Leadership Essay

This is a question we had to answer in no more than 3 pages with double spacing. 

What does leadership mean to me?

Introduction

To me leadership starts with a devotion to an objective, the confidence that we need to go somewhere, or achieve something for a certain purpose. Hence, leadership starts with a commitment. Personal values must also drive this commitment, if it doesn’t resonate with your personal values, you cannot carry your message through to other people, or perhaps you can, with difficulty. When we think of leadership we may think of leaders as powerful and charismatic people, however I believe that anyone can be a leader by committing to an objective and developing a certain set of skills.

People

Leadership is about interacting with people in such a way that generates a common understanding, goal, or vision. A leader typically promotes understanding, inspires and motivates people to act toward a defined objective.

Leadership is demonstrated in uniting people by clarifying values and affirming shared ideas. In many cases these components may already exist, just not being visible enough. By appealing to shared aspirations, it is possible to envision possibilities and create a common vision (Kouzes and Posner 2007).

From a ‘follower’s” perspective, having understanding and being motivated can both be annihilated by a realization that nothing allows them to act. Leadership goes with giving people the tools to do what they are inspired to do; connecting people and creating a network of resources, facilitating relationships, convey the required information or offering training where needed. People are then empowered, motivated to act.

An aspiring leader must also have sufficient competence in the area he operates in. He must also be someone who keeps people interested by always learning, experimenting, looking for ways to improve; challenge the current processes.

Once these actions are in place, a leader should always follow up and communicate with his team in a positive way. Consulting the team, being able to take feedback, criticism, and allowing people to take the lead when appropriate creates an inclusive culture, one of participation.

Attributes

For leadership to emerge, honesty must exist. Honesty must be kept between people as much as to oneself. An aspiring leader should know his strengths, weaknesses, and limits. These can be pushed in various ways; gaining experience and using personal development tools.

It is often said of leaders that they display charisma, making them appear confident and convincing, motivated and enthusiastic. A ‘not-so-charismatic’ person aspiring to lead may regard this as a disadvantage; however I believe commitment yields charisma.

The idea of devotion to an objective also entails that the aspiring leader understands that she/he is serving a purpose, and must not systematically bring focus on her/him self in the role of a ‘leader’.

I believe it is not necessary to worry about results if you are confident that you are doing the right thing towards the objective; that is what will ensure of the quality of the results.

 Moral considerations

During a conversation with colleagues, the idea of leading for right or wrong reasons was discussed. In the case of dictators, the same rules as those discussed before are applied; they could not get to their goal on their own. Dictators would have needed confidence and a certain ‘charisma’ to convey their ideas to certain people, who would then be willing to follow them. The followers were also empowered to take actions and saw benefits for doing so. Even in such cases, I would argue that these people would have to be honest to each other, however more complexity may arise in some situations; this topic is beyond the scope of this essay.

Conclusion

This brief description of behaviours suggests that leadership is created from an initiative to bring people together to achieve something, while ensuring everyone involved is truly happy to do so. As Dr. Carstedt points out, people are happy to take part in an undertaking that is meaningful to them. Leadership is present when sparking people’s will. Dr. Robert points out another key ingredient which is credibility: if people cannot foresee a meaningful benefit or result of their involvement, they will be much less willing to commit.

Hence, I believe in the idea that “leadership is a relationship between those who aspire to lead and those who choose to follow. It’s the quality of this relationship that matters most when we’re engaged in getting extraordinary things done” (Kouzes and Posner 2007, 24).

Bibliography

Kouzes, James M, and Barry Z. Posner. 2007. The Leadership Challenge. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Dancing post!

... nope, not dancing pole...

As you would know by the previous posts, we are learning salsa, tango and some other dances thanks to our south American colleagues.

I'm really enjoying it, and re-discovering the beautiful ways that we can express our feelings through dancing, involving such a variety of intricate moves and subtle signs that partners give to each other. Attitude is a key factor; the way you act converts the music, sound in the air, into movement. The world just seems at your feet when you connect these two elements harmoniously.

Latin dances are full of emotion; salsa for instance conveys excitement and joy, playfulness and complicity, all by the combination of rhythm, body connections, turns, changing hands...

Tango not including a set rhythm is a flowing, elegant dance where balance and connection between the partners must be seamless. Pace, eye contact, connection, holding, carrying... all are governed by the music’s message; anger, joy, sadness... The man very much guides the dance, giving space to the woman when appropriate. As Ricardo (our teacher) says, ‘the woman is a beautiful painting; the man is its frame’.

Dancing connects you to people, for you don’t always dance with the same partner. As a man I wouldn’t dance with a man (some do that and it's fine), but I can still observe other couples for inspiration, and continually learning makes the experience ever-more exciting. Even if you know every possible move, you can always strive to reach perfection – as this quest can never be fulfilled you may stay on it forever, as long as you have fun!

I consider Art at large as the way of expressing and creating emotions for yourself and others – poetry, singing, painting, sculpting etc... Growing up I always enjoyed pencil drawing, it was a time when I could break away from the world and give my very best on a piece of paper, however my mother would always comment: ‘not bad’, then I’d be angry and strive to do better (I believed my drawings were in fact very nice!)

Back to dancing, there is a quote from the poet Robert Frost saying that ‘Dancing is the vertical expression of a horizontal desire’. This can be taken in different ways, to me dancing and other art forms have been developed with such effort towards perfection and so often driven by love, that they can bring relationships to an incredibly high level of value.

In other words, I guess this (very!) short reflection is about taking time to develop skills, connecting deeper and generally add value to relationships in a world where you may cross the path of hundreds of people in a day while counting smiles on the fingers of one hand. You won’t dance with everyone in the world, but if you can get more people dancing in your area, I’m sure you will count more smiles. Perhaps this can also build trust that people are not always in for quick returns and that we can wait for bigger things, being worked on, to emerge...

I hope this all makes sense, now enjoy some tango and bachata - caution: both vids are extremely hot!!



Bachata link here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2cehkSxOLNA
sorry, "embedding disabled by request" on youtube.

Next post will be about our leadership essay! Have a good one!

Early October update

Hey guys, thanks a lot for the feedback by email, more 'Sustainability Stuff' coming soon.
In the last couple of weeks we've been busy with a lot of things, classes obviously, very pleasant get-togethers, conversations, playing soccer, yoga, found the indoor rock climbing centre on campus, and also partying - massive zombie pub crawl saturday which you can see pictures of on my facebook page, so much fun (specially on the streets)!!
I actually think I'm going to take a break from the partying this week end so I can catch up on some reading!

Sunday the 3rd an orchestra from The Malmö Academy of Music was at BTH (our university) for a concert. It was a Chord Orchestra (right word??), absolutely amazing, I guess more so because I had never experienced one live before. A couple of friends and I who like drawing actually planned to draw the orchestra while they played, so we got in early and go front seats... How foolish was I to even think about it. The level of precision, focus, coordination and grace of the players, the quality and beauty of the music left me feeling like a child who got the DREAM Christmas present he never expected to have... fantastic. At the first break we looked at each other and ditched our papers and pencils back to our bags: we can't draw right now, no way!!
There was actually a pleasant surprise even before they started playing; the orchestra was composed of the teacher, a renown Swedish conductor (named Matthew Trusler) and (more importantly) students; many of them were actually really beautiful girls!! Voyez plutot:

Yeah... front seats rock

Yesterday we had a full day with Dr. Goran Carstedt, former CEO of Volvo and Ikea (short biography here: http://www.bth.se/ste/tmslm.nsf/pages/a5bbf5cbc998e921c1256de3003aac43!OpenDocument). 

He was very impressive in a sense that he was humble, really speaking to us as if we were his friends and sharing what he had learned from his experiences. He talked about leadership towards sustainability and organisational learning. I really like what he told us, and will use some in the leadership essay we have due tomorrow, will post it then.

Here is the man, with a key slide

As far as leadership for sustainability goes, his talk was also very well set, the message coming out 'crisp and clear'. I cannot expose it here in a summary, but am most happy to share one reference he shared with us, a graduation speech from Paul Hawken: http://designthinking.ideo.com/?p=328. It is... very nicely elaborated, highly recommended even if you only read the first few paragraphs.

To finish, our photo freak colleague Kim Davis added some more Karlskrona photos to his album, great stuff:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/kimimago/sets/72157624809007991/show/

Sustainability stuff: PART II

In the last post I mentioned that human society was ‘having adverse effects’ on the biosphere and the climate. Sounds like a cheap/ ‘science class’ statement...? Here are a few facts on human activity.

One of the most striking realities is the fact we have domesticated almost all the land that can be, to some extent (cities, agriculture, pastures etc...). This graph tells us that about 35% of total land area has been domesticated.

Source for this graph and others in this post: IGBP ‘Global Change and the Earth System’

This map makes it easier to visualize the space we are talking about:

In brown are the areas in which at least 30% of the landscape is cultivated. You might think there is a lot of ‘untouched space’? Well obviously the Sahara is immense and useless to us both because it is infertile and there’s no rainforest providing services like creating oxygen or no wetlands to purify water. Australia is also in large proportion a great desert in the southern hemisphere, Siberia and the very north of America are extremely cold, not allowing for great human activity or biodiversity. Unfortunately we are starting to see some brown in the rainforest regions (Amazon and central Africa).

 So you can see how much of the land surface, of the entire planet, we are somehow controlling. We must also remember that for these spaces to be used, we need water; hence we are pumping water from rivers, water tables, lakes etc. Pumps can be very traditional (even artisanal) or mostly powered by fossil fuels (-> CO2). Also in a lot of places, chemicals such as pesticides and fertilizers are used, which end up in water tables. We are talking non-stop activity here, at all these places on the map, everyday, during every passing year. As a result, forests are cut down, fossil water (non regenerating water tables) are used up, over-exploitation of land causes desertification, exports of food (vegetables and meat, both containing water) means that “across the planet, 1 major river in 10 no longer flows to the sea for several months a year”. This is large scale, multi-effect activity.

Another major thing; fish stocks – the amount of fish left in the oceans. This graph shows that nearly 80% of fisheries are fully exploited today.

Global fishing has gone from 18 million to 100 million of metric tons/year since 1950. This is industrial fishing, happening so fast that fish don’t have the time to reproduce. A good representation of that can be found in sport fishing. Here is a photo of the ‘trophy fish’ at the end of a recent fishing day somewhere in Florida:

Here are the ‘trophy fish’ from the same place, same boat, in the 1950s:

Yeah... they were huge

These photos are taken from a TED talk by Jeremy Jackson, highly recommended if you can spare 20minutes to the guy: http://www.ted.com/talks/jeremy_jackson.html. He also explains the many implications of ocean problems caused by over-fishing, pollution and climate change.

An interesting figure; fish is the staple diet of 1 in 5 humans on Earth.

Next! We can talk about rain-forest destruction. Rainforest absorb a lot of CO2 – destruction of rainforest is also a cause of CO2 concentration increase.

Biodiversity loss; species are disappearing at 1000 times the natural rate. As said in the previous post, evolution since the beginnings of life has lead to a biodiversity in which each species has a role in maintaining the equilibrium of living conditions on the planet. Biodiversity is lost by habitat destruction, land use, toxic leaks, emissions, over-exploitation and more...

Back to the CO2 and climate change; remember all these water pumps around the world? Burning fossil fuels for electricity to power our industries, agriculture, cities, homes, ships (fishing, tankers, cargos, leisure..!!), planes... 24/7, never-resting, all around our blue beauty = Greenhouse gases emissions.

I mentioned 385ppm of CO2 in the previous post as the current level. This is equivalent to 790 gigatonnes of carbon in the atmosphere (actual quantity). As we keep burning fossil fuels, it keeps increasing; an increase nowhere near stopping for the moment. “If we wished to stabilise CO2 emissions at a level double that which existed before the industrial revolution (widely considered the threshold of dangerous change), we would have to limit all future human emissions to around 600 gigatonnes. Just over half of this would stay in the atmosphere, raising CO2 levels to around 1100 gigatonnes, or 550ppm, by 2100. This, incidentally, would be a tough budget for humanity to abide by, for if we use fossil fuels for another century, that equates to a budget of 6 gigatonnes per year. Compare this with the average of 13.3 gigatonnes of CO2 that accumulated each year throughout the 1990s (half of this from burning fossil fuel), and the projection that the human population is set to increase mid-century to 9 billion, and you can see the problem” (Tim Flannery – The Weather Makers). Another interesting figure is that 70% of all people alive today will still be alive in 2050...

Scientific evidence suggests that ‘the last time polar regions were significantly warmer than present for an extended period (about 125,000 years ago), reductions in polar Ice volume let to 4 to 6 meters of sea level rise (IPCC report 2007). I let you imagine what happens to cities like New York will do it that case, there are so many of them (I used to think the artificial islands in Japan – e.g. for airports – were clever...). An important point here, I’ve talked about AVERAGE temperature rise so far. At the poles, changes are much bigger (I will post more detailed numbers on a separate page soon). Other than sea level rise, the atmosphere affects everything on the biosphere because it is in contact with it, and the climate governs the season’s behaviour (so to speak), along with droughts, floods etc...

Now, anyone doing some hard thinking yet?? Those are SOME of the facts. I summarised and left out A LOT so that I can have a “bloggable” text. When I think of all this, I wonder what we are collectively thinking... we are simply wrecking the place faster than it can regenerate itself, in a long term manner and not realising the inter-connectedness of things. This means that we have less and less opportunity for people to ‘get by’!! = UNSUSTAINABILITY

SUSTAINABILITY:

Many researchers have come up with definitions so far:

Fuwa defines biophysical sustainability as preserving or improving the integrity of the life supporting systems on the earth. Hence the biosphere systems that provide clean air, fresh water, food (plants) etc... this is a more ‘nature’ oriented definition.

Solow defines sustainability as a matter of preserving the production capacity for a long future. Here it makes sense to interpret ‘production’ on different levels: as above, nature’s production of clean air (etc... fish for example!), and also our production of social ties, services, and other creations allowing us all to live AT LEAST a decent life with dignity (that's my take on it).

So where do we – YOU & ME – fit in this grim picture? The scale of it all may be overwhelming yet we are still doing well on a personal level (if you have power for your computer, access to internet and can read this you’re doing pretty well to me!). I said I’d elaborate social aspects in this post but with rectify my aim and talk about it later, along with sustainability principles.

As it is my first attempt to communicate sustainability content to an audience as broad as possible, I’ll appreciate your feedback. Is it too complicated, not precise enough, fuzzy etc?? Also there is continuity between the posts, some content may become clearer once you’ve read Part I. Many thanks in advance for your input!

Sustainability stuff: PART I

Hey all! Hope your week end has been as good as or better than mine!! Party Friday night, lunch with some friends Saturday, followed by a nearly 3h long salsa and tango class, today study and attended a Violin orchestra concert which was mind blowing! – More details on the social side later.

I wanted to share some of the great content we are learning here in the scope of our Masters of Strategic Leadership towards Sustainability. I may have talked to you personally about sustainability before, and I imagine that we would have gone in many directions, be it social, ecological, economical etc... Defining sustainability itself can be difficult. The course has put things in perspective quite well for us, I’ll try to convey the message as best as I can and hopefully you will get a good feel for it after ‘Part II’.

One of the most important things we know is that we, human beings, are biological beings; made of flesh and bones, and are part of an ecological system. This system is called the biosphere, a thin ‘living crust’ on the surface of the planet. It now boasts with an incredible diversity of living species that each provide a certain service. Like bees carrying pollen for some plants to reproduce, everything has a role. 

Humans have been around for about 200,000 years, but for us to be able to exist, the planet has gone through incredible events. For instance the presence of the moon stabilized the planet’s rotation on its axis, due to its mass and therefore its gravity effect. I didn’t know that before and was amazed! I thought all planets turned on a very stable polar axis, but they don’t. Mars turns in random directions, unpredictably! The stability of our planet alone allows complex life to be the way it is today. Complex life came from single cell organisms – ‘microbes’ – in the oceans. For over a billion years they produced oxygen by photosynthesis. The early atmosphere was not breathable, there was no ozone layer shielding life (outside the oceans) from the deadly solar radiation (UVs), and it was full of carbon. When enough oxygen had been produced, the ozone layer formed (ozone is a molecule made of 3 oxygen atoms). Later there was enough actual oxygen in the atmosphere that new forms of life could use. What’s so special about oxygen anyway?? I won’t go into the details but it allows cells to get A LOT more energy out of the food they take. Very quickly, thanks to the oxygen rich atmosphere, complex life developed. 

Source: Brendan Moore, BTH

This timeline shows how much time it has taken to get to complex life, including plants, animals, insects etc... On top, you can barely see anything for the Homo sapiens part, that’s because we’ve been around for ‘no time’ compared to what’s happened before us on Earth. The Chicxulub thing is the point where the dinosaurs disappeared.

There have been several mass extinctions even before the dinosaurs were wiped out, I won’t go any deeper in this, but most of them were related to climate, because climate is a set of physical conditions that allows life to exist on the surface of the planet. For as long as humanity has existed, surface conditions have been relatively stable. That was insured by the balance created by life – plants removed enough CO2 (a greenhouse gas that retains heat from the sun in the atmosphere) to bring the conditions allowing us to live, and other natural mechanisms (eg. Erosion, decomposition) maintained greenhouse gases in the good proportions to keep some heat too. So we live in an incredibly complex, balanced world.

By the way humans have evolved through some very cold times, the last ice age for instance ended just about 18,000 years ago! Ice ages happen periodically, according to the Milankovitch cycles which are variations of the Earth’s orbit around the sun. The orbit is elliptical but changes shape over time, which changes the Earths exposure to solar radiation (I will post more specific details another time). Anyhow, during cold periods the ocean can dissolve more CO2 than hot periods, and other mechanisms have insured climate ‘stability’ as mentioned before. Yes, most of the CO2 that goes into the atmosphere is dissolved in the oceans. The graph below shows the variations of CO2 concentrations (in red) in the atmosphere over the last 600,000 years. Concentration means how much of it is actually there compared to other components. It is expressed in parts per million (ppm), which mean that for a million other things, there is X number of CO2 molecules.

In the graph the 'low CO2' periods represent ice ages, and the 'high periods' are warm ones, like the one we are in now. As you can see the cycles are quite steady through time. 

Source: IPCC 2007, 446

However, we are today out of the bounds of the natural cycle, due to the systematic release of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere since the industrial revolution. Before then, the CO2 concentration was stable at about 280ppm; it is now 385ppm and keeps increasing. More CO2 means more retention of heat, which changes the climate, causes the oceans to expand (therefore sea levels to rise), affects natural habitats, biodiversity etc... To me a big realisation is that the CO2 increase and global warming represent the imbalance we have caused within the biosphere and atmosphere. It is the result of continuous, systematic extraction of resources, production, consumption and waste.

Source: NOAA Satellite and Information Service and IPCC

It is difficult to think that we had that much adverse effects on the planet, but there are now 6.7 billion people on Earth (only 2.5 billion 60 years ago!!), and the entire society strives for growth. More and more people are gaining access to modern life (in itself it’s not a problem), however we are still heavily relying on fossil fuels to respond to a growing demand for energy. Here is a good example of how the pursuit of growth becomes disproportionate and ridiculous over time:

Between 1880 and 1980 the world crude oil consumption grew at 7% per year. If growth had continued at 7%/year, it would have looked like this:

Source: Dr. Goran Broman, BTH

But after all, people just want to meet their needs. I will elaborate on social problems and get to define sustainability as clearly as possible in the next post, showing more of why we actually need to be worried too.

It's coming...

OK I tried to make a few small posts this week before I finally finish the big one (in progress), but it just doesn’t work!! I wanted to say a few words about our climate change assignment, some social sustainability stuff we’ve covered, parties, dance class, etc... But I can’t summarise each in a small paragraph. Synthesising everything is actually a really good way to pin-point what you haven’t fully understood and some details have been stopping me along the way, so indirectly you guys are helping me out, cheers!!