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ThoughtsOnLeadership

Thoughts on Leadership

Published: 2008 September 10
Categories: Essays

Forgive my writing style this time. At a San Francisco music festival, "Outside Lands", I had the pleasure of conversing with a well-dressed man who had admitted to having bipolar schizophrenia, and whose mind was always connecting disparate ideas into seemingly coherent narratives. Sometimes I wonder if there's a thin line that separates him from me.

I told my friend "Chrispy" over lunch about the numerous insurmountable problems that I wanted to resolve. "You put too much on yourself, Bao. You need to trust other people to do their part." It took a few years to finally admit to myself that I only had a pair of hands, a pair of feet, eyes, ears, a brain, a voice, and one heart. What I needed was more hands, feet, eyes, ears, brains, voices, and hearts, not literally of course. This, however, became my basis for community organizing.

Listen!

And so, to put money where my mouth is (or mouths are), I reframed the problem. I noticed that when I joined a social network (a la Facebook), I received a lot more invitations to events, groups, and chances to participate. That's fine, although for some people it is viewed as spam, unwanted noise in a sea of chaos and uncertainty. Essentially, we're all trying to recruit each other to join some cause or another, and thus, we are back to the same problem I mentioned earlier: we only have a certain number of body parts, wishing we had more. Harlan Cleveland, an accomplished leader of sorts who once served as ambassador to NATO under Lyndon Johnson's administration, talks about in his book, "Nobody In Charge" the qualities of an evolving form of leadership needed in the Information Revolution. Among these traits is the ability to listen to people. In fact, he quotes Mao Zedong from "Thoughts of Mao Zedong" (in translated form): Look, you cadres, don't get the idea that you're making the policy. The masses (that is, the people or the general public) are making the policy. Your job is to get out and sniff around (he doesn't mention scientific polling) and figure out where the people are going. Then you've got something to do that the people don't know how to do. You have to codify the policy, program and budget it, and organize staff to carry it out. But then you had better go back and check again with the people, to make sure that you keep up with their changing sense of direction. Then you recodify, reprogram, rebudget, reorganize.

Good leaders listen. A lot. It might just seem they are stealing other people's ideas. But if they were talking instead of listening, they would just be, as Cleveland puts it, "a one-man orchestra". I had a funny luncheon with a colleague of mine, Christine, who worked for a government official. I asked her, "What can I do to better help you?" To which she answered, "I should be asking you that!" Alas, two listeners trying to listen to each other. You ever been to a lounge and in your group, have that dead air in the room because everyone's just trying to listen to each other? (For those who are interested in knowing how to handle a situation like this, learn the techniques of improv comedy. They master the art of avoiding dead air.)

70-20-10 Rule

I've held the view that everyone is already busy with something (in general, not on a day-to-day basis) and have their own interests and work. So it's always a concern for me to see people burn out from putting too much on their plate in terms of work, including service work. I've been down that road, so I know. I finally heeded my mom's advice (good ol' mom's advice), and put a limit to the number of hours I put into service work each week. Any more than that, and, she says, you need to think about delegating, either to other people in the present, or to entrust it to the future generations. Just putting a cap to my hours alone made me think about how to best allocate my time. How much time do I spend grooming new leaders? How much time do I spend doing direct service? Raising funds? Building infrastructure? Forging alliances? The fact that we are chronically working overtime in America suggests that we haven't found the magic formula in balancing work and life. Or maybe we're just addicted to work. But Google provides a clue to their model of success. It's a bit simplistic, but then again, why aren't the simple ideas the best?

Google CEO Eric Schmidt talked about the 70-20-10 rule that worked out for the company: 70% of your time/money/qi should be devoted to your core business; 20% devoted to supporting activities; and 10% to trying wacky ideas. In a nutshell, that's 70% work, 20% rejuvenate, and 10% invest. It's an interesting idea, and I'm trying to employ this idea in organizing, although I'm not sure how to break it down. Perhaps if we view the total number of projects that NorCal UVSA does in a year, then 70% should be work related to our mission statement (i.e. leadership development, Vietnamese cultural education, community service, and community-building), 20% should be supporting activities (like social functions and fundraisers), and 10% should be in incubating bold, untried ideas. Most of what I learn at conferences are your typical organizational management practices, the stuff covered in the 70% and 20% categories. But encouraging investment, initiative, and innovation? How do you do that?

Rise of the Creative Class

A friend of mine, an artist-activista from California, had me read Richard Florida's "The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It's Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life". Ever since I finished reading the book, it has become a kind of Manifest Destiny for me. Florida's thesis is that innovation and growth occurs in an environment that tolerates differences and fringe ideas. Such an environment is conducive for creativity. Sir Ken Robinson, author of "Out of Our Minds: Learning to Be Creative" believes that if you're not prepared to make mistakes, you will never come up with an original idea. Interestingly, we are all born creative. The challenge is to remain creative when we grow older. The problem is that we are in an environment that discourages mistakes and fringe thoughts, whether in school, work or at home. This in turns stifles the inspiration to take initiative because taking initiatives requires us to take risks. Being daring is one of the quintessential qualities of leadership. Debra Meyerson talks about the important role leaders play (specifically people in authority) in providing that safe space, in her book, "Rocking the Boat: How to Effect Change Without Making Trouble". People in authority have a power in setting the tone of the organization, whether they do something or not. If someone makes a caustic remark on homosexuals, and the chair or president doesn't call the person out on that remark (or worse, joins in on the tirade), people will leave (and they don't have to be homosexual) because they will feel they are in a hostile environment. Or when an idea comes up by a junior officer, and the president doesn't show much interest or isn't very vocal about it, that junior officer is less likely to raise ideas in the future (unless the person is stubborn). Meyerson's work is still qualitative, but it provides an insightful view on the day-to-day dynamics that encourages or discourages creativity.

So, if anyone has seen that tacky sticker at the uNAVSA Conference, "NorCal UVSA Got Yo Back", appropriately used when applied to the back of a friend in need, that was the start of creating that environment, that we welcome anything and everything. You want to talk Vietlish with a Jamaican accent? It's all good. You want to do the Superman dance as part of a dau xanh (green ointment) commercial? It's all gravy! If you think your ideas are stupid, trust me, we've come up with worse, and we're still pretty proud of it.

The Conference as a Design Process

I included the two examples above (which I just invented the moment I was writing that sentence) to bring up a methodology of creativity. I would say it works a lot like the theory of evolution: you need mutations and recombination in order to create a pool of candidates. Genes that survive the environment get to replicate, and genetic candidates that don't survive, well, don't survive. Culture (and consequently Vietnamese culture) behaves like that. British scholar Susan Blackmore explores this idea of extending evolution to not just DNA, but also to culture and information (like viral marketing). In order for the Vietnamese American community to progress, we must be conscious of the many possible manifestations that exist, like Bao Phi's spoken word poetry (which is so new to the Vietnamese American community), or heck, pairing up jeans with ao dai (apologies to the designer who invented that idea, I could not locate the name at the moment).

William McDonough, a sustainability designer, says that design is the first signal of human intention. What is that we want to get out of life? Graphic design (and really, any kind of design) is a process that studies the creation of form and function (aesthetic and purpose). It is very similar to the evolutionary process. Essentially the steps break down as follows:

1. Pre-production design, which includes defining the goals, analysis of the goals, research on related topics, creating a specification, solving problems, and creating possible solution scenarios. This is where the recombination occurs to produce viable candidates.
2. Design during production, which includes refinement of several solution candidates, and testing the solutions.
3. Post-production design feedback, which releases the design solution into the environment, and evaluation is given on the process and results, including constructive criticism and suggestions for future improvements.
4. Redesign, which is any or all stages in the design process repeated (with corrections made) at any time before, during, or after production.

When NorCal UVSA set out to organize its own Summit for the first time last year, that we included a process for the leadership to brainstorm ideas for UVSA activities for the upcoming academic year and put it to a vote by all of the attendees. It seems quite by accident that we began a constituent-feedback cycle that started to take on the form of the design process itself, and in a sense, the evolutionary process. By embedding the evolutionary design process into an organization, it turns the organization into a living organism that will be capable of adapting to the changing environment, in an era where we are least certain what path the future will take. However, the more input we get from members of the community, and the more ownership we give to them on the decisions we make, the more likely we can stand resilient in these tumultuous times.

Final Word (For Now)

There is a concern of how much of our future should be designed from human intent, and how much we should leave to the hands of God, destiny, fate, chance, or whatever force we believe is beyond our control. But I do not think that this will be much of an issue; our potential might be limitless, but not infinite. No matter how large we grow, there will be obstacles at every turn and every level. And however much control over our future we think we have, there is still more yet beyond our control. It is better to enjoy the journey than to reach the top of a mountain and only frown to see that there are higher mountains to climb.