Irving Wladawsky-Berger

Soft Power, Smart Leadership

I have been thinking a lot about the style of business leadership that is most appropriate in our increasingly flat, globally integrated world, a world in which we are now able to tackle problems of an incredible complexity, in markets that are fiercely competitive and constantly changing, with organizations that reflect the complexity of the systems and markets with which we are dealing.  It is pretty clear that the classic hierarchical style of management that served us well in the Industrial Age is not up to the task.

Similar discussions about leadership styles are taking place in political circles, most prominently around the concept of soft power.  Soft power was first coined by Joseph Nye, professor of international relations at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government.  According to Professor Nye, if power at its most general level is the ability to influence the behavior of others to get the outcomes one wants, there are several ways to accomplish that. You can coerce them with threats; you can induce them with payments; or you can attract or co-opt them.

Soft power is all about getting others to want the outcomes you want without threats or payments - through co-option rather than coercion.  At its essence, "soft power rests on the ability to shape the preference of others.” 

“In the business world, smart executives know that leadership is not just a matter of issuing commands, but also involves leading by example and attracting others to do what you want.  Similarly, contemporary practices of community-based policing rely on making the police sufficiently friendly and attractive that a community wants to help them achieve shared objectives."  In international relations, "a country may obtain the outcomes it wants in world politics because other countries admire its values, emulate its example, aspire to its level of prosperity and openness."

Playing (Serious) Tricks on the Mind

The Turing Test was proposed in 1950 by the famous English mathematician and cryptographer Alan Turing, as a pragmatic and innovative approach to testing a machine's capability to exhibit intelligence.  Turing developed it to help him consider the question: Can machines think? 

In the Turing Test, a human judge engages in a written, natural language conversation with two other parties, whom he or she cannot see. One is a human and the other a computer.  If the judge cannot tell which is which, then the computer would be said to have passed the Turing Test. 

For years the Artificial Intelligence (AI) community has worked hard on developing software that could pass the Turing Test.  One such computer program was ELIZA, developed around the mid-1960s to behave like - perhaps parody is a better description – a psychiatrist conversing with a patient.  ELIZA did little more than rephrase the patient's statements as questions posed back to him or her.  For example, if a patient said, “I am feeling unhappy,” ELIZA would simply reply, “Why are you feeling unhappy?”

A more serious experiment on machine intelligence was IBM's Deep Blue supercomputer, which famously defeated then chess world champion Garry Kasparov in a six game match in May of 1997.   

I was reminded of the Turing Test recently, as I have been watching the huge progress we are making in social networks, virtual worlds and personal robots.  Our objective in these applications can perhaps be viewed as the flip side of the Turing Test.  We are leveraging technology to enable real people to infuse virtual objects - avatars, personal robots, etc - with intelligence, - as opposed to leveraging technology to enable machines and software to behave as if they are intelligent.

Reflections on Leadership and Innovation

Over the last few months I have been thinking a lot about leadership skills in anticipation of the graduate seminar I am teaching at MIT this Fall - Technology-based Business Transformation.  In this course, I want to examine how to leverage disruptive innovations to significantly transform a business or even a whole industry.  I want to focus, in particular, on what a company has to do when faced with a disruptive innovation so that it becomes the disruptor rather than the disruptee.

The course started last week.  At our first meeting, I told the students that the overriding objective of this course is to develop or enhance their leadership skills so they can better deal with complex systems, complex markets and complex organizations.  This entails a subtle balance of at least three kinds of skills - technical, management and social or people-oriented skills. 

Can leadership skills be taught, or are these things that you are born with - you either have them or you don’t?  If they can be acquired, how do you develop such skills?  Each of us is better at some things and less good at others, but we can always improve our talents in a given area if we work hard at it.  This applies to leadership as well.

My approach toward working on leadership skills in the class is through lots of discussion focused on three key areas. The first is the material in our reading list - including The Innovator's Solution by Clay Christensen and Michael Raynor, and Who Says Elephants Can't Dance? by Lou Gerstner.  Second, I’ll focus on my personal experiences leading technology-based businesses, in particular IBM's Internet Division. Third and perhaps most important, we’ll explore the students' own experiences and feelings, gained through whatever jobs they have had in their young careers, as well as their education and outside reading.

IT-based Collaboration and the Evolution of Work

Information technologies have significantly contributed to the evolution of work over the last fifty years.  At first, IT was primarily applied to automate back office, highly repetitive and fairly standardized tasks, such as financial transactions, payroll, and inventory management.  The machine-like nature of these tasks made it possible to develop data processing applications that no longer required a human in the loop unless there was a problem.

As time went on, IT was increasingly applied to interactive applications that enabled people to do for themselves tasks that previously required human assistance.  For example, the advent of ATMs in the '70s, allowed people to get money on their own without having to go to the bank and queue up in front of a teller. Word processing applications in the 1980s enabled people to type or at least edit their own documents without requiring the services of a professional secretary.  Computer-assisted design (CAD) applications have proved invaluable for engineers and architects, significantly cutting down the effort involved in their various design tasks.

Customer self-service was arguably the commercial killer-app of the Web in the '90s.  It seemed almost magical how easy it was to now do for yourself so many activities that previously required a trip to a store or office, or at least a phone call during office hours.  All of a sudden you could track the status of your packages, access tax information, check the weather of any city in the world or buy a book with nothing more than a browser and an Internet connection.

Beyond back-office automation, personal productivity and customer self-service, I believe that the collaborative Web is now ushering us into the next major phase in the evolution of work, especially as it applies to services.  Services essentially involve people interacting with each other - e.g., healthcare providers and patients, teachers and students, financial advisors and clients.  It has been very difficult to apply IT to these activities because the human interactions are an essential part of the work, and the unstructured, highly variable nature of these interactions defies automation, no matter how powerful the computers are.