but also have the humility to recognize the limits of their abilities and the courage to admit their mistakes.
But there is another aspect to being humble that is equally important: inclusivity. True leaders can avoid mistakes by encouraging input from all the people who will be impacted by a decision or who have a great deal of expertise to offer. By seeking opinions, background materials, data, and anecdotal evidence from a large and diverse contingent of people, leaders allow everyone to feel like they had in a hand in the final decision and hence, choices that turn out to be mistakes can be quickly rectified as a team effort. Of course, sometimes too much varied input can paralyze leaders, who become afraid to make a decision because they are presented with an array of complex and nuanced pieces of solutions to a problem. That’s when the heroic aspect of this leadership paradox must kick in. By not making any decision, a leader is actually making a decision to do nothing and the organization or region will fall behind in today’s dynamic landscape. Real leaders would have the courage to make a decision based on what they know and be ready to change course if the chosen option turns out to be in error.
It takes profound personal resilience for leaders to admit when they are wrong, allow others to make mistakes, be inclusive in seeking advice, make hard decisions based on what their gut tells them, and foster confidence to stimulate ongoing success. It demonstrates vulnerability and in the process leaders become more human to their colleagues. In turn, these paradoxical elements of the humble hero serve as a springboard for facing the future.
Paradox 5: Traditioned innovator
Competing Capabilities
Traditioned: Connect deeply with the purpose of the organization or place—especially the original ideas that served as its foundation—and bring these values to the present day
Innovator: Drive innovation, try new things, and have the courage to fail and allow others to do so
Marjorie Scardino, CEO of Pearson Plc, who appears in chapter 9, recognized that the strength of her company was in its traditions. Rich, smart, accurate, and credible journalism are the bread and butter of Pearson’s Financial Times and the Economist (in which Pearson owns a 50 percent stake). The company’s educational offerings were also well respected and deeply entrenched in the organization’s DNA. Less so was an array of other businesses in technology, investment banking, and waxworks. Scardino’s challenge was to maintain the company’s traditional strengths, protecting its essential character while developing new channels and updated products that would allow the company to survive the technology disruption facing old media. Many other brand-name media outfits—Time Inc. is an obvious example—were unable to make the transition that Scardino handled so nimbly.
To describe leaders like Scardino, I coined the term traditioned innovator—someone who respects the traditions of the institutions they are leading but realizes that to preserve what is significant about those institutions you need meaningful innovation. This phrase first came to mind in a conversation with my closest colleague at Duke University, Greg Jones, the dean of the Divinity School where clergy are trained. He described the challenges of changing a school so deeply founded on tradition, one where a single very old text served as the basis for all of its research and teaching. Jones saw the need for greater integration with other schools, research and teaching focused on the increasingly multidisciplinary problems of the day, the changes needed to develop religious leaders in an increasingly secular society, and the need to recast ideas such as character and virtue in today’s world. I made the irreverent observation that his problem boiled down to a simple question: How do you tell your faculty, board members, alumni, allied churches, and students that God was wrong ten years ago? We determined that a better way to put it was, How do you translate the traditions and truths of the past in a manner still relevant to these times?
It was essential for Scardino to hold on to the products that Pearson was best known for and the best historical qualities that Pearson possessed because these gave Pearson value. These traditions are precisely what is needed in the ADAPT environment—media that is fair, neutral, and covers the world from a sophisticated perch. At the same time, innovation is non-negotiable. All organizations need to transform, not just once but often as global gears shift. Leaders must ensure that transformation occurs by creating a culture that will drive their organization into new areas, technologies, methods, products, and services, and (perhaps most important) new ideas, since relying on outmoded ways of thinking without questioning or updating them has been the prime contributor to institutional irrelevance today.
But instead of traditioned innovation, would it make more sense to just break the organization and move on? Split the paradox and throw out the traditioned part? For most institutions that is a foolhardy approach. After all, the value of what institutions like the media, government, education, markets, policing, and defense have provided is not in question—it is just as important now as it was in the past. The inability of these institutions to change and modernize is the critical shortcoming. Some media companies have in fact attempted to ride out the disruption in their sector by, for instance, adulterating the journalism they were known for. They chase Internet clicks with poorly written, unsourced, sensationalist articles instead of trying to serve the better angels of their readers. Many of those media outfits have not survived, enmeshed in a digital revenue squeeze as they and hundreds of others on the Web race to the bottom.
By respecting tradition, leaders are more apt to adopt appropriate and more impactful innovation because they took the time to understand the core purpose of their organization—and to carry that purpose forward into a more modern manifestation. That, in turn, gives the evolving organization a foundation to build upon. The traditioned innovator paradox can best be summarized by the somewhat Confucian suggestion that leaders remember that they are hosts to those who came before, who are sitting on their shoulders watching what they are doing, reminding them how they got here and urging them not to destroy the organization’s legacy through inaction.
Paradox 6: Strategic executor
Competing Capabilities
Strategic: Use insights about the future to inform today’s decision making
Executor: Deliver exquisitely on today’s challenges
As someone who is responsible for the strategy of a large organization, I find this last paradox a bit humbling. The global landscape is changing far too quickly for me to have the luxury to sit back, review what’s going on, debate it at length, and come up with a grand scheme to be reviewed and implemented some five years later. Not anymore. Yet there are extremely long-term trends and intermediate-term issues that we need to prepare for as we respond to the immediate pressures and significant short-term issues. The answer is to not separate execution from strategy. We need to execute with the future in mind, or strategize while executing.
Ravi Venkatesan, the founder of GAME, exemplifies the strategic executor paradox. On the one hand, he is the consummate big-firm strategist able to put a grand vision and a large organization together in a manner that reveals expertise picked up during decades of work in the corporate world. (He was chairman of the Bank of Baroda, India’s second largest bank, and before that, chairman of Microsoft India). On the other hand, Venkatesan is dedicated to creating local opportunities for a large number of entrepreneurs through GAME, an effort that will epitomize learning and adjusting rapidly to changing conditions in the start-up sphere.
His organizational framework has two distinct elements: (1) an overall architecture and governance structure that will be relatively permanent and hew to principles that Venkatesan designed, based on experience, to facilitate GAME’s mandate; and (2) a dynamic operational model that will be in flux; constantly improving as new ideas emerge. In the first part, Venkatesan demonstrates the execution aspect of the strategic executor paradox; in the second, he provides the strategic dimension. Perhaps the most impressive element of his approach to GAME is that without the disciplined structure and the concomitant rules and policies that he put in place—without the exquisitely drawn execution game plan for governance and growth—the organization would be adrift and unable to meet the goals of its strategic thrust.
When execution and strategy are not in balance, success is anything but certain. Leaders who favor execution over strategy are setting themselves up for failure because they could be caught in the vicious cycle of constantly fixing problems within systems but not addressing flaws in the system itself. On the one hand, they go from fix to fix without making material progress—progress that would be possible if there was a strategic plan for how the system is expected to serve the organization’s goals in the coming years. Moreover, these execution-heavy leaders are trapped, focusing on today’s problems rather than what the future requires. Dynamic innovation is at a premium when a leader approaches developing a system or an organizational plan in this way.
On the other hand, a leader who is “all strategy, no execution” won’t remain in the job very long because the organization will lack the capacity to actually address issues that must be tackled for its survival. If you can’t fix the small things in front of you, you will certainly be unable to solve the larger problems that are yet to materialize. Most organizations will oust the leader who is ill-equipped to deal with obvious day-to-day dilemmas. Also, systems, structures, or programs that are not executed well will chew up resources—financial, workforce, political—in the short-term and leave nothing for the longer horizon. People usually have an inclination toward strategy or execution. To overcome that, a leader should articulate a strategy but with a clear understanding that it probably needs to evolve and execute with both immediate needs and the changing future in mind.
For people in roles like mine, present success and future vision executed brilliantly and together are essential today. It seems daunting perhaps to effectively reconcile all Six Paradoxes of Leadership, which is why good leaders know what their strengths are—and the leadership paradox they are most suited to navigate. They must develop complementary leaders around them who are more comfortable managing through other paradoxes. In exploring these leadership paradoxes and the remarkable people who have excelled, I am struck by how deeply each leader cares about the leadership tasks they have before them. They care enough to face very large questions affecting the future of their towns, organizations, businesses, and institutions with both courage and depth, to understand what is at the heart of the challenges and what it will take to find a way to overcome them. I can’t help but think that if we all cared more about finding solutions and building bridges of trust that welcome the input of people around us, the leadership paradoxes would not seem quite so difficult to resolve.