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Managing People with "Inspired Peculiarities": The Dandelion Principle
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From the course by Copenhagen Business School
Leadership in 21st Century Organizations
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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?
Meet the Instructors
Robert AustinProfessor, Management of Creativity and Innovation
Department of Management, Politics, and Philosophy
Shannon HesselAssistant Professor of Art, Leadership and Entrepreneurship
Department of Management, Politics, and Philosophy
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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