How: Why HOW We Do Anything Means Everything…in Business (and in Life)
By Dov Seidman (Wiley, 2007)

NR

Ever wonder how “the wave” became common in sports stadiums? How did it begin? How did fans get inspired, section by section, to stand up, throw their hands in the air, and cheer? How did “the wave” catch on in sporting arenas around the world?

Starting with the story of the invention of “the wave,” How explores the nature of leadership in the Information Age. In the book, author Dov Seidman looks at how leaders connect with others, how they establish trust, and how they shape values.

The first chapter of How has a feel similar to The World Is Flat by Thomas Friedman. In it, Seidman places today’s economy in historical context by tracing the progression of economics over time. In the past, land ownership or control of resources were the ways to wealth. Today, instead of hoarding land or assets, wealth is generated by those who best learn to share information. In illustrating his point, Seidman cites Google’s mission, “To organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” Seidman concludes that the challenge for today’s leader is not to amass resources, but to present information easily and attractively to customers. In his words, “command and control has given way to connect and collaborate.”

The midsection of the book, Chapters Four through Nine, serves as the meat and potatoes of Seidman’s work. In them, he unveils how companies will behave and think as they move into the future. Topics of note include his endorsement of values above rules in Chapter 5, his discussion of trust in Chapter 8, and his thoughts about business reputation in Chapter 9.

LW subscribers reading to discover the main thrust of the book should hone in on pages 81 to 96. In these content-rich pages, Seidman puts forth his strongest material about the power of values-based leadership. Worthy of careful attention, this portion of the book can be mined for a wealth of wisdom.

As an author, Seidman brings to bear a diverse collection of talents. Holding degrees in law, philosophy, and economics from Harvard, UCLA, and Oxford, his writing displays an academic’s love of research, and showcases his strength as an incisive, high-level thinker. In addition, Seidman writes with the practical know-how and business savvy gained from his experience as a CEO. In How, Seidman also demonstrates the perceptive abilities of a futurist, and he weaves together stories like a seasoned writer.

The result of Seidman’s many abilities is a finely crafted and riveting book. Forceful and compelling, How takes for an intriguing look into the redefinition of leadership in the Information Age. Readers will be hooked as Seidman explores how a leader’s approach to earning trust and instilling values will determine success in the future. Those daunted by the book’s length (over 300 pages) may want to pace themselves by reading the book in spurts and skimming over its more scientific examples (such as research from neuroscience or evolutionary anthropology in Chapter 4). However, no student of leadership will want to bypass Seidman’s essential contribution to the intellectual pool of today’s prominent thoughts on leadership.

Chapters Five through Chapter Nine
A forceful and compelling book

The World Is Flat, applied and personalized
Good for Futurists
Erudite
Cross-disciplinary

Prologue

Inventing the wave

Krazy George Henderson

How?

1. Attention
2. Motivation
3. Touching a common passion

Reach out
Share your vision
Enlist in a common purpose

PART ONE: HOW WE HAVE BEEN, HOW WE HAVE CHANGED
Summary on pg. 61

Chapter 1 – From Land to Information

Land is power, zero-sum game.
Fortress capitalism – get assets to get ahead
Information is not zero-sum; it is infinite
Unlike money, information is elastic, worth different amount depending on its need.
Power and wealth shifted from hoarders of information to those who made it accessible and available.
Google’s mission – “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”
Our connectivity serves as an engine of growth and innovation.
Command and control has given way to connect and collaborate
Your success will depend on your ability to relate to others in powerful ways.

Chapter 2 Technology’s trespass

The workforce has become an ecosystem comprised of mutually reinforcing independent agents. An ecosystem, by definition, interacts or it does not survive.

“moral imagination diminishes with distance” David Hume
A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic.” Joseph Stalin

Human interaction is a symphony of symbolic gestures of which language is just a small part. Physicality, intonation, facial expression, volume, and body language play an important role in our ability to interrelate and understand the intention behind the words we use.

Paradox of Info Age: technology connects us more than ever before but those connections are more fractured and incomplete than we are accustomed to.

Information is like a toddler: it goes everywhere, gets into everything, and you can’t always control it.

Info Age has created transparency and surveillance and persistence of memory. Wayback Machine archives 55 billion web pages dating back to 1996.

With the democratization of info, the standard of info verification has been lowered.

Chapter 3 The Journey to How

Just Do It – spirit of the 1990s, all about performance, fast-pace. Expediency and short-term values. What more important than how.

Gap between our ideal and our real, the Certainty Gap.

1. physical security
2. Material prosperity
3. Emotional Well-Being

Dotcom bust, corporate scandals, Catholic Church, steroids in sports, terrorism.

People who feel overregulated in turn feel distrusted.

Innovating in WHAT powered the 20th Century. Now with reengineering (fueled by information) it’s difficult to stay atop the market.

Innovative in HOW. Not the product, but how the product is put together. Processes became the prize possession. TQM and the like.

Product to process to behavior

Now, the opportunity is to outbehave the competition. Pg. 52 It’s HOW we do WHAT we do.

Emerging trend involves delivering not so much a better product, but a better experience to their customers.

PART TWO: HOW WE THINK
Summary 79

Chapter 4: Playing to Your Strengths

Power in a world of How is not power over something, but power through something, like a network, or a synapse, or a circuit; a power that connects, not a power that commands.

Reciprocity—doing unto others as they do unto you—seems therefore to be a biological function; trust begets trust.

Trust builds trust.

Our biological propensity for values-based thinking leads directly to Adam Smith’s vision of ideal capitalist enterprise: the development of a free and fair market system based on mutual advantage.

Placebo effect. Expectations typically involve affective thoughts about current and future experience. Expectations can affect our experiences; beliefs can alter how we perceive information, and sometimes these beliefs manifest themselves unconsciously, separate from our conscious thought processes.

Chapte
r 5 – From Can to Should

There are many 25-year old voters who have little idea of what comprises good government and lots of 15-year olds with a highly developed sense of civic responsibility.

We often rely on rules when they are not, in fact, the most efficient or effective solution to getting the result that we desire.

Lunchroom rules: Clean Microwave After You Use It, Don’t Put Feet on Table, Don’t Eat Others’ Food. All of these can be codified in the value, respect.

Rules respond to behavior they don’t lead it. Rules don’t govern human progress; they govern the human past. Pg. 86

Rules live outside of us.

Pg. 90 – The problem with rules

The key to long-term, sustained success does not lie in breaking all the rules; it lies in transcending the rules and harnessing the power of values.

True freedom lies not in the absence of constraint; trust freedom lies in the transcendence of rules-based thinking.

Think in terms of should versus shouldn’t instead of can versus can’t.

Values do double duty; they inspire us to do more than while simultaneously preventing us from doing less than. They speak to the core of what makes us human. They create natural floors without creating inadvertent ceilings.

Chapter 6: Keeping Your Head in the Game

Workplace problems
1. Equity
2. Achievement
3. Camaraderie

Cynics create a space of suspicion between themselves and the actions of others—a permanent and unfillable Certainty Gap—and habitually question whether something will happen or whether it is worthwhile.

Combative the cynicism of dissonance:

1. Change ideas
2. Bolster idea, thereby giving it more weight.\
3. Trivialize a conflicting idea
4. Emotionally express the dissonance

PART THREE:

HOW WE BEHAVE

Chapter 7 Doing Transparency

When knowledge—enabled by this unprecedented access to information—was controllable, those who controlled it accrued power and became leaders. Now that information is virtually uncontrollable, the power has shifted to those who share it.

We pass value judgments on companies

The very presence in a market of cheap and easy information changes the costs involved in every transaction, providing the seller with a strong incentive to do the right thing.

Chapter 8 Trust

When the Certainty Gap—that space between the unpredicatable nature of the world and our ideal vision of stability—grows, we look for something to fill it. That something is trust.

Francis Fukuyama first hypothesized this in his seminal 1995 book, Trust. The wealth of a nation, “as well as its ability to compete,” he wrote, “is conditioned by…the level of trust in the society.” Paul Zak extended Fukuyama’s thoughts about the relation of trust to general prosperity. “Our analysis also shows that if trust is sufficiently low, then the investment rate will be so low that income will stagnate or even decline. Economists call this a “poverty trap,” and once a society has slipped into one, a downward spiral of trust deficiency results.

Traffic example to show need for trust regulators pg. 163

Trusting, in a sense, means giving something away and ceding power to others, an essential step in achieving the outward focus needed in a hyperconnected world.

In a hypertransparent, hyperconnected world, we are more exposed and discoverable. Opening up and letting info flow inherently involves more risk, less control, and increased vulnerability, so current conditions require us to be more comfortable in high-risk environments.

You’ve got to get good at heterogeneity, at developing the kinds of strong synapses that allow you to cover a much larger geography of interrelationships.

We tend to trust people who get their Hows right, people who are transparent, forthcoming, and open, and honest; who share credit and opportunity with us; and who communicate fully, build strong relationships, and keep promises.

“My wife, with our children, always refers to a ‘ladder of trust.’ You go up one rung at a time, but when you slip you come all the way back down to the bottom.”

“Somebody is doing something to day at Berkshire that you and I would be unhappy about if we knew of it. That’s inevitable…But we can have a he effect in minimizing such activities by jumping on anything immediately when there is the slightest odor of impropriety.”

The penalty for breach of trust is withdrawal of trust.

Chapter 9 – Reputation, Reputation, Reputation

Reputation is the sum total of your HOWS: What you stand for, what you can be trusted to do, your track record of accomplishment, the esteem you have earned, and how you have been experienced by others.

Reputation enters the room before you do, and remains after you go, either enhanced or tarnished. It records your past, but also creates expectations for your future.

Your reputation and your Rolodex—the network of contacts and supporters—become a far more integral part of your personal package than they ever were before.

Reputation cannot be built on spin or PR.

Really talented people are motivated by:

1. working in a place that gives them opportunity and resources with which to grow and develop and make meaningful contributions.

2. working with people who share their belief system, professional aspirations, and objectives in enterprise.

3. working for a enterprise that is making the world a better place in a some dimension that is important to them.

To thrive in our transparent, connected world, we need to shif our thinking form managing reputation to earning it.

PART FOUR: HOW WE GOVERN

Chapter 10: Doing Culture

Culture is a company’s DNA, the sum total of its history, values, aspirations, beliefs, and endeavors, the operations system, if you will that defines and influences what occurs at the synapses between everyone working together in a group, large or small.

Culture is a company’s unique character, its lifeblood.

4 cultures
1. anarchy and lawlessness
2. blind obedience
3. informed acquiescence (rules-based)
4. Values-based self-governance

The Five HOWS of culture – pg. 228-229 table
1. How we know (hoarding, need-to-know, transparency)
2. How we behave (coerce, motivate, inspire)
3. How we relate (followers, defined managers, leaders)
4. how we recognize (lack of punishment, reward, significance)
5. how we pursue (survival, success, significance)

Chapter 11 – The Case for Self-Governing Cultures

Instead of achieving culture through governance, companies must learn to govern through culture, to put the guardrails of governance within the culture itself.

In an informed acquiescence culture, you could do everything that the carrots and sticks require, play by the rules, and still never delight or surprise anyone.

Because values-based governance is positive governance—given to what is desirable rather than what is prohibited—it presents a proactive solution to achieving corporate aims.

Streamlining authority and putting information and decision making in the hands of those closest to the challenge make a team nimble and responsive, two qualities critical to thriving in a fast-moving market. More than front-loading decision making, however, self-governance holds the key to the next great leap in corporate efficiency: It closes the gap between the individual and the compa
ny.

Clearly articulated values keep everyone on the same course. Values place governance within each person rather than in persons or rule sets external to them, establishing the conditions for a very different type of culture to grow.

Culture is something that you do, not something that does to you.

Why Self-Governing Is the Future of Business
1. A horizontal world calls for a horizontal governance architecture
2. Self-governing culture thrive on the free flow of information
3. A leading company needs to be a company of leaders
4. Values-based self-governing cultures encourage employee development
5. Self-governance builds universal vigilance
6. Self-governance shifts decision making from the pragmatic to the principled
7. Self-governance appeals to transcendence. Values are of a higher order than rules.

Chapter 12 – The Leadership Framework

Vision

A self-governing person spends some time in another realm—the future.
Leadership means envisioning a better future for yourself, the tasks at hand, and those with whom you labor.

Envisioning represents a proactive stance toward achievement; it is an activity, a behavior, a disposition toward pursuing your goals.

Communicate and Enlist

If you don’t share your vision with others, you are acting as a maverick.

Seize Authority and Take Responsibility

Step forward.

Plan and Implement

Quit talking and begin doing.

Build Succession and Continuity

Though we need heroism from time to time, to truly thrive we must build self-sustaining approaches at the same time.

In Spite Of

Persevere

Confront Complexity and Ambiguity

Open doors and close others

Wield Charismatic Authority

Inspire

Motivation requires an object of motivation, a carrot or stick, some external means by which to propel or compel action.

Be Principled

“Always act on principle. That way, you won’t have to keep track of all the intended and unintended consequences of your actions.”

Be Rigorous about the Truth of the Present

Be Reflective, Especially about Your Own Nature

A lack of reflection leaves you superficial and determined.

Go to the Point of No Return

Be Passionate and Optimistic

Pursue Significance

On this day...

• April 18, 2014 - 2014
• But the wrath of God is the wrath of love, which is not out to destroy but, even in anger, is out to save those whom it loves - 2014
• The terrible thing about sin is that it makes people fugitives from God - 2014
• Genesis 31:53 - 2011
• Genesis 31.42 - 2011
• 2 Peter 3:18 - 2009
• Mark 10:21 - 2009
• Ezekiel 35:10 - 2009
• Romans 15:20-21 - 2007
• James 1:6 - 2007