Organisational behaviour & leadership
WinSocially Weekly
No deep dives this week! Instead, reading an article on leadership got us thinking about the modern titans of tech and how their egos and sense of destiny are mirrored by their organisations.
Nimble Leaders
This HBR article has interesting things to say about leadership styles and injects a welcome note of realism into the topic.
Specifically, the way leadership types vary according to the position within an organization.
we identified three distinct types of leaders. Entrepreneurial leaders, typically concentrated at lower levels of an organization, create value for customers with new products and services; collectively, they move the organization into unexplored territory. Enabling leaders, in the middle of the organization, make sure the entrepreneurs have the resources and information they need. And architecting leaders, near the top, keep an eye on the whole game board, monitoring culture, high-level strategy, and structure.
In our experience, from tech to politics, we’ve found that rigid notions of what leadership should “look like” have a debilitating effect on organisations.
In particular, there is an obsession with the Great Man Theory.
Universal History, the history of what man has accomplished in this world, is at bottom the History of the Great Men who have worked here. They were the leaders of men, these great ones; the modellers, patterns, and in a wide sense creators, of whatsoever the general mass of men contrived to do or to attain
As we often point out, this has been especially poisonous to the tech industry, with the likes of Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg running unchecked within their own organizations while building their own mythos.
For the generations who grew up with likes of Steve Jobs and Bill Gates as part of their cultural narrative, this idea is very seductive but creates a dangerous environment given the power and resources available to these new leaders.
technology hero worship tends to distort our visions of the future. Why should governments do the hard work of fixing and expanding California’s mass transit system when Musk says we could zip people across the state at 760 miles per hour in a “hyperloop”? Is trying to colonize Mars, at a cost in the billions of dollars, actually the right direction for future space exploration and scientific research? We should be able to determine long-term technology priorities without giving excessive weight to the particular visions of a few tech celebrities.
Facebook is fine(d)
A flashback to our April 28th newsletter, where we wrote:
There is no better insight into the current difficulty of regulating social media than the fact Facebook can make provision for a fine up to $5 billion.
This week, there was news that Facebook had reached a settlement and accepted a fine.
The fine is for mishandling users’ personal information and is the biggest by the federal government against a technology company, eclipsing the $22 million imposed on Google in 2012.
When news of the fine broke, this was the result:
Here is the fundamental problem — organisations like Facebook are imbued with the DNA of the “great men” who run them.
For those who believe that their destiny is to change the world, mere fines are simply the cost of doing business.
The largest FTC fine in the history of the country represents basically a month of Facebook’s revenue, and the company did such a good job of telegraphing it to investors that the stock price went up.
Here’s another way to say it: the biggest FTC fine in United States history increased Mark Zuckerberg’s net worth.