Category: Passion

It’s late on a Sunday night in October 1996. In a crowded basement on Hoxton Square, East London, around 300 people have crammed together to dance, drink, smoke (because we could back then) and listen to DJ and Metalheadz co-founder Goldie spin his trademark jungle drum and bass.

Apart from the flashing visuals, there’s not much colour in the room, the crowd, made up of students, artists and anyone else who doesn’t have to get up on Monday morning, is a heaving sea of sweaty faces, dark jackets, dark t-shirts.

The music keeps playing, the volume louder if anything, but in the corner of the room, there’s a ripple through the crowd, and the dancing is momentarily more subdued. Heads turn. For a minute or two, all eyes rest on the beautiful, pale face, the cheekbones dusted with glitter, the beautiful slanted eyes, fringed with jet black hair.

Bjork is only in the Blue Note for a short time but, in her unexpected presence, everything changes. For a moment, a sweaty local venue becomes a celebrity hangout and a routine Sunday night turns into a lifelong memory.

You don’t need to be a Brit Award winning, internationally-acclaimed popstar to make this sort of entrance, but it probably helps.

Drama queens and kings

Tudor Pickard, who writes about leadership on his blog, picks up on a story told by Meryl Streep in the LA Times; the actress remembers her days at Yale Drama School, when the students were asked how they would go about playing a king:

“And everybody said, ‘Oh you are assertive,’ and people would say, ‘Oh you speak in a slightly deeper voice.’ And the teacher said, ‘Wrong. The way to be king is to have everybody in the room quiet when you come in.’ The atmosphere changes. It’s all up to everybody else to make you king. I thought that was really powerful information.”

Tudor asks, are drama and leadership really that far apart?

Certainly trade unionist Keith Grint, in “The Arts of Leadership”, believes that a key part of leadership is the ‘performance art’ – persuading others to follow you through the strength of your actions.

Chances are, we’ve all had a boss who makes us cringe when he/she walks into the room, or a gorgeous work colleague who makes our hearts leap. The emotional impact other people have on us, and vice versa, is the driving force behind mainstream psychotherapy as well as less-scientific practices such as NLP.

The charismatic leader whose entrance causes a roomful of people to quieten, whose very presence sparks a current of excitement through a crowd, is the type of leader we’re conditioned to cry out for. As Cass Business School’s David Sims has said on this blog, their existence feeds a deep need within us.

This need generates the sort of mild hysteria that has people saying Barack Obama is the new Messiah (if you search for Barack Obama + Jesus on Google you’ll get over 6m results) or that Gordon Brown is saving the world (Gordon Brown + saving world = 396,000 results).

Like Tudor, I agree with the idea of a highly reciprocal, co-dependent relationship between leaders and followers, but rather than build up great leaders, we should ask ourselves where we can help them lead. In other words, as one of the world’s more charismatic leaders would have it, “Ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country” (John F Kennedy, 1961). Meanwhile, leaders themselves can start thinking about how to empower others.

The end of the office ‘celebrity’

Actions speak louder than words and I agree that all the best leaders should and do lead by example. But, in the book, I’m interested in toning down the ‘’performing’ side of things. In my view, any performance should be so subtle as to go virtually unnoticed.

In “The Starfish & The Spider”, Ori Brafman and Rod Beckstrom quote the ancient Chinese philospher Lao-tzu, “a leader is best when people barely know that he exists; not so good when people obey and acclaim him; worst when they despise him”. (p115)

We want to feel our leaders have our best interests at heart. There’s nothing more irritating than a leader who simply shouts about how great he/she is. Often, when those types of people are in management positions, they’re doing anything but ‘leading’.

What’s the true key to motivating and driving others? This is the heart of the ‘passion’ element I’m exploring. Leaders like Richard Sambrooke, Craig Newmark, Jason Fried, Gina Poole, Lloyd Davis and Andy Bell all seem to get it right.

Someone has left a lollipop in Gemma Price’s Canary Wharf office.

“I don’t want it – you have it,” urges Gemma.

The lollipop is one of the few bright things in the otherwise very sedate office, full of grey, black and muted tones – the kind you’d expect of a leading investment/ private bank. The lollipop seems out-of-place. As rare as a Myspace page in a set of banker’s bookmarks (it turns out).

Gemma looks after learning and development for the bank’s 25,000 back-office staff, as well as overseeing learning and development (co-ordinating, sharing best practice etc), for Europe, the Middle East and Africa – this role also covers employees in private banking, investment banking and asset management.

Gemma’s unit operates as a kind of internal consultancy, brokering deals between internal ‘clients’ and external vendors, including executive coaches, facilitators and IT training providers.

Gemma has been at the bank for nine years so when she started, the internet wasn’t much of an issue. Today however, there are tight limits on what can and can’t be viewed:

“We’re very restricted with what we can access, apart from LinkedIn and Google. We can access the BBC and news sites…LinkedIn is seen as professional tool. Most Facebook groups [for example] would not be considered professional.”

With regards to internal communications, a knowledge management team has just been set up, charged with looking at KM in its entirety across the bank. But the watchwords are effectiveness and ROI, rather than radical change:

“They’ll be looking at knowledge management in terms of efficiency. The last thing anyone wants in the market right now is innovation or risk-taking!”

The bank’s vast corporate intranet serves 45,000 people across 51 countries.

“There’s a massive staff directory, and Sharepoint, which includes a lot of shared sites where people have blogs and wikis. There’s a lot of stuff on there, a lot of videos. There’s a huge amount of e-learning.”

Gemma points to the webcam on her desktop, used for Camtasia presentations.

“We design and develop our own content, working with outside vendors. We also use Harvard Management a lot, and Intuition Plus.”

In a large, multinational company, it’s a challenge to produce e-learning videos where the message hits home. And Gemma’s team needs to catch the attention of people who are extremely busy and frequently stressed.

“The shorter, the better, the funnier we can make [the videos], the better. Actually funny is a flippant comment. Because we can’t afford to have something that’s funny in London being unfunny in Singapore.”

How would she describe the overall culture of the company?

“We’re a real mix. The dominant cultures are Swiss and American. We have some people coming in who are very innovative, but then we’re also very traditional. We have people who’ve made it up themselves through adversity but also people with double PhDs in Maths – again, that duality.”

The staff is, culturally, very diverse. The bank has just won an award for its multicultural leadership programme, and Gemma clearly works hard to promote harmony.

She admits she looks for parallels where possible:

“The Singapore and Zurich offices aren’t dissimilar; their attitude is ‘we’re here to serve’. The approach of London and New York is more, ‘we’re here to work with you, and we want to get the credit’.”

“My role is to create a great working environment. A manager has to be all things – a coach, a mentor. The predominant style of the lead manager has a huge impact on mangers below. [Our CEO] isn’t a ‘show and tell’ guy so his team aren’t out there banging the drum. That creates very much a team-based culture.”

Recent experiments in sub-prime mortgages aside, the banking industry tends to be conservative by nature, especially where leadership is concerned.

“The front office tends to be very command and control. That sort of method is seen as outdated but in practice still exists. There’s a real dichtonomy there.”

Above all, the bank’s well-heeled clients want to see respect:

“We’ve got to strike a balance. It is quite formal. You don’t say ‘Great!’, ‘How you doing?’ or ‘Wassup?!’ to personal clients, a lot of whom are billionaires. There’s no room for casual language in that way. These are high net worth individuals we’re speaking to. Luckily, there’s huge amount going on socially so we’ve got plenty of opportunity to be informal and casual.”

Maybe that’s what the person who left the lollipop thought.

It all comes back to stories, according to Ziv Navoth.

Ziv is sitting in his New York office (AOL’s headquarters on Broadway), chatting to me on Skype.

“Leaders see opportunity where other people see difficulties or challenges…then what you have to do as a leader is convince other people; make them think they can win. The ability to do that requires the ability to tell stories.

“Look at where Barack Obama was 21 months ago. Watching his campaign has been mind-boggling. [The US] is a country that doesn’t like change. The thought of voting for a black person is anathema to some people. But Obama can paint a picture of what the future could look like.”

Ziv works for Bebo, the world’s third biggest social network (45m registered users), which was acquired by AOL for $850m in March 2008. As Senior VP, Marketing & Partnerships, Ziv is part of “People Networks” – a business unit at AOL which includes Bebo, AIM, ICQ and Socialthing.

Ziv should know all about stories. In February 2007, the same week he started at Bebo, (as VP of marketing and business development), he published his first book, Nanotales, a collection of 83 short stories.

Inspired by the book, Bebo ran a competition encouraging users to write their own ‘nanotales’ – short stories of under 1000 words. The stories were uploaded to the web where they could be reviewed and rated by other users.

The contest was a perfect reflection of the potential ambitions of Bebo’s core 16 – 24 year old demographic, and a great way of harnessing the viral power of the internet. Shortlisted writers such as Tolu Ogunlesi, Richard Mooney and Shirley Davenport promoted the competition on their sites, asking readers to vote for them, and spread the word.

“Social media enables you to cross barriers of space and time,” says Ziv. “You can broadcast your story with zero investment and the only thing that will effect how far it spreads is the power of your story. Before there were barriers and hierarchy, now it’s just up to you.”

Whether it’s teenagers on Bebo, or CEOs of multinational companies, the internet is a great leveller. Craft your message in the right way, touch a chord, and your words will spread like wildfire.

Scott Monty, Ford’s head of social media, stresses the importance of simplistic story telling. To succeed in the digital world, he says, you need to decide your story and repeat it again and again. Polish up your story-telling talents, and you’re more likely to be on to a winner.

The Oxford academic Keith Grint praises imaginative story-telling in his book, “The Arts of Leadership”. He compares leadership to a series of artistic disciplines – and defines the effective portrayal of a strategic vision as the ‘fine art’ of leadership.

“This art is most appropriately considered as the one responsible for constructing the strategic vision of an organisation – that is, its future destination, its current direction, and its past deployment. It is, in effect, the world of the artist’s studio, for here the fine artist/leader must draw or paint or sculpt the future…the imaginative vision can be crucial in explaining the success or failure of a leader.” (p.16)

Add network effects to an appropriate imaginative vision, and you have a virtuous circle. But if you allow them to amplify a mistaken vision, you have a public relations disaster, as brands such as Virgin, Kryptonite and Cillit Bang have found to their cost.

AOL is a media giant “beginning to get its groove back”. It’ll be interesting to see which stories Ziv will weave to ensure his brand regains maximum respect in cyberspace.

I first meet Head’s Ramsey Khoury at the Web 2.0 Expo in New York where we’re both on a panel discussing the pros and cons of doing transatlantic business.

Ramsey once ran a fashion company out of New York so he knows a thing or two about US/UK cultural differences. We all agree the world’s a lot smaller now that social media means you chat to friends and colleagues across the pond every day, usually without even thinking of the distance involved.

Today, as founder and managing director of Head, one of the UK’s longer-established digital agencies, Ramsey is as equally concerned with what you might call a company’s inner beauty as its outward appearance.

When we hook up again, Ramsey tells me Head prides itself on strategic thinking: “trying to educate our clients to think more long-term rather than short-term, transient campaigns”.

We’re sitting in the boardroom in the townhouse on Percy Street, where Head’s 17-strong team is based. Whiteboards adorn the walls, and the table is half covered by a roll of brown paper and multi-coloured marker pens. Words and pictures are scribbled on the paper – the productive work of a brainstorm that’s recently taken place.

Strategic slow-build is intrinsic to successful social media so maybe it’s not surprising that social media projects now make up a significant proportion of Head’s workload.

Ramsey finds the company spends a lot of its time helping clients get up to speed with the whole culture of social media:

“There’s definitely an education side to it. We run free workshops at the start of projects where we ask clients what their issues and concerns are around the social media space. We’ll run the workshops either here or at clients’ offices. We’ll set out an agenda and share knowledge. We want to hear their stories. It’s important to take the time, do the workshops and have the senior people buy into the process. If you have a client who’s not 100 per cent behind what you’re doing, you’ll run into problems.”

Head famously started life in a ‘broom cupboard’ in London’s Langham Street in 2000. At a time when other digital/ dotcom businesses were boasting swanky shopfront offices and large teams of under-qualified, over-paid VPs, Head chose to grow slowly and organically – possibly one reason why the company is still thriving today.

So why did Ramsey turn his Dolce & Gabbana-covered back on fashion?

“I wanted to get involved with something a little less complex, more intimate, more collaborative. I’ve an equal interest in creativity and technology. Both have a voice at Head. I went to fashion school but I’m also interested in how things work.”

Now, he loves what he does:

“We really enjoy our space and it’s an interesting space [the web] because there are so many different areas. We’re really interested in what start-ups are doing. We go to Minibar every month. You’ve got all the agencies in the NMA top 100 – all evolving, all doing interesting things. There’s so much to understand.”

Ramsey’s enthusiasm spills over onto the corporate website which is liberally sprinkled with words such as ‘loveable’ and ‘marvellous’. The website boasts (not without irony) that Head’s workplace can feel like “the happiest place on earth”.

Certainly the townhouse offices are pleasant with ambient music pumped out over the speakers and, Caroline, the business development manager, dishing out free samples of herbal tea.

How does Ramsey hope to sustain this positive environment?

“I think the ecosystem [you’ve established] stays. You nurture talent. And you choose the right people. As long as you’ve got the right people you can grow the hierarchy without using the culture.”

As mentioned, the emphasis is on long-term, sustainable projects. The task of finding the Next Big Thing is not one that appeals to Ramsey:

“We don’t want to develop the next Youtube. Neither do we want to become a factory just churning out work. We’re experimenting. More and more we’re trying to find our specialist area, which I think is sites that have a long-term dialogue with their reader/user-base. Webcameron was a good example.”

Back in 2006, Head came up with the idea of the UK’s opposition leader, David Cameron, keeping an online video diary – a project which enabled the Tories to grab a piece of the digital limelight and steal a march on Labour, the UK’s ruling party.

Currently, Head is working with Microsoft on building and maintaining a social network for the 1.2m people employed across the NHS. With 20,000 registered users so far, the aim is to get around 70,000 to sign up. Staff can build their own avatar (weemee), form a group or discussion around any topic, as well as be kept informed of NHS events.

Working with big clients such as this can be all-consuming. In order to ensure they don’t miss the more innovative stuff, Ramsey re-invests a “significant amount” of Head’s annual profits into Head Labs, its R&D arm which was set up in 2005.

“We treat Head Labs and clients as projects of equal value. A lot of ideas that start in Labs can be fed back into client work. There might be 2 or 3 people working in Labs at any one time – or we outsource it; I’ve had an outside developer working on Labs for two or three months.”

Ramsey finds he has to tread a careful balance between the two areas:

“If you start to be more of a ‘think’ space you can lose focus and efficiencies, but if you don’t do that you can lose talent. Before Labs, we had to make things in our downtime. Now innovation becomes part of day-to-day operations.”

But it’s important to keep a focus. Above all, Ramsey thinks it’s essential to resist the temptation to be all things to all people:

“It’s very hard for a brand to know what to buy. There’s few agencies that know everything, do everything well. As a client I wouldn’t go to just one agency for everything.”