The Five Literacies of Global Leadership

What Authentic Leaders Know and You Need to Find Out

Richard David Hames

• Publisher: Jossey-Bass
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9780470319123
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781119177586
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Leadership
• Index: Business

New research has exposed our leadership paradigm as a outdated mess of flawed models and practices. By working with great leaders and observing their common attitudes and behaviours, Richard Hames has cracked a universal code based on intelligence, appreciation and collaboration. This code unlocks Five Literacies of Global Leadership.

These behaviours are the trade secrets of the artists and alchemists among us. Often instinctively, these leaders charge others with energy, search for new perspectives and embrace diversity. And they are driven by dialogue. This book reveals approaches and attitudes that they all share - and that can make anyone an exceptional leader.

PART ONE
MESSY BUSINESS

In the film trilogy, The Matrix, the world with which we are all familiar is a digitised fantasy – a highly sophisticated illusion fabricated by an alien life form following Earth’s devastation. Those in control are superior beings, able to morph between reality and the Matrix with ease. Human minds have been sucked dry – they are mere husks, memories edited, all aspirations deleted. Inhabiting a state of naive contentment, people remain ignorant of their actual predicament. An elaborate simulacrum has become their reality. It is also their prison. Humanity’s true plight remains undetected to all but a few who have cracked the code. Instead of swallowing the blue pill, which would keep them in a comatose state, they have chosen the red pill of knowledge. In so doing they are marked as heretics – troublemakers that must be eliminated. But once they have seen the Matrix there can be no going back. Their lives are changed forever.

CHAPTER 1
THE MATRIX

The tools of the mind become a burden when the environment which made them necessary no longer exists.

– Henri Bergson

LOOKING OUTSIDE-IN

The pace of life has accelerated remorselessly over the past few centuries. Our cultural evolution is an exponential trajectory in which everything is speeding up. It took from the beginning of civilisation to the year 1900 to develop a global economy producing $US600 billion in output. Today the world economy grows by that rate every couple of years! Supply chain velocity has become the most critical factor for business in maintaining a competitive advantage. Communication has become instantaneous. We are constantly on the move, yet also plugged in to the pulse of world events. Information that would have taken days or even weeks to deliver in the age of sailing ships is now transmitted within the blink of an eye. Working on the principle that ‘faster is better’ industrial society set out to conquer distance and duration. It has succeeded.

But speed is not free. Enormous flows of energy and materials are needed to keep pace with society’s insatiable demand for food and water, goods and services, roads and runways, bridges and tunnels, electronic equipment and lifestyle gadgets. Our material evolution has been so fast and intense that the drive towards simultaneity has even thrown nature into disorder. In the process we are rapidly approaching the edge of chaos – surfing wildly on the shock waves of cultural fusion, climate change and technological wizardry as they collide and converge into an attractor¹ that is transforming the world in ways we may not be able to comprehend, least of all control.

Numerous other factors feed this attractor. On almost every economic indicator continental Europe continues to decline. The future is perceived as dark and ambiguous and the spirit of enterprise is frustrated at every turn.² Meanwhile China and India seem set to dominate the coming decades just as the US ruled the latter half of the twentieth century.³ Chasms of confusion are opening up between different belief systems, provoking reckless acts of inhumanity and terrorism. Watched by millions who are starving to death, developed nations continue to plunder the environment and accumulate obscene wealth, appearing to value selfishness and greed as if these were the peak of sophistication. Consumers everywhere are demanding more and more of everything, fuelling misery in the developing world and perpetuating the gap between those who benefit from global prosperity and those who cannot.

This vast global dynamic is only just booting up. Yet it is already giving rise to a disconcertingly complex environment in which the axioms (and much of the knowledge) of the past appear increasingly inadequate. We are in the early stages of a revolutionary demographic shift that is upending political, technological and economic priorities at the same time as redefining global markets.

Plagued by indecision and ever-deepening paradox, our lives have become a tickertape parade of newness and excess. Meanwhile almost everything we supposed constant, from economic growth to rational decision making and even more fundamental concepts such as human rights and national sovereignty, have become tentative. In the face of such unrelenting novelty and tension, conventional approaches to leading, managing and organising human activities have become ineffectual. We maintain these obsolete mechanisms only because they are what we know. It is as though we cannot see any acceptable alternatives. But increasingly they do not work.

Figure 1.1 The fabricated driving forces of global transformation are smashing together at warp speed – creating a world of zero geography where change itself is accelerating exponentially.

The evidence is everywhere – if we could just see it. Nothing and nobody is immune. Even that most cherished of all concepts, democracy, has been subverted as the hegemony exerted by powerful elitist regimes engages in a purpose vastly different to that originally envisaged. Setting aside for a moment the fact that the term itself has become devoid of any meaning in a world where governments of every political persuasion routinely identify themselves as being democratic, all current systems of representative democracy are designed to pursue unsustainable economic growth and preserve high levels of inequality. Democratic leaders routinely apply violence in some form as a means of establishing or of preserving this so-called democracy. Furthermore, that is the intention! Modifying Abraham Lincoln’s celebrated phrase, we presently have ‘government of the people, by interchangeable sets of career politicians, for the pursuit of economic growth and development through an engulfing culture of transnational corporate capitalism’.⁴ This is immoral. It is also patently unsustainable, as Michael Albert convincingly avows in his essays on an alternative post-capitalist system based on participative economics – or Parecon:

In capitalism, owners together with about a fifth of the population who have highly empowered work decide what is produced, by what means, and with what distribution. Nearly four fifths of the population does largely rote labor, suffers inferior incomes, obeys orders, and endures boredom, all imposed from above. As John Lennon put it, “As soon as you’re born they make you feel small, by giving you no time instead of it all.” Capitalism destroys solidarity, homogenizes variety, obliterates equity, and imposes harsh hierarchy. It is top heavy in power and opportunity. It is bottom heavy in pain and constraint. Indeed, Capitalism imposes on workers a degree of discipline beyond what any dictator ever dreamed of imposing politically. Who ever heard of citizens asking permission to go to the bathroom, a commonplace occurrence for workers in many corporations (Michael Albert, There is an Alternative, Frankfurter Runschau, 27 July 2005).

The final speaker at the World Social Forum’s closing ceremony in Brazil on 5 February 2002 was the Nobel Prize-winning Portuguese poet, Jose Saramago. His concluding words were these:

Everything in this world is discussed, from literature to ecology, from expanding galaxies to the greenhouse effect, from waste treatment to traffic congestion. Yet the democratic system goes undiscussed, as if it were a given, definitively acquired and untouchable by nature until the end of time. Well, unless I am mistaken, among so many other necessary or indispensable discussions, there is an urgent need to foster worldwide debate on democracy and the causes of its decline, on the part citizens play in political and social life, on the relations between States and international economic and financial power, on what affirms and what negates democracy, on the right to happiness and a worthwhile existence, on the misery and the hopes of humanity or, to cut down the rhetoric, the hopes of the simple human beings that make up Mankind, one by one and all together. There is no worse deception than self-deceit. And that is how we are living.

A more convivial⁵ model of society is feasible, but it will only be achieved if we can bring into being an entirely new paradigm of participative citizenship, where Lincoln’s phrase would describe the democratic system as being of the people, by thinking, acting and learning together, for the co-creation of just and sustainable societies.⁶

Alas, our addiction to the beliefs and habits of a bygone era, matched only by our seduction for the new, is insidious. Blind faith in numbers and the opinions of experts, the appeal of arcane knowledge, the valuing of profits over people, the suffocating dogma of dependency (particularly upon the state and its elected representatives) the bizarre conviction that we can predict the future (or even other people’s behaviour for that matter), and the bravado-like façade of infallibility used to rationalise our negligence in degrading the biosphere, for example, all still go largely unchallenged today. How can this be so?

The true nature and purpose of the human condition is unfathomable. Inexplicable and immensely complex, it remains beyond our current comprehension. We may occasionally experience moments of enlightenment – brief insights, a fleeting sense of déjà vu, perhaps, or memories from a deeper consciousness. Some may sense the sheer exhilaration of being constantly out of control.⁷ Others encounter mostly despair as we drift into a scary future few would have intentionally chosen. Most of us, though, are just world-weary. Our public lives have become a sham, warped by fashion, trivia and the coruscating banality of screen celebrities, politicians, sporting heroes and omnipresent brands. Estranged from a world of our own invention, albeit one that escaped our grasp decades ago, we are now captive to its unrelenting prodigality. As hope and optimism recede, to be replaced by an overwhelming sense of helplessness and futility (especially among the young and the disadvantaged), changing things for the better is no longer an option. It has all become too difficult! Yet change we must, for the tedious conventions and artifice of this regimen ensnare us within a corruptive worldview that is utterly inadequate for resolving the tumultuous upheavals we experience in our daily lives.

The world we inhabit, the corporate world of industrial economism,⁸ is at once both fact and fiction. It is the Matrix. In reality there is no such thing as a free market. Capitalism, too, is mostly a fiction.⁹ What the Matrix has created is a darker side of capitalism – an elitist corporate system and bureaucracy posturing as a free market where producer power extends its influence over consumer demand and where corrupt CEOs, cheating Wall Street analysts and number-impaired accountants pursue their vested self-interests at the expense of society at large.¹⁰

All encompassing and horribly oppressive, the Matrix nevertheless has its narcissistic charm. It is as easy to become complicit in the deception as to remain oblivious to its existence, unaware that we are so beguiled. Held within its thrall, we continue to conjure madcap schemes; clinging to pitifully deficient ideas in the belief that conditions will remain sufficiently stable for long enough to bring success – whatever we imagine that to be. It is impossible to persist with these practices and worldview for very much longer without risking mayhem and ultimate collapse of the social order. The real world dances to a different rhythm now. An unstable, chaotic rhythm that alters in a flash. And completely without warning!

So new ways of knowing and designing society and its interactions are essential; new institutions, frameworks, tools and techniques are urgently required. Moreover, these must be allowed to evolve so that they remain pertinent to our needs. If ever there was a time to...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• FOREWORD
• INTRODUCTION
• PART ONE: MESSY BUSINESS
• PART TWO: CHANGING MINDS
• PART THREE: THE FIVE LITERACIES
• PART FOUR: ESCAPE VELOCITY
• FURTHER READING
• INDEX
• End User License Agreement