Can you imagine a new kind of innovative leadership for MBAs, one modeled in all phases of their graduate program? Classes where they learn, use, and track - real world problem solving tools for a new era? I'm convinced that each one of us can take small steps in the direction of growth wherever we stand, and that we can also significantly support others who do the same. Each one of these small steps count for a finer future we build together. They're rarely easy steps, sometimes lonely and likely will cost you a fortune along the way. Yet, together we can support one another to achieve the leadership change we all envision! That's still my belief after a lifetime of renewal in how adults learn and lead best. It's also why I support innovators here at the MIX, as well as in the field. None of us can do it alone, but together we're already moving forward.
On January 13th 2011, we launched my newly designed MBA leadership course, titled LEAD INNOVATION WITH THE BRAIN IN MIND. The leadership class is based on the MITA manifesto for renewed leadership, and debuts at a local university. With it, we just posted a draft copy of accompanying text, on the university’s blackboard space for the class. By the second week,none had dropped, the class size grew, and expectation runs high.
The Mita Brainpowered Method of leading and learning starts with a question, bypasses lectures or talks, engages multiple intelligences, and ends on Feb 24th with a Celebration of Innovation. The celebration could be described as an interactive trade show of sorts. Participants invite from 3 to 5 guests to engage in their innovative initiative, and are scored by specific, negotiated criteria, to engage the wider community in excahnges about their unique discoveries.
In spite of its maiden voyage this week, in a revolutionary MBA leadership course, the Mita method comes from 30 years of killer work, numerous tests of its effectiveness in many countries. It brims over with research and input from diverse cultures, several highly successful Phds to demonstrate its proven strengths, and personal funds to affirm that sometimes it takes a costly commitment beyond reason, to mature innovative initiatives.
It also comes from amazing leaders like Dean David Martin and the business school faculty at highly respected St. John Fisher’s, Bittner School of Business, who invited the innovation course as a support to progressive leadership growth in the management department. Finally, it takes amazing collaborators like Dr. Robyn McMaster, who spent the last 15 years working overtime daily with me on Mita initiatives, in several countries, and across many population groups. Robyn’s amazing talent and faithfulness, contributed immensely to Mita’s current status, and to my own survival in the mind-bending process.
The goal will be to build a graduate level leadership roundtable, that draws on MBA students’ personal passion to lead, through brainpowered tools. We’ll model collaborative leadership at the helm, as I’ve shared facilitation of this course, with my senior VP, Dr. Robyn McMaster. Together we hope to engage leaders to foster policies that support passionate discovery, and to facilitate tone that sustains innovation.
Our own deep desire to lead MBA communities of passion, with curiosity and care shows, as this maiden voyage nears. We hope to offer even more practical ways to gather and facilitate novice leaders - through growth sessions that offer creative tools for passion driven leadership. The idea is to apply passion driven leadership skills as they built tools that capitalize on their own talents. Unlike Sir Ken's claim that education kills creativity, in the TED video below, each session will foster creative leaders who'll inspire original initiatives in their organizations, during this revolutionary course.
The problem is that traditional MBA leadership courses, sometimes prepare leaders for past eras, when in reality, organizational needs have shifted. From headship, where a single leader's in control, we plan to facilitate a community of leaders where passion leads innovation initiatives in a sort of mutual mentoring format.
1. Typical MBA leadership faculty tend to tell or deliver facts or theories, while neuro-discoveries show how people learn more by teaching others than by listening to lectures.
2. Traditional approaches in master level classes, teach learners how to critique for mistakes, while brainpowered tools for encouraging passion for leading, develop talent by collaborating solutions.
3. Graduate level courses tend to use the same approach to reach similar standards, while MBA students using brainpowered tools - develop quality differences based on interests and abilities.
4. In conventional MBA courses, leadership is seen within a paradigm that fosters talents at the top. While brainpowered approaches would ensure passion is developed through each learners’ unique mix of multiple intelligences.
5. Assessments that may not always be intelligence-fair, are completed in regular MBA leadership classes, while brainpowered tools would emphasize evidence based assessment, where students’ passion to lead becomes part of their course completion initiative.
An MBA leadership course seems like an ideal laboratory to investigate and cultivate a new model as a brainpowered innovative leadership approach. Neuro discoveries have opened new opportunities for leaders to harness more talent, encourage more genuine growth in all, and empower participants to carry innovative practices into their organizations.
In contrast to traditional MBA classes, leaders-in-training will become the solutions they hope to see in business. Their own passion will be invited to alter and improve the class as it moves along, since exit forms will be given for their feedback at the end of each session. Suggestions will then be incorporated into following classes.
They'll earn grades as awarded by a negotiated set of criteria for their innovative performances. Each leader will be invited to reconfigure a broken practice at work, into quality prototypes for passion-driven leading in the 21st Century. They'll cross isolated siloes to build brainpowered communities, across departments where they work.
Five key distinctives (all based on the MITA Brain Based Manifesto) will mark this course as distinctive from traditional MBA courses I’ve taught. These five include:
1. Students will question, apply and wonder about every topic, rather than listen to lectures – in a guided sort of mutual mentorship, as well as through original interviews with leaders they admire.
2. Leaders in training will target improvements to areas of weakness they identify at work. Rather than critique case studies they will attempt brainpowered solutions to real workplace problems.
3. MBA students will be given opportunity to negotiate all criteria used to assess their work. So the same criteria that guides the assignments, will also be used to evaluate these.
4. Students will be encouraged to collaborate and will be expected to engage several of their multiple intelligences as tools for their leadership initiatives.
5. A Brainpowered Celebration of Innovation will conclude the course with the student’s opportunity to engage the wider community in their newly designed leadership initiatives.
Increasingly, innovative communities call for a new kind of leader. If you agree, you’ll likely also agree that renewed leadership requires a new kind of MBA, with classes that are millennial friendly. One that few business schools currently offer.
Imagine MBAs who suddenly added innovative tactics for a new era to your organization. If well-equipped leaders facilitated cutting edge initiatives with more brain in mind. Your organization would know these new MBA leaders by sharply increased profitability and worker morale where they worked.
In a brain based program transformed graduates would come into your organization with current business plans patterned after highly successful local, national and global leaders, such as:
- Talent – Bill Conaty leads business talent management. Conaty raised the level of HR internationally, and convinced other business leaders to spot credibility of HR as an answer to unleashing talent as human capital.
- Finances – Jeffrey Sachs calls for a complete change in economic strategies for a crowed planet. In spite of the wonderful insights of President Obama, Sachs offers, we are still dealing economic lies and abuse in the back rooms of government and Wall Street.
- Curiosity - Ursula Burns leads Xerox from tired traditions that sagged in sales to position it back among top organizations, with the challenges that come from asking Where to from here? By stirring curiosity for answers in co-workers, Burns finds answers that many CEOs tend to miss.
- Innovation – George Lucas comes with creative insights for the future of cinema. Lucas never really wanted to make money, but passionately wanted to make art. In art you make an emotional and innovative connection to people. Innovation for Lucas, involves telling stories to the population in a meaningful and emotional way.
- Tone - Barak Obama solves complex problems with statesman-like tone that engages opposing views, while finding courage to speak out against cynicism. Only by using tone skills for tough times, can leaders facilitate innovative ideas from diverse angles so that all can both teach and learn from others who differ.
- Organization – Gary Hamel offers unique management innovation plans that would revolutionize MBAs. Hamel stated in the world business forum 2009, To succeed in the future, organizations are going to have to find ways of energizing people, so that they bring not only their skills, expertise and diligence to work, but they bring their passion and their initiative as well.
- Change – Ann Mulcahy takes charge and draws others into change. Mulcahy faced critics and cynics alike – to embrace changes that brought Xerox back from the brink of disaster and held it in archaic practices with exclusive privileges for a few leaders at its top. By launching innovative change, Xerox is back in the race as a strong global player.
Many old school skills taught in current MBA program, remind us that a new kind of leader is urgently needed. It won’t be easy to accomplish in some current campuses, nor is it a task for the faint hearted. Yet the urgent need for a new kind of leader, compels us to rethink how we can develop highly effective business leaders for a new era.
Could reconfigured MBAs carry our business world back from rags of broken banks back to riches of human achievement? Could leadership that models a new tone for tough times, for example, offer Wall Street’s answer to an innovative future for management? Perhaps more importantly, could a new breed of MBAs open main street’s surest segue to creative progress?
Imagine leaders like those here at MIX, who build brilliant inroads that reconnect humans to innovation through technology, management, social media, and institutional change. How so? Perhaps, leaders in each of our organizations would eventually begin to address the narrowing gates to resources, as we continue to propose initiatives with ROI. . Innovation today may appear tenaciously blocked by bureaucrats with power, or dismissed by politicians without vision of innovation’s new roles for humanity. In contrast, imagine the active place innovation would leap to within a facilitation style leadership, that came to business from cutting edge MBA programs, for instance, armed with innovation in your area.
New kind of Model Many support the idea that to create a new kind of leadership, requires a new kind of "what if...? business school model. When we piloted this brainpowered approach to 25 senior Executive MBAs we received an overwhelming response from every participant in class. We continue to value any insights or practical suggestions, from MIX leaders and others in our community.
The MBA leaders' main project will start with a two-footed question, such as "What if...? Students will engage their multiple intelligences as leadership tools, will work together and on their own to build innovative business components that solve complex issues at work.
Each student invites five leaders in the university or wider community to attend their final Celebration of Innovation. The brainpowered course will conclude with a negotiated set of criteria to guide their Celebration of Innovation, as an opportunity to model their innovations. New neuro-discoveries provide leadership tools, learners engages the wider business community, and "Where to from here?" questions trigger future investigations of their MBA work.
Technology as Central - Blackboard, offers student leaders an opportunity to organize their files – since innovative initiatives in the course are incremental, and all build toward a final improvement proposal for their workplace. In addition the students and faculty participate in asymmetrical discussion groups through Blackboard applications. Technology offers increasing tools for all MBA students in this course to respond to issues during class, ask questions as they work, build tools for their innovative initiatives, and network their ideas both to one another and to experts in the field.
They can even tweet their ideas to a hash tag team forum that is set up into Blackboard for their use during the sessions. Several of the students will take technology to the next level in their course assignments, while others will be less prone to move ideas into the digital arena, and will capitalize on additional intelligences to express their outcomes.
The text for the course is written only in draft form as yet, and while we’ve received an invitation already to submit, from a well respected publisher – we’d rather run through the course once to ensure we are doing all we can to challenge, engage and support and learn from, these students as talented leaders.
See Polly LaBarre's challenges for MBA programs, and reflect on ways innovative changes could occur.
See Aaron Anderson's Challenge to Broken MBA practices
See Dan Oestrrich's Cracking the Code on Group Trust.
See Celebration of Innovation which is like an innovation trade show of sorts where participants prepare innovations to exchange insights and celebrate inventions with other leaders.
See Gary Hamel's Imperious Institutions, Impotent Individuals
See blog Does Your Business Need More MBAs to identify the new kind of leader out there.
See Joanna Barsh video below to see how meaning unlocks innovative performance.
Robyn, I am deeply humbled by your kind words and the overflowing brainpower you bring to this work daily. These student- leaders will take our grandchildren to a new place, and I trust each of them deeply to do it far better than me!
Thanks for ALL you offer the field, and for the humility, generosity, and openness you carry to the work daily!
What an honor to watch these gifted leaders run with innovative initiatives that will grow and improve the wonder that workplaces could be in the coming era!
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Ellen, in watching how students returned to class with "brains on fire" for all they have learned and experienced already about what it takes to solve a problem and put an innovation solution in place just awes me.
You are a true facilitator. You are willing to work with ambiguity for over three hours, since you never know what will be coming next. You play the chords like a fine violin, stretching your own skills at the same time you stretch students beyond their comfort zones. Your working memory, a place that can be uncomfortable is running at the peaks.
Students tell us they have never experienced so much learning. Best part is that they can't wait for more.
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The buzz is out they are already making huge changes with practical brainpowered tools and the dean (a very progressive leader) visited last night to let us know he’d like to attend their Celebration of Innovation.
One student selected the associate dean as an innovative leader to interview for the case student assignment, and students are energized by the results they are getting. Especially cool is the fact – that the students’ amazing efforts and talents are taking them to new heights and they are making amazing gains in implementing brainpowered improvements where they work.
Love your challenges with What if since that is the final and reflective stage of the Mita brainpowered approach, and while it fits into the MIX's innovation targets, it also gets dynamic results from curious - minded leaders-in-training. All you say about flattening the hierarchy in your own fine work – was evidenced for its power to release new intelligences in our class last night. What an honor to walk alongside and learn from these amazingly talented leaders! Their curiosity and keen openness to implement new ideas inspires us all. And they do apply and then report their results -- keeping us all fired for a finer future in the workplace!
Several fine universities have already expressed interest in this revolutionary leadership class – with a related new text (still in draft form) – so I am trying to figure out how to leverage the work in a thoughtful way. Any ideas for us?
Thanks for the innovative leadership you model, Bill! Ellen
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Bill
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As written about earlier, the Celebration of Innovation will occur on the last night of class, Feb 24th - Thurs - from 6 to 9 PM.
Students have incrementally (in each class session) designed a workplace innovation to lead -- to improve upon one perceived challenge they meet typically in business.
With each session - they apply leadership models, and brainpowered tools (new-neuro discoveries that convert into doable leadership tactics) to ensure they have captured a real workplace challenge, and have designed an effective solution to lead as they build their innovative workplace community.
So far they have inspired us with their openness, research skills, curiosity and risk-taking capability to try novel approaches where they lead at work. This celebration will be their attempt to engage guests in their designs and listen to others' ideas about improvements they might consider to their initiatives. It's a intellectual tradeshow of sorts, and is also their final exam, and in fact will be student-led.
They are excited to learn of their University Business Dean's plans to attend this event, and are already trying out their ideas to get feedback at work. I placed their rubric below Bill, to show what is required, and how they will lead business guests in that event.
Celebration of Innovation – Guidelines- Rubric – Group Project Due at the Celebration on Feb 24th, 2011
1. List your three invited guests who attended on the final project
2. The two footed question should be evident at your celebration booth.
3. Two clear targets should be evident to show innovation goals
4. Expected criteria you planned to achieve should be listed – with how each was met
5. Move multiple intelligences into action as tools to lead innovation.
6. Reflect where to from here on your topic – with celebration participants.
7. Innovation should draw on accurate research and apply brainpowered tools
8. Case studies that students did with selected leaders will inform their project
9. Project should represent an innovative solution to their key question
10. Students' active participation during celebration is vital – as they facilitate guests in their innovative leadership designs.
Bill, if you think of the final exam scraped in favor of this evidence based event on the last day (worth 40% of grade) then you have the bare bones of this course. I have written texts before -- but this one is written specifically for this course and for innovative leaders who lead with the brain in mind.
Thanks for asking, Bill, and thanks for the innovative design you lead. Make sense? Ellen
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Fascinating initiative Ellen! As my postings indicate we support your focus “with the brain in mind!” The assumption that management must control employees has too long constrained innovation, so questions like these might help your “what if?” sessions open student thinking. What if management has no fundamental reason to control employees? Why can’t employees function with full responsibility, full authority, and full accountability—i.e. with freedom? What if organizations were designed for “Theory Y” employees—instead of the “Theory X” underlying hierarchical control? Good luck and let me know if I can help.
Bill Nobles
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Wow - Title intrigues me, Aaron. I will look for it and let you know how I can draw upon your ideas for work I do in areas of change. Will be sure to offer you deserved credit - as I recommend, write about, or engage the ideas you generate. Love the cover - with ropes. We often toss a rope onto the floor when we facilitate leaders and have them select a side to defend on a wonderful exchange of opposing views.
Your 6 cases would make good background for courses on change, and likely offer good settings for exploration of change approaches. My work comes at change from neuro-discoveries about the brain's natural proclivity to default back to comfortable approaches - to the less comfortable but more rewarding ways of operating more in the working memory parts of the brain – which regulate change.
All to say – our work is delightfully pulling to similar parts – using different reasoning and approaches to facilitate folks there. Congrats on your book! Look forward to reading, and will get back!
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Ellen,
I'll have to spend some time thinking about the assessment concern. There's a whole subset of literature in the higher ed field that offers wide ranging views and tests of various assessments.
Re: the book is called Engaging Resistance: How ordinary people successfully champion change published by the Stanford University Press - due to be shipped in early Feb, details here: http://www.sup.org/book.cgi?id=16531
thanks for asking.
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Aaron, your ideas, and insight continue to challenge and inspire me. Thanks for taking the time to share what you are doing, and for your interest in my own efforts. Please tell me the name of your latest book - so that I can be sure to read it - as I look forward to hearing more of your insights.
You raised a very interesting point about the assessment - a thought came to me as I thought about your students' responses to other than paper-pencil tests. First, I don't blame them:-). Mine will say the same thing at first, and then after we work together, not so anymore:-) Like you suggest - it's key to give them voice along the way. In 1999 I published a book on Assessment for secondary and university (with Pearson Publishers) to address the issues you raised here and to appeal for intelligence fair assessments.
Mita's stand on assessment is a bit different - and I will suggest why.
We require of ourselves in Mita for intelligence -fair assessments – the exact same criteria that students use to guide creation of a project – when we assess that project. Absolute alignment means no surprises, students often help to create the criteria and the assessments are very transparent.
That entails complete alignment of the directions (requirements) with the assessments, and it makes students very confident that they can still do well for their efforts and talents. Without that alignment one can create a very mistrusting setting, without meaning to do so. Does that make sense?
Let me explain:
We list (and negotiate) perhaps 5 evidence-based criteria today for all innovative assignments. Those five may shift a bit as we move - but all have them in front of their faces. That same 5 criteria tells faculty & students if the tool met our mutual standards. No surprise -- huge transparency -- and high marks expected because of the alignment between what was expected, what criteria guided the work, and what criteria evaluated the work.
That is why Mita brain based approach claims that to have intelligence-fair assessments you must have clear (and preferably negotiated) standards and those SAME CRITERIA must be used to evaluate the work. Otherwise students feel fear that the criteria are less known or less objective than they need to get the marks they deserve.
I’ve keynoted, coached and facilitated leaders on this topic, and find that faculty and master students are really very satisfied after they negotiate the criteria, clarify the guidelines, and align guidelines and criteria – so they can go after their work without anxiety. Not sure if that makes the difference, and know I could sure learn lots in your classes.
There are so many courses on finances and economic policy that I would benefit from also. Yet this is my love.
What are your thoughts on creating rubrics with MBA students?
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Strange, when I got the feedback from my students over the past term after turning in the grades in December, they were asking for more quizzes based on reading, and that with out them, they will not or abandon the reading of text books today. I found that a bit odd as I stipulate at the outset of every course that graduate level learning is not a glorified book club, but it seems like they were wanting more of an undergraduate approach than what I would consider graduate level seminar style of teaching/learning. I'll have to overhaul my approach for the new term in the fall. I'll be curious to hear how your experience goes as we will most likely be teaching in the same term, albeit in different courses and locations.
I'm curious to see how you develop the text over the term, and I encourage the engagement of the students to assist in its development. When I was writing my book, I was regularly hashing out some particularly thorny concepts with the students and incorporating their input. You are wise to wait and publish the book after teaching it.
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Dan thanks for your vote of confidence. It’s taken a lifetime of global renewal work, and the fine support of folks like you for this entry point to materialize! And it launches this week, so your encouragement is so timely!
I’d heard the “move a graveyard” comparison (and actually included it in the text) that accompanies this new class. It still makes me laugh for the truth of it, though, and at the same time it makes me grown under the weights that shovels sometimes have been in my arms, as I tried to move a grave at a time over 30 years. Smarter people can me could have likely answered my own call for renewal, in half the time it took me to begin to get it right:-). Still, as each of us moves forward together – we can all help to impact broken systems, and that’s the joy of this MIX beginning.
Dan, I am running with your kind and supportive words about my own “energy and example as much as the more deliberate and conscious content of your course and its new methods will inspire others and change lives -- by changing the paradigm completely.”
Thanks Dan, I learn so much in the kind of safety linked to delightful challenge that you build innovatively, and those lessons added, to my 2-bits here gives me excitement that we can make a difference for the good of a wider community. How excited I am that you sense others will deeply benefit. Wow – that is more than a reward for the years of work and learning and testing these tools!
Along with your thoughtful hopes for this venture – I am keenly excited that this may be “precisely the kind of work where incremental changes during a learning process can result in major changes over time to traditional corporate culture.” You’ve made me feel so lucky to have a chance to help facilitate young leaders into pathways for discovery! Let the innovation begin!
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Ellen, this is a wonderful and provocative approach. As the head of a business school joked during a speech I head many years ago, "Changing the curriculum at a business school is like moving a graveyard." Very difficult! Your energy and example as much as the more deliberate and conscious content of your course and its new methods will inspire others and change lives -- by changing the paradigm completely. I'm so grateful for what I've already gained from our connection. I know others will deeply benefit. This is precisely the kind of work where incremental changes during a learning process can result in major changes over time to traditional corporate culture. Lucky students!
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The students will do selected readings and it would be good to give them progressive places to exchange their innovative ideas. Similarly, when they invite business leaders to attend their celebration of innovation, they could invite people who are open to new ideas - as that helps to gain them confidence they need to take their ideas to the next level.
When I worked with a leadership course in China on the Yangtze, I remember somebody invited one very critical and cynical gentleman and he saw his role as one of telling everybody what they did wrong and how he'd always done it far better. Yikes! We did laugh though, and certainly the leaders in training learned a great deal about the mind of a cynic.
This is the first time I crafted the course from scratch, and the first time I wrote the text to accompany the leadership course - so we are really quite elated with possibilities.
All to say -- you jumstarted my dopamine chemicals for adventure already and it doesn't start til Tursday. Thanks Deb, for your terrific ideas and support:-)
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Ok, I'm ready to attend! This sounds terrific, and quite an undertaking but with tremendous impact. Are you able to, for the initial class, select people from organizations where both the person & the organization are more favorably inclined to accept change back in the workplace? Of course this is (positively) stacking the deck so you won't get the same type of feedback, but would it increase the odds of success in the 1st round so that it would make others, who might not have been as willing or accepting of change, to enroll and therefore adopt? Not sure, just a thought. When I'm working with clients to start "creating a culture of innovation", we always stack the deck in terms of people & biz units/divisions/functions for a higher chance of success so that it's easier to get buy-in...
Let me know what I can do for you - this could make such a big impact!!
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