SUMMARY:

• What are the problems you wish you could solve but done have?
• Involve those you lead with questions and write them down
• Expand your search to your customers and your vendors
• Step outside of your business and boundaries.

That’s when the answer to these two simple questions will emerge:

1. Where do we go from here? (new paradigm emerges)
2. How soon should we start?

Once you know where to go and decide when to start, you are ready to begin shifting paradigms. And the role of a leader is to have people follow you where they would not have gone without you.

Leadership has to determine

• The thing that has to be done
• When do we start?

A leader must prioritize

• Communicate challenges
• Create the culture to meet the challenges

3 Keys to the 21^st century

• Anticipation – all about the right time and the right place – Anticipate the right thing and the right time and the right place to introduce it – Leverage – efficiency – about resources – focusing resources you have more productive - Timing!
• Innovation - in order to protect from obsolesces
• Excellence - the base on which the 21^st century will be built – Deming, Juran – Is excellence enough? Probably not quite

Put these three together – powerful

If I am a leader how does it ties to the paradigm discussion?

What is a Leader?

Someone you chose to follow to a place you wouldn’t go by yourself

Important – follow – key word – leader must have people follow them

Chose to follow – otherwise dictator or tyranny

Breadth of leadership

Manager/Follower

 Breadth of Responsibility

Leader

Time

Leader does not have time to do today – so must do with tomorrow

Cannot pretend to take care of today –

Hire Manager to take care of today

• Where does a leader lead to – the future?
• If a leader does not do the job of finding the future, which is going to follow?
• Fortune magazine: Andy Grove – Who is minding the store when CEO is thinking the big thoughts?
• Right on!! The front liners are taking care of today because the leaders are thinking about tomorrow.
• If I think my leader doesn’t know where the future is, the follow starts to think about the future and is less efficient in today’s market place?
• Neglect the future and no one will thank you for taking care of the present.

Lessons for a leader: Take the time to look into the future.

You come back to the present to:

1. Recognition of those in future
2. Crisis
3. Come back with the message of the future – what have you seen, what have you discovered – then the leader is doing her job

A leader must take time to look into the future – wear her leader hat

A manager must be in the present – doing the job now

The present will always take priority over the future.

Challenge – Set the time – leadership requirement to take time to look into the future.

• A leader must get a lot of people in exploration and definitely in the discussion of the future and what is being discovered. Communication issue is paramount to make it work.
• Delicate balance – gain from experience without entangled in their roles
• Involve them in the search without burdening them in the responsibility of finding it.

Question – Where can we find the triggers for the next great change?

What are the problems you wish you could solve but don’t have a clue how to do it?

Write them down – and share them

Leadership role – collects these and listen and honor – Never critical – Listen and write it down –

 

Honoring the right to not have problem solved

• Circulate the list – maybe someone else does have the answer – the other departments, your vendors, your customers – you don’t know where your help is going to come from. Leverage is powerful
• Clear permission that it is OK to step outside your boundaries. Does not mean they will come back successfully but creates an opportunity to look for the answers

Is your organization really ready – simply declaring it is not enough?

• Need permission – policies – boundaries – get troops to act on it.
• Open door policy – not how wide the door is, but how many people walk through the door.
• Increases the value of screwy idea – mental exercise – think about it – consider it – makes you more open than if you did not
• Reinforces cross talk – talk between the silos – Barbara Cox Shaw – problems – Health care – Northwest Airlines. They had three or four ideas that the hospital. Serve food – beds/seats/ customers – in crisis

Who do you know? Vendor, another industry, customer

Beauty of diversified Board of Directors – does your board know your problems that you cannot solve – Courage to lower your guard and share your problems –

You manage within a paradigm – You lead between paradigms.

A leader leaders where you would not go by yourself.

Managing within a paradigm

Manager? Control, measure, enhance – optimizers!! Steepen the curve!

Add value – Sharpen the rules!

Leaderships – finds the new rules

Can be a good manager and a lousy leader?? YES
Can be a good leader and lousy manager?? YES

Use your people where you should use them

Give the job to the person who does it well.

Leaders – find future, then give new future to managers and leaders go back to look for future again.

• Paradigm is leader is CEO – but leader can be at bottom
• Test for leadership: If that is a person you would not go by yourself – that is a leader, regardless of where in the organization
• Leadership – not titles, but purpose.
• Line guy at Ford – lead from old line to new line – get the people moving and willing to accept. Once you get there and people on line, then maybe someone else

Three major decision – choices and paradigms

• Keep your paradigm and change your customers – printing from checks to something else
• Change your paradigm and keep your customers – IMB to PC
• Change your paradigm and change your customers –

During paradigm shifts these decisions are inevitable - All come with varying degrees of challenge

The more you anticipate, the more you can shape your own future, and the more you can lead.

The future will always surprise you, but you needn’t be dumbfounded.

No body forecasts the future perfectly, but there is a flow of information that can keep you abreast of the possibilities.

How can we get better at seeing the alternatives? How can we interact between future and present?

Future is not beyond your control – it is right in front of you -likely to walk through your door, then step outside of your business and boundary.

Remember:

• What are the problems you wish you could solve but done have?
• Involve those you lead with questions and write them down
• Expand your search to your customers and your vendors
• Step outside of your business and boundaries.

That’s when the answer to these two simple questions will emerge:

1. Where do we go from here?
2. How soon should we start?

Once you know where to go and decide when to start, you are ready to begin shifting paradigms. And the role of a leader is to have people follow you where they would not have gone without you.

Thank you,
Joel Barker

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