If organizations are going to evolve from the hierarchical, command-and-control structure that has dominated over the past century to a new model where trust, transparency and meritocracy are guiding principles, they're going to need to change the way they develop leaders. To gain some insight into how the leadership development process is adapting to the challenge of creating leaders who are inclusive, progressive, and able to look beyond their organization for great ideas, we turned to the MIX community. With our partners at HCI, the Human Capital Institute, we sponsored the HCI Human Capital M-Prize on Leadership, and we asked you to share your stories on leadership development.
 

Read more

Our big goal here at the MIX is to inspire and unleash as much collective aspiration, audacity, imagination, energy, and passion as possible when it comes to making all of our organizations fit for the future--and fit for human beings.

We've said it before: so much is broken when it comes to how most companies are managed, organizations are structured, and work is designed. "Modern" management was developed by a bunch of long-dead big thinkers who were solving for a very different set of challenges than we face today: maximizing control, conformance, discipline, reliability, and predictability. Those are important organizational virtues, but they're not what creates real value today.

Read more

 

Everybody hates it, but so much of life is ruled by it: bureaucracy. It's time to bust up the ideology of control that has infiltrated every aspect of organizational life.

That's why we launched the Beyond Bureaucracy Challenge (the second leg of the HBR/McKinsey M-Prize for Management Innovation)--a call for inspiring stories, bold ideas, and instructive experiments that demonstrate what can happen when you scrap compliance, conformance, and predictability for freedom, passion, and dynamism.

We asked management innovators around the world to share their stories and hacks about:

Read more

For all of the time spent chasing after what looks like success, too many of us have only a dim sense of what it feels like. That's clearly a wide-spread cultural malady, but it acquires special force in the world of work.

Organizations invest billions annually on a success curriculum known as "leadership development," which ends up leaving so much on the table. Training and development programs almost universally focus factory-like on inputs and outputs--absorb curriculum, check a box; learn a skill, advance a rung; submit to assessment, fix a problem. Likewise, they leave too many people behind with an elite selection process that fast-tracks "hi-pots" and essentially discard the rest. And they leave most people cold with flavor of the month remedies, off sites, immersions, and excursions--which produce little more than a grim legacy of fat binders gathering dust on shelves.

Read more

Editor's Note: This is the first in a series we're running in conjunction with our friends at Fortune. Called "Fit for Human Beings," the posts will explore what it takes to create organizations that are as resilient, inventive, inspiring, and accountable as the people who work inside of them--with reports from the progressive thinkers and adventuresome practitioners actively wrestling with that question. We hope you'll share your stories and ideas in the comments--we'll publish the best ones here and on Fortune/CNNMoney.

---

"Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM."

Read more

“That was a small lesson I learned on the journey. What is interesting and important happens mostly in secret, in places where there is no power. Nothing much of lasting value ever happens at the head table, held together by a familiar rhetoric. Those who already have power continue to glide along the familiar rut they have made for themselves.” —Michael Ondaatje, The Cat's Table

Back in September I was lucky enough to participate in IBM's centennial THINK forum in New York City . The lineup included a staggering array of CEOs of the biggest, oldest, and most influential companies in the world, several heads of state (on loan from the General Assembly sessions at the UN across town), and a handful of boldface journalists and thought leaders. For all of the power on display in that room, the real topic of the moment was insurrection.

Read more

To transform organizations so that they are fit for human beings--more inspiring and engaging and yet just as disciplined and even more productive--we need to understand why promising ideas for improving management developed in the 20th Century--such as teams, empowerment, delayering or innovation--failed to become a permanent part of the standard management repertoire.

The default mental model of management

These improvements didn't stick because of the mental model around management should be conducted that is still remarkably pervasive in the Fortune 500. It comprises five interlocking principles.

Read more

I'm delighted to share the first of six videos from my conversation with our latest MIX Maverick Seth Godin. Seth needs no introduction--he's a 13-time bestselling author, serial entrepreneur and tireless game-changer. He is a one-man army when it comes to unleashing the passion and initiative of individuals to make a positive difference in the world. I'm always struck by his ability to make sense of the economic and cultural moment in a way that is both practical and profound.

Our recent conversation was clarifying and galvanizing. I hope it is for you too.

First up: "Why being human is the only way to win."

Read more

In the spirit of constant experimentation and evolution, we continue to invent new modes of engaging the most adventuresome practitioners and boldest thinkers in tackling the big challenge of making our organizations as resilient, inventive, inspiring, and accountable as they need to be to meet the future.

One of those approaches is a twist on the software world’s hackathon: a burst of intense, coordinated effort designed to generate an enormous amount of progress (or code) in a relatively short time. With the MIX Management Hackathons, we aim to unleash the collective intelligence of progressive management thinkers and doers from around the world in an intense, hands-on, collaborative effort to generate truly fresh and radically practical new ideas and practices.

We recently wrapped up our pilot hackathon: the Communities of Passion Management Hackathon. I’m delighted to report that it was such a success that we are launching a second—even more intense, inclusive, and (we hope) productive—management hackathon today.

Read more

Some fifteen years ago, in the early days of starting up Fast Company magazine, co-founder Alan Webber, shared one of his rules of thumb with me: "a good question beats a good answer." That pithy wisdom sunk in and took hold immediately. In the course of hundreds of reporting journeys and thousands of conversations with leaders, entrepreneurs, thinkers, and doers of all stripes, I've tuned into the questions people ask.

The first thing you notice when you have your ears pricked for questions is that most people (especially businesspeople) are more interested in presenting solutions, making assertions, and sharing their vision. This isn't surprising. School programs us to focus on producing the right answer and the job description of the leader for the last century has basically been "the person with all the answers."

That's why it's so refreshing (and instructive) to spend time with people who lead with questions rather than answers. Why? Why does inquiry beat certainty every time? Here are just three reasons:

Read more