Details
Book title: Leadershift
Tagline:Reinventing leadership for the age of mass collaboration
Author: Emanuelle Gobillot
Previous book: connected leader
Leadershift is the follow up of the book "The connected leader". I found a great video of about 45 minutes of Emmanuelle Gobillot speaking to Google about leadership about the content of his previous book:
Content
In the book Leadershift Emanuelle Gobillot asks the question: “If mass collaboration changes everything, how does it change the way we lead?”. He argues leaders have to led go the concept of them having the experience, expertise and control to bring a group to great end results. Compared to hierarchical leading, leadership in communities is intrinsically linked to narrative, task and contribution rather than power, role and accountability. No longer in charge of direction, the role of the leader is to help the community find its voice. From there their communities will find their own direction and narrrative as they set out to succeed.
The book is written in spoken language and is easy to understand with its rich and entertaining examples towards the concepts it presents. An example is the beginning of a chapter: “This supposed to be the future, so where is my jetpack?”.
Emmanuelle describes four mayor societal trends that bring down the walls of hierarchic leadership:
- the demographic trend: we have multiple generations working alongside eachother where everybody has preference of their own methods of getting work done
- the expertise trend: expertise is now to be found as much outside as inside the organisation
- the attention trend: organisations have to fight harder than ever to capture the attention of employees and customers as information and interaction sources are now abundant and lay claim to the time available.
- the democratic trend: It is not likely leaders still have direct control over their resources like they used to as people work more and more in all kind of different teams with different leaders claiming the same resources.
These four societal trends make room for new ways of practicing leadership. Emmanuelle describes four shifts in leadership style that are needed to lead in these new times:
- from clarity to simplicity: clarity within a project is giving you clear tasks, but does not ensure you understand why you need to do the task. Simplicity makes your tasks clear, but lets you understand why you need to these tasks and generates meaning. Simplicity ignites your participation but also actively lets you think about the intentions of a project and how your tasks fit into that wished for end result.
- from plans to narratives: plans are constantly changing and are not likely to be followed while a narrative will inspire people and is more flexible to changes. Projects nowadays are more influenced by new insights the networked society provides, providing the need to change plans but keep the narrative alive.
- from roles to tasks: roles define formally where you stand in an organization, but do not define what tasks your will and can perform
- from money to love: money does buy you time to allow another to keep motivated, but does not ensures mental involvement. Money is therefore a hiegene factor, but does not ensures full commitment.
Imagineering relevance
Emmanuelle explains implicitly why Imagineering is important in the new economy. Some parts of an alinea that connects strongly with the convictions of Imagineering:
- We must “reestablish a sense of meaning in the economic activity”
- “By forcing our organizations to rethink their very essence they will become stronger”
- “It is easier for meaning to be shared when it is co-created”
Imagineering is focussing on collaboration and organisation by dialog and is learning a Master in Imagineering student how to lead this process. This book is focussing on how we need to lead in an age of mass participation. These concepts are strongly correlated I believe.
How to use this book?
Leadershift is a refreshing book that confirms parts of what we’ve been learning at the Imagineering Academy, referring to the networked economy, motivation, societial trends and others. However Emmanuelle presents the material in a very understandable argumentation that makes sense to current leaders in the field and is therefore an excellent tool to convince CEO’s and other deciders upon the relevance of Imagineering. I think this book is explaining in a very accessible way what leadership could look like in a changing society.
Conclusion
I did like to read this book because of the accesible style it is written in, together with the humor the writer uses, the book is entertaining while giving a clear view on how essential leadership qualities are changing. Let’s categorize this book edutainment :-). A must-read for CEO's that want to work with Imagineering and understand why they need to work with Imagineers
3 comments:
This sounds like an interesting book indeed, and I think you very well captured the essence in your review. Links with imagineering theories such as narrativity and AI are obvious. However, I wonder whether Gobillot also mentions the need to co-create with the consumer. Does the book focus on new leadership to cope with the mass collaboration, or to actually exploit it?
Either way, I think this is a book we could use to translate imagineering theories to concrete implications for an organization. Probably a good place to start from when introducing imagineering in an organization.
@NielsvanderHaven Yes, it does have a co-creation element in it. It states a leader is the mouth piece of a community and that leader earns its position in communities as mouth piece. It connects with servant leadership and co-creation as well.
Do you remember the article "Managing a herd of cats"? That's kind of managing a community naturally.
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