The Social Network, or “not because you’re a nerd” …

I emailed my real friends, but they were busy or washing their hair, so my partner and I queued behind a thousand teens blackberrying intently while they waited to buy tickets for Vampires Suck and Paranormal Activity 2. Despite having gone to the cinema with people, everyone around us was talking to someone who wasn’t there. Eventually, and appropriately, we waded through the fast food wrappers to see The Social Network, the story of Facebook. Or more accurately, mostly the story of the lawsuits that later erupted around those at Harvard during the time that ‘thefacebook.com’ first debuted and the rather messy years that followed.

Much has been made in comments on the film of the irony of a social network whose driving force is a man portrayed as so lacking in the social graces that lubricate and enable friendship. As much as been made of the film’s suggestion that Facebook was a response to getting dumped in a bar by an erstwhile girlfriend. (She gets the film’s best line in the process), with Mark Zuckerberg, the central figure, denying it while other websites dig a little deeper into what may or may not be the truth behind what actually happened. So this posting is a reaction to watching a film that may or may not be exactly what happened in Harvard and in California in 2004 – 6: that the film itself suggests that truth is a highly interpretable abstract concept is a comment worth slipping in at this point.

 

The multiple faces of employee engagement

We can be a perennially puzzling species. While the majority of us almost certainly head to work intending to do our best, it would interesting to know how many of us are that generous in our assumptions and assessments about those around us – and how far any gap is accounted for by the generosity we tend to extend when we are invited to assess ourselves. But I strongly suspect that the start of any new job – something we’ve (usually) chosen to apply for, polished our cvs and interview skills, cleared the hurdles of interview and assessment centre – is a time when all of us are at our most positively intentioned. There’s a lot of hoping as well as striving in the journey from hoping to induction, and the moment of arrival is a time when we are looking to invest that hope.

That’s a view echoed in the words of Orlagh Hunt, group HR director at the RSA Insurance Group, in an interview with People Management:

We know that people show up in a new company wanting to engage. Very few people think, ‘I’m going to do as little as humanly possible and be as destructive as I can’. They start off thinking this is a shining new opportunity, and then the job they do, the leader they get, the environment they’re in either translates that optimism into having a great time and doing a great job, or not quite so much.” 

 

Book review: Dave and Wendy Ulrich – The Why of Work

Dave Ulrich is, without question, an HR guru: as with any guru, it’s difficult to know whether to approach them on bended knee or with a degree of trepidation. Having read “The Why of Work”, the best approach is with an open mind, a small pinch of salt – and with sufficient time to take on board what Ulrich (writing with his wife, Wendy, a psychologist) has to say. There is much of immense value here, and much that has the potential to enable leaders and organisations to generate immense value in more than one sense for themselves (and, importantly, both their customers and their shareholders). Like many of the best books in the ‘how to manage business better’ arena, my biggest qualm is that those who stand to gain most from reading it are those least likely to read it.

 

No more heroes? A question of slick performance

… or to quote another pop song from the now seemingly innocent days of punk, “Accidents Will Happen”. Elvis Costello was, of course, singing (well, after a fashion) about romance: the accident that is pre-occupying many of us currently is a less happy topic. As the pun-loving Mr Costello might have put it, we’re all in Deepwater now. But the Louisiana oil-spill is providing some fascinating examples of how the modern world sees leadership, contemporary thoughts on ‘responsibility’, and of how and when we consider ourselves to be ‘victims’.

As several million gallons of crude oil cause serious damage to the coastlands of the Gulf of Mexico, there is endless press coverage. What is strikingly odd about this is that very little of it appears to be about the coastlands, or those in the region whose livelihoods are under serious threat. Instead, we’re witnessing a political and media storm focusing on President Obama, BP CEO Tony Hayward, and – reminding us of the historic importance of alien substances in American waters – the Tea Party. In this strange version of the world, BP has become ‘British Petroleum’, a name it stopped using in 2001: the tagline it adopted at the time – and still uses – has, however, acquired an aura of prescience: ‘Beyond Petroleum’. Reaction and commentary on the consequences of the Deepwater Horizon rig explosion have certainly spread with the same depressing scope as the oil. It would be odious to draw comparisons (and recent references to 9/11 seemed to be willingly misread to stir just such a sense of odium), but the spheres affected by the verbal and political response are also being damaged.

 

They can’t take that away from me – the one thing missing from the workplace?

In challenging times, retreat is a natural human response. Rightly or not (and sadly usually not), we tend to perceive some earlier time when things where ‘right’ and – at some level, conscious or otherwise – look for ways of returning to this blissful state. As Carole King sang, in a song whose lyric merits a less casual interpretation:

I think I’m going back/to the things I learned so well in my youth;
I think I’m returning to/the days when I was young enough to know the truth”.

 

We’re all in this together: a new future for co-operatives?

In less than 24 hours, we may be getting an interesting lesson in leadership and the forging of working relationships. Alternatively, we might get a lesson in leading while visibly having only a minority of potential available support, or a masterful (well, it will be a man) display of tantrum throwing at the electorate’s lack of gratitude for their potential services. (Today’s Times has published a recipe for a coalition cocktail for those of you for whom this is all too much to contemplate: you may wish to stock up on Galliano on your way home.) Whatever the result, the electoral ground has shifted in this campaign as rarely before: the level of public discussion about electoral reform may have interesting implications for the governing style of any ‘winner’. But I also noticed another very interesting aspect of the campaign that may see interesting developments in organisational development and leadership almost regardless of the outcome.

 

Leadership and Ethics- Myth or Reality?

[This post is a guest contribution by ASK Associate, Barbara Hocking. You can read Barbara’s biography on our Guests page, which also provides a link to her Personal Learning Profile.]

Is the time for ethical leadership really here? Has the global economic climate created conditions for a radical rethink in the way we do business? Will we see a different set of values being pursued by those in positions of influence in the major corporations around the world? Business schools across the globe are certainly questioning how they should be developing leaders of the future in the light of criticism from many quarters following the worldwide economic crisis.

 

Are you thinking what one’s thinking?

[We were delighted to receive the following contribution to our blog, exploring leadership and engagement against the backdrop of an election campaign, which we are respectfully publishing anonymously.]

One normally isn’t to allowed to express an opinion, of course, but one is an intelligent woman of a certain age, who keeps keenly in touch with current events. As I believe people might write in letters of introduction to potential employers, one also has what one might call ‘a breadth and depth of experience in leadership roles’. So one can’t help but think sometimes. And that iPod one was given does make a useful storage device for one’s voicemail messages to oneself. One imagines there’d be quite a to do if one’s thoughts were to be more widely known – one can only hope one’s handbag is in safe hands – but it is a comfort to record them. If one’s upper lip were less stiff, for example, one might almost be currently forgiven for thinking ‘oh, here one goes again’.