Tag: umair

Lets change the world?

I won't change the world....

Its not unknown for me to say “Lets change the world”

But Umair Haque writes about why this kind of thinking drives him up the wall.

Auughhh. Like yours, my skin crawls every time I hear it. “Changing the world” is the latest nails on the chalkboard of Modern Life…an eye-rolling platitude…a gut-churner of a buzzword…shouted daily by thousands of high-fiving business-class wannabes in chinos…the worst invention since the Company Theme Song.

Ebola? Who cares!! Dude!! We’ll call them emergency Ubers!! Climate change? Buddy, chillax!! We’ll send the flood victims tacocopters!! No life? No problem!! Everyone can have robo-friends!! They’re better than humans!! Unemployment? Let them Taskrabbit!! Who needs a career…an education…a life…when you can be a butler?!

Don’t worry, bro!! Dude!! Don’t you get it? Digitally connected superwatches will rescue us!! They’ll make us transcendent superbeings!! The Human Condition?! We’ll app our way out!! Glory be!! Hallelujah!! Sing it with me!! We’re not just here to make money, we’re…changing the world!!

I do see what he saying and his examples picking out the mentality of Uber, Taskrabbit, AirBnB and Tinder is spot on. Maybe the creative disruption these guys hide behind isn’t really creative disruption at all?

Think about it for a moment. Do you think Travis from Uber or the creepily misogynistic guys from Tinder “changed the world” more than Jonas Salk…Galileo…Einstein…Gandhi…Martin Luther King? Do you need a brain transplant…and asoul? Are you a dummy? There have always been billionaires, tycoons, hucksters. But there haven’t always been polio vaccines…cosmologies…theories of relativity…civil rights.

Those are the guys who really changed the world, and to be fair they didn’t shout creative disruption as they went about it.

Changing the world isn’t helping your bro find a date by coding an app. Changing the world isn’t feeding your frat house by building a tacocopter. Changing the world isn’t turning life into a perma frat party by making a shot that can fulfill all your daily nutritional needs.

Things that make people…butlers, chauffeurs, maids, courtesans…debtors, sharecroppers, zombies…don’t change anything. They are merely more of the same. They redeem no human suffering; enhance no human potential; spark no human accomplishment; transform no human being. They do not create anything truly worthy that might not have been otherwise. There is no greatness, nobility, goodness, justice, or truth in them. There is merely the same old ugliness, cruelty, despair, and self-deception that has always been.

I think what I took away from everything Umair wrote is the empowerment for all. Even I have been thinking a lot more about the gotchas when using Uber and even AirBnB. Everything is tied into an algorithm, how fast you reply, how slow, collecting and build reputation for you which you have no control over. Even when you decide to opt out, its a problem. This is all without even looking at the overall societal, social and humanity effect of dancing with algorithms (as I am now calling it).

Its all very good critique and quite a bit to think about next time I shout “lets change the world!“

Why be a leader?

2011 Thought Leaders in Brand Management Conference

Gotta follow Umair Haque on Twitter… He posts a heck of a lot but theres some real gems. One such gem was his piece for Havard Business Review titled “How and Why to Be a Leader (Not a Wannabe)”

Leadership — true leadership —is a lost art. Leaders lead us not to a place — but to a different kind of destination: to our better, truer selves. It is an act of love in the face of an uncertain world. Perhaps, then, that’s why there’s so little leadership around: because we’re afraid to even say the word love — let alone to feel it, weigh it, measure it, allow it, admit it, believe it, and so be transformed by it.

Sounds fantastic… And I can almost feel my heart pounding. Umair then goes on to outline six ways to be a real leader… I won’t spoil it so here’s the top 3 which got me thinking

Conform — or rebel? Are you breaking the rules or following them? The rules are there for a reason: to stifle deviation, preserve the status quo, and bring the outliers right back down to the average. That’s a wonderful idea if you’re running a factory churning out widgets — but it’s a terrible notion if you’re trying to do anything else. And so leaders must shatter the status quo by breaking the rules, leading by example,= so that followers know the rules not just can, but must be broken. If you’re nail-bitingly following the rules, here’s the score: you’re not a true leader.

Talking my language, break the rules but cleverly. I’m all about the outliers and shattering the status quo. Been using the term “change the world or go home” a lot more around work. The status quo is so seductive and I see people around me wishing for things to be as they use to be alot more.

Someone asked the question the other day if things are better now or a while ago? Without a doubt its better now and it will get better still. This of course ties directly into the next point, vision or the truth…

Vision — or truth? The wannabe sets a vision. With grandiloquent gesture and magnificent panorama, the vision glitters. The leader has a harder task: to tell the truth, as plain as day, as obvious as dawn, as sure as sunrise, as inescapable as midnight. Vision is nice, and many think that a Grand Vision is what inspires people. They’re wrong. If you really want to inspire people, tell them the truth: there’s nothing that sets people free like the truth. The leader tells the truth because his fundamental task is that of elevation: to bring forth in people their better selves. And while we can climb towards a Grand Vision, it’s also true that the very act of perpetually climbing may be what imprisons us in lives we don’t really want (hi, Madison Ave, Wall St, and Silicon Valley). Truth is what elevates us; what opens us up to possibility; what produces in us the sense that we must become who were meant to be if we are to live worthy lives — and one of the surest tests of whether you’re a true leader is whether you’re merely (yawn, shrug, eyeroll) slickly selling a Grand Vision, or, instead, helping bring people a little closer to the truth. And if you have to ask what “truth” is (newsflash: climate change is real, the global economy is still borked, greed isn’t good, bankers shouldn’t earn a billion times what teachers do, CEOs shouldn’t get private jets for life for running companies into the ground, the sky really is blue) — guess what? You’re definitely not a leader.

This one really brings things home for me. Vision is important but the truth is much more important. We’re not kids, protecting us from the truth in the end. As Haque says, tell us the truth and in time we’ll respect you for it. I specially love the newsflash at the end.

Archery — or architecture? Wannabes are something like metric-maximizing robots. Given a set of numbers they must “hit,” they beaver away trying to hit them. The leader knows their job is very different: not merely to maximize existing metrics, which are often part of the problem (hi, GDP, shareholder value), but to reimagine them. The leader’s job is, fundamentally, not merely to “hit a target” — but to redesign the playing field. It’s architecture, not mere archery. If you’re hitting a target, you’re not a leader. You’re just another performer, in an increasingly meaningless game.

Metric-maximizing robots! Indeed… Its not about hitting those targets, its about redesigning the playing field. A true leader will change the world by changing the nature, landscape or architecture. I remember when Google talked about changing the patent process then they bought Motorola mobile and they shut up about that. Shame! Could have been a leader, but instead opted for the same goals as all the others.

I would conclude that having a business model which relies on year on year profit growth is maybe the constraining element, but were talking about leadership not business. If your treating both like the same, maybe your a wannabe and not really a worthy leader?