Presidential Elections and “Change”

The 2008 Presidential election is all about change. As the candidates profess change and each claims to be “a change-agent”, we are left with the question of how to assess which candidate will be most able to achieve change. We’d like to invite you to rate the candidates (see link at bottom) but before that, let me give you a short introduction to a new framework.

At Vivékin Group, through a decade of research at the Wharton School, Purdue University, and the University of Minnesota, we have developed the LSmarts framework. This framework, which draws on theories of multiple intelligences, allows us to rank the Presidential candidates on their ability to handle and bring change on the basis of 5 leadership intelligences.

The Five Intelligences of Leadership
A true leader demonstrates the ability to chart a path in unmapped territory, and to lead a group, a community, a nation, or all of humankind itself, along this path toward progress. This ability of a leader becomes all the more critical when times are uncertain–the true leader demonstrates a flexibility to plan and take action in the face of unforeseen circumstances.

Leadership ability is thus reflected by that which marks us as quintessentially human: Intelligence—the ability to combine knowledge, experience, perception, and imagination to solve a problem. But, by intelligence we do not mean its popular conceptualization as IQ.

Building on recent advances in psychology research, we view leadership intelligence as more comprehensive and multi-faceted. A true leader for the future needs to possess five different kinds of leadership smarts (LSmarts): Analytical, Operational, Inventive, Communicative, & Ethical LSmarts.

1. Analytical LSmarts

A leader with Analytical LSmarts quickly defines or identifies problems and appropriate solutions. The leader is able to systematically acquire new knowledge and demonstrates an ability to learn both from successes and failures. Analytical LSmarts also allows the leader to monitor performance and take corrective action when necessary. For instance, one illustration of Analytical LSmarts will be when a candidate finds a smart–and yet, legal–way of getting around campaign finance laws.

2. Operational LSmarts

A leader with Operational LSmarts transforms ideas into action even when circumstances are not congenial. Such a leader is an agent of change, and is efficiency oriented.
Operational LSmarts can be seen when a candidate (or a campaign) is able to find ways of getting around factors such as bad weather or technology glitches that adversely affect operations, or during a hostage crisis.

An excellent example of a leader demonstrating Operational LSmarts is that of Jack Kennedy during the Cuban missile crisis.

3. Inventive LSmarts

A leader with Inventive LSmarts demonstrates imagination. Such a leader carries and conveys a vision, and inspires the public with new ways of solving both old and new problems.

4. Communicative LSmarts

A leader with Communicative LSmarts demonstrates a capacity to persuade audiences. Such an ability is clearly evident in the Presidential debates where an example is that of Ronald Reagan who in the 1984 Presidential debate with Democrat Walter Mondale intelligently remarked that he would not make his opponent’s “youth and inexperience” an issue in the campaign.

5. Ethical LSmarts

A leader displays Ethical LSmarts when faced with an ethical dilemma. Ethical LSmarts are not about the ethical beliefs of a leader or how ethical you perceive the leader to be. It is also not about doing “good work” (as in “the ethical mind” that Howard Gardner of Harvard has proposed.) Rather, this aspect of intelligence reflects how capable the leader is of recognizing and understanding the ethical implications of a new situation. Ethical LSmarts bestow upon the leader a capacity to understand the ethical standpoints of people who do not share his or her ethics. Good examples of leaders who demonstrated ethical LSmarts are Abraham Lincoln (especially, his Gettysburg address) and Mahatma Gandhi.

An Invitation to You

We invite you to participate in the first-ever public application of this framework to assess leadership. We have an survey that you can access online and provide your assessment on both the Republicans and Democrats who wish to become the next President of the USA.

If you wish to participate in this unique experiment, please access the survey here.
It will open in a new window.

Over the break, I got to see Taare Zamin Par (Stars on the Ground), a Bollywood movie that I would rate as one of the most sensitive movies I’ve ever seen. It portrays the trials and misunderstandings an eight-year old dyslexic boy faces both at school and at home. While, of course, for box office reasons, the movie had to have a feel-good ending, the movie’s tag line: “Every child is special” resonated for me because of our philosophy at Vivekin Group: that every person has a special ability, and that we have to find the best way to bring out all that is good in that person. Good movie to see, especially during the festive season.

The writer’s strike in Hollywood is making many producers look for alternate solutions to the impasse. Krisztina Holly has an article in BusinessWeek where she points out the various things Hollywood needs to do to bring in desperately-needed innovation.

I find Holly’s article quite on the ball, but a bit too generic. The steps she points out–things like “Embrace failure”, “You don’t have to be first, but you need to adapt” or “Innovation doesn’t always mean immediate profit”–are all accurate, but these maxims can be as true for food industry or a manufacturing firm as they are for Hollywood. What is different about innovation in Hollywood?

I brought this up with my wife, a folklorist and cultural anthropologist, who is an Associate Professor at Duke University. She is an expert on performance studies and her book was recently won a prestigious American Academy of Religion award. As we discussed innovations in the entertainment industry, conversation turned to old storytelling traditions. We agreed that performances all over the world–whether a storytelling event by a village bard or a movie produced by a Hollywood mogul–have to continuously innovate. Imagine telling the same story over and over again and still being able to capture audiences. How does this continuous innovation happen?

I was able to put together four innovational abilities that storytelling calls for:

1. Memory The storyteller must be able to remember long stories, sometimes epics. But the important thing is to memorize in modules because such module-oriented memory allows the teller to combine different modules to create a variety in story
2. Routine We humans have been called “storytelling animals” (see Alasdair McIntyre) but we need routines. We believe in beginnings and ends, we believe in progression of the storyline. Routinization helps innovation in two ways–it provides a structure for the innovator by providing a template to fill out (in this case, think the stock beginnings and endings and the routine phrases the storyteller employs during the narration), and it allows the listener to quickly absorb the innovation (think consumer acceptance of incremental innovation versus radical innovation).
3. Imagination The storyteller exercises his or her imagination in creating a mental image of the story–the plot, the characters, the action–before letting listeners hear (If you want to do some heavy theory, look up Paul Ricouer’s work on this).
4. Articulation The final innovational ability that successful innovation requires is that of articulation–conveying what is in the mind, or what is perceived in a beautiful way so that the rendering moves the audience. How many of us has not seen a bird sing on a dark winter day? But only Thomas Hardy can write a poem like The Darkling Thrush.

So here’s a framework for innovation for Hollywood, in fact, for all performance-oriented businesses. As I think about this, these abilities seems to roughly mimic the ISmarts framework. With some shoehorning, they can fit the analytical, the operational, the inventive, and the communicative intelligences of the ISmarts framework.

In an article in today’s New York Times, Matt Bai makes an interesting point about leadership. Toward the end of the article, he asks,

At the risk of triangulating, I think you could make a case that it would be awfully nice to have a leader who is both practiced and intuitive. But this question of where leadership comes from is a worthy one for people to think about.

At Vivekin Group, through research that brings together psychology and management, we find that leadership is closely tied to intelligence. Recent work by Howard Gardner of Harvard (see his book Five Minds for the Future), although slightly different from our framework, corroborates it. We find that leadership smarts (LSmarts) are five-dimensional: Analytical, Operational, Inventive, Communicative, and Ethical. LSmarts reflect a leader’s ability to think flexibly along these five dimensions. The framework brings together both left-brained thinking (Analytical and Operational LSmarts) and right-brained thinking (Communicative and Inventive LSmarts), apart from addressing the ethical dimension.

Ron Paul’s blimp is in the news because it’s flying near where I live. As the local news reports it,

“The blimp is being paid for by supporters who aren’t officially connected to Paul’s campaign. The blimp is scheduled to float up the East Coast past major cities.

The aerial billboard is emblazoned on one side with ‘Who is Ron Paul? Google Ron Paul.’ The other side reads ‘Ron Paul Revolution.’”

I’m not a Ron Paulite, but I find this first Presidential blimp to be a fascinating innovation in campaign communication. Obviously, it is an excellent example of communicative ISmarts.

But the blimp idea is also a fantastic illustration of analytical ISmarts–in the way it gets people to donate to Ron Paul’s campaign while getting around campaign finance rules. Ron Paul supporters created a private company, Liberty Political Advertising, LLC, to finance it. However, since Liberty Political Advertising is not a political action committee or officially affiliated with the Paul campaign, it is not subject to campaign finance laws or regulations. So supporters who pay for the blimp are not considered contributors, but are instead, purchasers!

Desperate times call for innovation. The Federal Reserve Bank is trying to do what it can to stop the hemorrhaging caused by the subprime mortgage loans crisis. Jill Barshay on Marketplace this evening has the best analysis I have heard so far on this.

As Jill puts it, the problem is that the credit market is frozen–there is tremendous distrust, and banks don’t want to lend to each other. In such a situation, the Fed has two options: try open market solutions such as cut interest rates (which it did by 0.25% yesterday) or open a discount window where banks go directly to the Fed and get loans. The problem with interest rate cuts is inflation, and the problem with the discount window is the stigma (there is often a rush on the banks seen going to the Fed). So here comes the Fed’s innovation. In collaboration with four foeign central banks, it announced a new scheme where any financial institution can go to it and pledge any kind of collateral (even subprime mortgage loans!) to get a loan. Further, the lending is made out to be a big party, you’re one more anonymous bank in a crowd.

Will this work? Well, the answer hinges on whether the Fed has addressed the central problem: the banks’ distrust of each other. As long as this situation where banks are wary of what loans other banks are hiding continues, the credit freeze will continue.

The New York Times has an article today on Dr. Shinya Yamanaka, who has discovered a new way to obtain stem cells without using human embryos. The NYTimes reports:

Dr. Yamanaka is widely credited with being the first to hit on the idea of reprogramming adult cells to behave as stem cells because of his mouse work. The crux of his idea was to add genes called master regulators to the skin cells’ chromosomes. These genes can change the cell’s behavior by turning other genes on and off.

I found the article educative in terms of what characterizes innovators and innovation:

1. A process that begins with imposing constraints (Yamanaka saw stem cells through a microscope in a friend’s lab and realizing that they could be his daughter, wanted to find some other way to make stem cells than use human embryos). This is much like what C.K. Prahalad calls the “sandbox”.

2. A willingness, even a desire, to take risks.

3. A reliance on “educated guesses” and intuition rather than blind rationality. (”One challenge was figuring out which genes would reprogram adult cells. With hundreds of candidate genes, the number of possible combinations was almost infinite. …… He said he used his instincts, as well as published research of other scientists, to pick the 24 most promising genes. He said he used his instincts, as well as published research of other scientists, to pick the 24 most promising genes. In the lab, he found that the 24 did indeed contain four genes that could reprogram adult cells into stem cells. “)

4. A series of small changes, what I call “microinnovations”, that led Yamanaka to adapt the techniques that worked in mice to humans. Too often, we think of innovation as that one-time all-transforming giant idea, whereas it really is a series of small steps.