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Managing People with "Inspired Peculiarities": The Dandelion Principle

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Leadership in 21st Century Organizations

Copenhagen Business School

4.8 (324 ratings) | 26K Students Enrolled

Meet Jim Barton, the new CEO of Santa Monica Aerospace. Jim's job won't be easy: the company's hemorrhaging cash, struggling to regain investors' trust after an accounting scandal, and striving to transform its culture to become a more global competitor. In this course, you’ll travel with Jim as he takes on leadership challenges ranging from strategy execution, to inspiring people, to maintaining an ethical approach. Experts agree that twentieth-century leadership practices are inadequate for the stormy twenty-first-century present. This provocative course equips you with the insights you'll need to rise with the occasion of a rapidly shifting business landscape. The course is based on a book, Harder Than I Thought: Adventures of a 21st Century Leader, by Robert D. Austin, Richard L. Nolan, and Shannon O'Donnell, published by Harvard Business Review Press. Purchase of the book is optional. If you want more information about the book or wish to buy it, see https://hbr.org/product/harder-than-i-thought-adventures-of-a-twenty-first/an/10332-HBK-ENG or http://www.amazon.com/Harder-Than-Thought-Adventures-Twenty-First/dp/1422162591 After taking the course, you'll be able to: o Enact your own personal leadership approach, derived from your ongoing evaluation of how Jim Barton has handled his leadership situation, as well as from established leadership concepts and frameworks; o Avoid leadership actions that might have worked in the past, but are not suited to a newly challenging 21st century world; o Navigate treacherous new 21st century leadership challenges, such as greater reliance on specialized workers or the need to respond to external scrutiny in an increasingly transparent world (and many more); o Avoid "slippery slope" ethical failures, and think more clearly about the separation between public and private life for a 21st century leader.

Skills You'll Learn

Strategic Management, Leadership, Collaboration, Communications Management

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4.8 (324 ratings)

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Oct 20, 2017

It's a very comprehensive course. I enjoyed the combination of theory with case study and scenario. I had a lot of fun discovering the new trends in the 21st century's leadership.

JA

Dec 01, 2017

I really enjoyed all the information the course offered me and I'm constantly inviting people to register themselves into it. Thanks for doing extraordinary products like this.

From the lesson

Managing Talent

In the 21st century, the biggest assets an organization has are its people what they can do. The evidence of this? Apple, Google, and Microsoft all have market values higher than Exxon (a company with vastly more physical assets). A very important job of a 21st century leader, then, is to attract, retain, and continue to develop the talents and skills of the people within the organization. Talent is a success multiplier, and an organization's leader is its talent-developer-in-chief. How should this be done? How would you do it?

Episode 17: Unexpected Insight from a Neighbor (Day 36)10:08

Specialisterne: From Hope to Action To Impact3:32

Managing People with "Inspired Peculiarities": The Dandelion Principle13:36

Anka Wittenberg, Chief Diversity and Inclusion Officer, SAP SE11:47

Anka Wittenberg Interview, Part 25:42

Taught By

Robert Austin
Professor, Management of Creativity and Innovation
Shannon Hessel
Assistant Professor of Art, Leadership and Entrepreneurship

Transcript

Welcome to this lecture on Leading People with "Inspired Peculiarities",

The Dandelion Principle.

You've already seen two very interesting videos about a company based in Denmark

called Specialistina.

Specialistina employs people with autism.

And manages to get tremendous performance out of them.

And we're gonna be talking about the leadership dimensions of that.

There's a more general principle, we call it the dandelion principle.

And not only this company but other companies are beginning to make use of it.

Before we start talking about the more general principle though.

Let's talk a little bit about people with autism.

A few things you might not know.

First of all,

over 75% of people in the autism spectrum have an IQ in the average to high range.

But only 25% of children with autism get to go to school.

Only 20% of teachers of autistic children have any training in the condition, and

only 6% of adults with autism have full time jobs.

Perhaps the most heart breaking statistic,

40% of children with autism say, they have no friends.

So, it's a condition that conveys considerable

limitations to the people who have it.

However, it's also a condition that in some cases conveys great strengths,

great abilities.

What we're looking at here is a picture of a drawing completed by Lars Sono,

the seven year old son of the founder of specialist, Torkel Sono.

You see this drawing that one day, Lars started, just out of the blue, to create.

And Torkel had no idea what it was.

It's a very complicated picture, as you can see.

It's covered with squares and numbers.

And so Torkel didn't think very much else about it, until a couple days later,

when he looking through a map book and he noticed the index page from the map book.

That's what you see on the right here.

And you can see again, we have squares.

We have numbers.

And what Torkel realized in a flash, is that his son,

his seven year old son, had reproduced from memory.

This very intricate map page, the index page from a map book.

And he found no errors.

When I first began to work with Torkel, he would come to my class,

and bring both of these pictures, and he would pass them around and

add offer to people a small reward if they could find any mistakes.

And as he liked to say, he hasn't paid anybody yet.

So amazing abilities that he notices in his seven year old son.

And being in the IT field,

this causes Torkel Sono to realize there is great potential here.

There is a tremendous ability,

if we can figure out how to convert it into a business.

Which is what he.

He mortgages his home and proceeds to set up a business that's based on this idea.

Well, flash forward, some years later, and this idea is catching on.

SAP, at their annual user conference, they hold it every May.

SAP, the large, German based software company and

multinational with about 70,000 employees.

They announce that by 2020, 1% of the company's work force will be

composed of people with some form of autism.

This is gonna happen as a result of a larger program to integrate

differently abled people into the SAP workforce.

Now, that's all very interesting and very important.

But something that's even more interesting here is the reasoning,

the rational that they provided when they did this.

I'm gonna read from the press release here.

What they said,

is that we share a common belief that innovation comes from the edges.

Only by employing people who think differently and

spark innovation will SAP be prepared to handle the challenges of the 21st century.

Now that is not a statement about being a good corporate citizen,

although, of course,

that's one of the things that SAP might be able to claim as a result of this program.

That's a statement about meeting people who are differently abled,

who think differently,

who come from the edges to activate an innovation capability for our company.

So, a very interesting way of justify this program.

Another very important factor as well, is that the tech industry in Europe, and in

all the developed world, is anticipating a very serious skill shortage.

So, it's very important to be able to access talent from talent polls,

that have not historically been accessible.

What's the dandelion principle?

We're gonna make an analogy between dandelions, those yellow flowers that get

into your lawn and the people who are employed by the specialists.

Now you may not know this but dandelions are very valuable plants.

I'll leave it to you to read all of the ways that this plant is valuable.

But just to note a few, it boosts the immune system.

There is some belief and research underway that suggest that there even be a cancer

medicine, that can be derived from the dandelion plant.

And then the question becomes, why do people consider dandelions as weeds?

Well, the answer of course, is if you've got a uniform green lawn and

you want it to look beautiful, and uniform, and green,

that yellow flower with its jagged, green, dinosaur looking leaves is a distraction.

And so people devote a great deal of effort, with chemicals,

with devices that extract the roots of a dandelion from their lawns.

People work very hard to get those annoying yellow flowers out of their

green lawns.

And of course, the analogy is to these people.

These people who have great abilities, but are weeds primarily because we try to

force fit them into our standard slots within our org charts.

So the question is, are people, are these people, are they weeds or

are they valuable plants?

And our assertion, our statement of the dandelion principle

is it depends primarily on the context, what makes them weeds is not their central

characteristics, but, that the context into which we try to fit them.

And so, the idea occurs to us, what happens as managers as far as leaders,

if we begin to make adjustments to the context.

It's important to note that this is partly,

about a shift in the way that value is being created in the 21st century,

especially in economic entities like companies.

In the industrial age, value was primarily about realizing economies of scale.

It was about efficiency.

It was about cost reduction.

It was about being able to do things more cheaply than your competitors.

In a situation like that,

the kinds of cost that have to be controlled, include coordination costs.

As scale gets larger, you have to work harder to make sure that the gears mesh.

That the cogs fit together and that the system chugs along extremely efficiently.

This is all about getting the pieces to fit in and also the people to fit in.

In an industrial valued creation context, we need people who fit in.

But this is changing and has changed to a large extent already.

In the 21st century, value creation is evermore dependent

on our ability to innovate, and innovation is not the same thing as efficiency.

Innovation is about coming up with differences that are valuable,

that are not what you would have expected.

They're about creating inconsistency, not consistency and efficiency.

So not fitting in becomes all important and this is exactly the rational,

if you think about it, that was in the SAP press release.

Moreover, it's already been happening.

If we take a look especially at the technology industry.

There are many examples of people with what we might call inspired peculiarities.

I'm quoting here a ventured capitalist, John Roberts.

He is a founder of Ignition Partners, a venture capital firm in the Seattle area.

And he says, I worked at Microsoft for 13 years and

had a chance to work on many of the great businesses there.

At the core of every great product, you'd often find a very capable individual.

For example, on Windows 3.0, it was David Weiss.

He figured out virtual memory.

Dave Cutler was behind Windows NT.

And these guys, no offense to them.

But they're all a little odd.

They have their own, let's call them inspired peculiarities.

They all extract a tax from the organization in the way that they work.

They're different from other people in a way that doesn't fit very well, sometimes.

But, if you're at the core of a product, you can extract a pretty high tax, and

that's okay, it's good for the company.

This idea has been taken even farther though,

by a very good writer Bruce Sterling.

Bruce Sterling wrote one of the first real interesting accounts of hacker culture,

and he has written to encourage people with inspired peculiarities

to embrace their nerditude, as he calls it.

So I'm gonna read this, cause it's kind of fun.

Says, forget trying to pass for normal.

Follow your geekdom.

Embrace nerditude in the immortal words of Lafcadio Hearn,

a geek of incredible obscurity whose work is still in print after a hundred years.

Woo the muse of the odd.

You may be a geek, you may have geek written all over you.

You should aim to be one geek they'll never forget.

Don't aim to be civilized.

Don't hope that straight people will keep you on some sort of path.

To hell with them.

You should fully realized what society has made of you, and take terrible revenge.

Get weird.

Get way weird.

Get dangerously weird.

Get sophisticatedly, thoroughly weird, and don't do it halfway.

Put every ounce of horsepower you have behind it.

Don't become a well-rounded person.

Well-rounded people are smooth and dull.

Become a thoroughly spiky person.

Grow spikes from every angle.

Stick in their throats like a pufferfish.

Now, you can think of this as the specialist manifesto,

in a way, but it is indeed a celebration of people who

contribute to organizational valued creation by not fitting in.

By being different.

By offering a different perspective.

So what does this mean in terms of the supervisor's or

the leader's challenge for the 21st century?

Well, in the 20th century the big question for a supervisor, and I'm

oversimplifying some, I'm being slightly provocative here, but the 20th century

question is how can I manage my people so they fit into an overall efficient system?

That's the puzzle that the supervisor needed to be able to solve.

In the 21st century, the question instead, is how can I create the conditions

in which my people can leverage their special characteristics,

their inspired peculiarities, if you like, to produce valuable differences,

which is just another way of saying innovation.

Companies, I assert, will prevail in future business competition

to the extent that they can get outlier performance from their people, and

to do that they're gonna need people who think differently,

have different backgrounds, have different disciplinary training.

All kinds of differences that you can think of,

including differences that are hard wired into cognition.

So, one of the things that this suggests is that we think about what's historically

been called human resource management or something like that,

is that we need to kind of turn our thinking around.

We need to reframe it.

Now according to the dictionary, resources are, and I'm gonna quote,

resources are a stock or supply of money, materials, staff, and

other assets that can be drawn on by a person or

organization in order to function effectively.

My question to you though is, which of these, money,

material, staff, other assets, which doesn't belong?

Which doesn't belong in that list?

Which is different in kind?

And I would suggest you, that people are different in kind.

Staff, in this example.

So the phrase human resources suggest that there's valuable human stuff.

The companies just happen to keep stored in containers called, people.

This is kind of like referring to the contents of an art museum,

as paint resources.

There's something wrong with it.

There's something wrong with the framing and we need to turn that around.

So, final note,

this is a quote from George Bernard Shaw, the 19th century playwright.

The future depends on unusual and unreasonable people, he said.

He noted that the reasonable man adapts himself to the world.

The unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself.

Therefore all progress depends on unreasonable men.

That's where we'll close.

There are a few things along these lines that you'll

want to watch in the next segment.

Thank you and I will see you later.

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