The other day I had the pleasure of meeting up with an old friend from my days in life insurance - a couple decades ago.

Jon and I have had many discussions over the years - a lot to do with innovation, creativity, leadership and life in general, so I knew he would provide some interesting insights into what his thoughts were on Responsible and Effective Leadership as we continue to gather thoughts from executives in preparation for the international conference - Responsible Leadership 2010 in November this year.

Jon began by explaining that you need to first think of where the responsibility is owed. This is not in a legal sense, instead it is an ethical framework that is much broader than religion or the economy and stretches across all communities.

"It is a 'Values Thing'..."

Leadership values suggest that words must be supported by actions. What you say must be reflected in what you do and Leadership is important in developing a culture that follows that process.

Jon explained a lot of things that he has learnt through his times working with various companies. Like the importance of alignment and working as a team.

You also need to value customers and communities in which you operate.

Commitment to high performance is an integral part of responsible and effective leaders. Not only does that demonstarte success that others can follow, it also enables security of peoples jobs, the values these people work by and enables profits and taxes that can then be re-distributed back into the community.

The value of development is also very important. This is a discussion we have had many a time whereby development leads to progress. With progress comes innovation, getting better whilst improving capabilities and skills.

It is going to be rare to have someone love their job for life these days - but leaders should give staff employability for life - no matter where they may end up so they can continue to support their families and those they love and care about.

A business that doesn't follow these principles will often cease to exist - or be taken over - leading to loss of jobs, instead of growing and employing more people.

We decided to not follow the conversation of the role of state versus welfare given the limited time we had. So instead Jon unveiled what he believed are the steps to a successful and responsible leadership.

Jon believes that looking at CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility) or Corporate Citizenship is far too narrow a focus when it comes to responsible and effective leadership.

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"The number one thing that companies can do is make a profit!" As they grow profit streams, more people can be employed, more taxes can be paid for re-distribution to the community, shareholders earn dividends which they can spend and or distribute back to the community in ways they choose.

In this way we do what we know best and make the biggest contributions to society. We know business much better that we know how to run a charity.

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Secondly, Businesses are important to societies fabric. Work is important to life. In the right environment and with a good quality culture it is rewarding and fulfilling - as well as challenging so you don't become bored. These are the rewards of work and a responsible employer will do this whilst keeping you safe, both with OH&S, but also physically, mentally - with health and wellbeing.

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Thirdly, businesses should be entrepreneurial. If there is no entrepreneurship, you need to get better to stay in business. If all businesses are going well - then there are more jobs for everyone and the businesses can CREATE VALUE... which is of benefit to

• Consumers / Customers
• Employees
• Shareholders
• Government and society (through taxes)

How much goes to government is a political decision and society selects the politicians.

The customer must receive good value for their money in order for the business to remain competitive and in business.

And employees must receive enough so they want to work.

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Fourthly , Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR).

Here comes the discussion of who is responsible for giving back and Jon believes that in truth, governments should be less bureaucratic and waste less.

With less charities we would also likely have better economies of scale - though these are subjects of other discussions.

Should businesses step in and support charities? Of course, though by working within the areas they have impact on. 

Firstly businesses should consider how they impact the environment and minimise waste. Not only is that better for the environment - it usually saves money in the long term - whilst adding to better business culture and relationships with customers, suppliers, shareholders and society. 

Aligning with shareholders who own the business is usually a good place to start - find areas with mutuality of interest and then work with ways to support society in those areas. 

One of the best ways businesses can do this is by sharing IP they have developed that has made them successful with charities and community organisations through in-kind support. 

As more businesses make it their duty to share intellectual capital with charities and society, they can better stand on their two feet, instead of relying on welfare. 

It is the old story. You can give a person a fish and feed them for a day or you can teach that person to fish and they can feed their family for life.

These should be the social ventures that help to get people out of welfare dependence. 

If a business takes on a person in need with an internship - they can learn, generate an income and support those they care for.

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Fifthly tied in with above is a focus on the environment.

Businesses must minimise environmental damage for our future generations. Often the true profit of business doesn't reflect true damage to the environment. 

A tax could change behaviour. Perhaps what is needed is a combination of a carrot and stick approach. 

At the stick end you have a tax that penalises businesses for damaging the environment. Though Jon is more in favour of a levy - so the money has to be spent on related purpose projects.

So, with climate, the levy could be spent on more renewable power options for example. 

At the carrot end you have subsidies for good environmental behaviour. So for example - buying more green power. Increase demand for sustainable energy resources makes them more competitive over time. 

The one concern with the areas of climate change etc is 'how is everything measured?' - the subject of another discussion.

Within these 5 areas described above, there needs to always be leadership that is measured by corporate governance. Business practices must comply with laws and follow a code of conduct that is reflected by responsibility. It needs to be part of the businesses culture. 

And one final thing that can have a large impact - avoid conflicts of interest.

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Adaptive Leadership and the Need for Reflection

Several months ago Australia acquired a new Prime Minister.

This was an extraordinary and unusual event for a first term government to depose an existing leader and elect a new one. The consistent reasons reported for this change of leader were the themes of a breakdown and a lack of confidence in leadership. The failure in leadership was not about any paucity of intelligence, or a deficiency in qualifications, or any immoral intentions, or an insufficient understanding of the challenges that needed to be dealt with. What was in limited supply were skills such as the ability to consult and listen; the willingness to seek and value broadly based experienced counsel; the capability to delegate and trust others; the aptitude to build a high performing team and the facility to create enough consensus to ensure that others were taken on a journey of change. There was no evidence of any reflective processes or incorporation of feedback mechanisms.

I have been reflecting that one of our often innate and immediate leadership responses in a time of crisis or uncertainty or chaos is to try to concentrate power rather than devolve it. This is because our natural human response is to try to control and command the situation when we are dealing with complexity, a high degree of uncertainty and challenging environments. What we should be doing instead is having high visibility, devolving issues to the experts in our team and making ourselves the ‘glue’ that holds it all together that allows the best choices and decisions to be made.

We can all learn from Kevin Rudd’s experiences and consider how we could become better leaders and what is that we need to personally do to develop and hone our leading skills. Wise leadership requires we expand our abilities to:

• act with courage,

• create, develop and use a team that is high performing that plays to individual strengths,

• strengthen our individual character based skills – integrity, positive influencing, communication abilities, wisdom capacity

• increase our communication abilities, and

• improve our processes of listening, reviewing, modifying, valuing feedback and executing.

When times are tough, the issues complex and the pressure feels relentless, it is important that we pay deep attention and part of this requires that we give ourselves time to reflect. One of the recurring themes that are highlighted about Kevin Rudd’s leadership was that he slept very little and didn’t have any personal space or time to consider the broader implications of what was unfolding.

Recently I did a course which examined key concepts held by the ancient Greek philosophers (including Socrates, Plato and other different schools of thought). One of the most interesting insights I had was no matter what the philosophical underpinnings, the ancients emphasized that to create and foster wisdom requires daily ‘spiritual’ exercises that build fitness.

The ancients saw that as fitness and daily exercises were required for the physical, they were also required for the ‘spiritual’. Spiritual exercises were not based in a religion or an ideology but were practices of reflecting, meditating, contemplating individual life impermanence, reading of texts, writing and engaging in robust discourse. All of this with the aim to facilitate the individual to interrogate reality, where appropriate challenge the status quo, question their own and group beliefs, thinking and motivations and act with wisdom.

The Ancient Greek view of spirituality was that individuals must embrace their own humanity so that they could be the most fully human, alive, aware, and wise, living in harmony with others to their fullest capability.

One of the best passages on the rationale for daily spiritual exercises quoted in book “Philosophy as a Way of Life” came from George Friedmann, who in 1942 wrote: “Take flight each day! At least for a moment, however brief, as long as it is intense. Every day a ‘spiritual exercise’, alone or in the company of a man who wishes to better himself….Leave ordinary time behind.

Make an effort to rid yourself of your own passions…. Become eternal by surpassing yourself. This inner effort is necessary, this ambition, just. Many are those who are entirely absorbed in militant politics, in the preparation for the social revolution. Rare, very rare, are those who, in order to prepare for the revolution, wish to become worthy of it’.

Here is a list of potential activities that can be used to create and build your menu of exercises to provide a means to reflect and assist our personal leadership journeys:

• Writing, journaling

• Relaxation, meditation and breath exercises

• Imaginative and mindfulness exercises

• Music – listening, chanting, playing instruments, singing

• Story making/telling

• Nature – connecting to nature through solitude, walking, reverence and living/being in nature • Painting, drawing, collage, image making – giving an opportunity for subconscious images to come forth

• Art making in any medium or any form that we are drawn to

• Poetry – reading, writing, reciting

• Dream work – activating and working with dream images and stories

• Sacred/Ancient texts – working with them in a deeply in ways outlined in this letter

• Movement of the body – yoga, dance, walking or any physical exercise which facilitates and allows you to feel an expansion of connection

• Intentions, Prayer and Blessings – not a necessarily a religious view of prayer, but one that suits you i.e. labyrinth walking, personal ritual, showing gratitude and creating intentions In my view adaptive and wise leadership requires a daily willingness and ability to broaden and deepen inner capacity and capability.

Such capacity and capability (foundation or platform building) allows and facilitates wise holding (internally and externally) of conflict, confusion, uncertainty, fear, opposing views/ideologies/forces, chaos and complexity so that the wisest path can be navigated which will allow the best resolution or an elegant solution to be created. The benefit for such discipline and attention accrues to us as individuals as well as our organizations.

Lindley Edwards July 2010

About the author: Lindley Edwards is the Group Managing Director of AFG Venture Group (www.afgventuregroup.com) and its various subsidiaries. The Group undertakes corporate advisory work which involves merger, acquisition, divestments, strategic consulting, fund raising and licensing for its client base of public and private companies based in Australia and in Asia. AFG Venture Group has a full or representative office in nearly every Asean country. In addition AFG Venture Group also has a joint venture with Gemini Carbon, the UK carbon trading company.

Learn more about Responsibility and Responsible Leadership and The Responsible Leadership Global Road Map project at www.TotalExec.com.au

Simon Haines | April 29, 2009

Article from: The Australian

JOHN Armstrong ("Transform into friends of society", HES, November26, 2008) says the humanities in Australia need to "transform themselves into friends of society" and to be "in the service of life", not just ofacademics.

A return to "core concerns" with notions such as civilisation would dissolve that false dichotomy of value, between the intrinsic or noble and the instrumental or practical, that bedevils university and government resourcing of the sector.

If such "important things buried within the disciplines" could re-emerge, our "economic anxieties would recede".

Like Armstrong, I went along hopefully to the speech by federal Innovation, Industry, Science and Research Minister Kim Carr on why the humanities matter for innovation and was not disappointed by his reference to the"intrinsic value" of works such as PeterTemple's Broken Shore and John Bell's latest Hamlet.

True, an intrinsic property is inward or essential, while value is conferred from outside, so the phrase is uneasy. Actually the dichotomy of value that concerns Armstrong is already buried in the 14th-century origins of the word, lying in conceptions of esteem on the one hand and of measurable worth on the other. But I took the minister to mean that such works of art are ends in themselves, rather like Kantian persons.

Reading them is therefore, in Armstrong's terms, a civilising activity. No problem there.

My main worry about the speech was from an advocacy point of view: its use of the word humanities. Carr is not alone in running the term together with creative arts and social sciences. I suspect many vice-chancellors, let alone premiers and other funding agents, have trouble distinguishing them.

But this is half our trouble and it goes to the heart of the dichotomy.

Our two sets of humanities and social sciences colleagues can tap into much more intuitive public senses of value than we can: one utilitarian, quasi-scientific, instrumental, Australian Research Council-friendly; the other deriving from still-powerful romantic notions of genius, of an unmeasurable, spontaneous, quasi-religious wellspring of creative vitality.

But what about the humanities, somewhere in the middle, in some no-man's-land between the creative and the scientific?

It turns out that even the Australian Academy of the Humanities hasn't so far produced a working definition of the humanities, although it is working on one now.

And it's in good company: the mighty National Endowment for the Humanities in the US doesn't have one either. (The ARC? Don't talk to me about the ARC.) Instead, conscious of variety and evolution, they have discipline lists. These usually include history, philosophy and (studies of) literature as the perennial central three (some remaining trace of the medieval trivium here), together with classics, linguistics, religion, archeology, and the history and theory of music and art. So maybe the humanities is just whatever all those people and their assorted humanistic fellow-travellers collectively do?

To return to Armstrong: Are there any core concerns here? We badly need to be able to articulate some. If we, of all people, can't say or show what they are, how can we expect any kind of public or private recognition?

The Germans have a word for it, of course, as Armstrong doesn't need me to tell him.

Even though the Geisteswissenschaften overlap significantly with our social sciences, we could usefully profess ourselves as scholarly custodians and promulgators of the knowledge or knowing activity of geist, the human spirit, human being in general.

For some more materialist types that's all a bit Hegelian, but presumably better than friends of civilisation, which would put them in mind of the worst excesses of Kenneth Clark, or Alec Hope's "chatter of learned fools". Yet the first humanists, in the Renaissance, thought of themselves as scholars of classical civilisation, as opposed to theology and divinity. Hegel's trick was to merge the two: knowledge of civilisation is knowledge of spirit.

Still too, well, German? What about turning to language itself (and an Italian)?

In an unpublished paper, Defining the Humanities, Anna Wierzbicka reminds us of Giambattista Vico's "fundamental distinction between studying things and studying people", his "New Science" being a precursor of Geisteswissenschaften and the humanities.

Crucially, it includes the study of ourselves as people, not as things. This is knowledge "from within", as Isaiah Berlin put it, knowledge of ourselves as made by ourselves.

Vico, a post-Renaissance humanist as much as a pre-romantic historicist, saw this kind of knowledge as an essential counterbalance to Cartesian and other scientific models of knowledge. He thought this self-making knowledge was gained specifically in language, and that language was itself fundamentally poetic and metaphorical - and hence also evaluative, estimative - before it was conceptual or logical. (Though the old struggle between metaphor and concept goes back to Plato and is itself deeply constitutive of human being in language.)

So can we venture a definition of the core humanities as qualitative rather than quantitative ("What sort of thing is this?", not "How do I measure this?"), evaluative rather than empirical ("Was this a good life/society", not "What happened in this life/society?"), seeking understanding rather thaninformation ("How was it to be this person?", not "who was this person?"), linguistic rather than symbolic, imaginative rather than scientific - but still methodical, scholarly and interpretative, still philosophical and historical, rather than artistic, creative or performative?

Yes, I know, a performance of Hamlet is also an interpretation; but I'm getting at the way Armstrong read an extract from Tolstoy in his second piece, or Carr used Temple and Shakespeare at the Press Club, or Iain McCalman used Joyce's Ulysses in an earlier landmark speech at the same venue. They were all working in the humanities as they did that, not the creative arts or social sciences: seeking a reflective and evaluative, a philosophical and historical, understanding of human being as constituted in language.

And why shouldn't we take this show on the road, as Armstrong suggests? Why leave it all to Carr? The audiences may well be receptive, not philistine. Clare Morgan and Ted Buswick, of the Boston Consulting Group in Britain and the US, have devised Poetry in the Boardroom, an exercise in which a poem is chosen by senior executives together with a literature professor as the focus for a boardroom discussion about complex decision-making, risk, leadership and power.

Evaluating a complex poem turns out to be a superb model for complex judgment.

The Lowy Institute for International Policy has encouraged speakers with humanities backgrounds to address its largely business and public service lunchtime audiences on issues such as the link between good manners and politics or between Milton's Satan and the received model of a terrorist.

The school of humanities at the Australian National University, with the Centre for Human Values at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, recently held a symposium on Measuring Thought in the Humanities (one outcome was Wierzbicka's paper).

Two of the best contributions came from IBM executives, who saw humanities people, able to combine analysis with imagination, as integral to the company's flexibility. Which raises another point about outreach: never underestimate our undergraduates. If you teach 100 a semester, you can reach 5000 minds in an average career, far more directly (as Socrates saw) than in your writing. Some of those are going to be in influential positions in society, but all of them could have richer lives as a result of what you are teaching.

Spread the word, I think Armstrong is saying; remember why this career chose you.

But remember, too, that if you mainly want to make society suspicious of itself, of its values, if you see that as your proper stance, then ultimately you must live with its reciprocating suspicion of you.

If on the other hand you mainly want to help it understand itself and its virtues and vices confidently, as a self-making community of value, as, indeed, a civilisation, then it still may not pay you much but at least it will recognise that you have some value, too.

Simon Haines is professor of English and deputy director of the Research Centre for Human Values at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Formerly he was head of the school of humanities at the Australian National University.

Source: The Australian

Source: TED

posted by Kermit Pattison

In recent years, corporations have turned to open innovation to solve their toughest research problems and reduce runaway costs of R&D. Now non-profits are beginning to see prize-based innovation as a strategy for humanitarian causes too, such as developing medicines to fight tuberculosis in the developing world, cleaning up oil spills or designing solar technologies for villages in rural India and Africa.

InnoCentive is the premier open innovation marketplace in the world, where corporations and non-profits post their toughest research problems and a global network of 160,000 solvers takes a crack at solving them for cash rewards. Non-profit challenges have grown to about 20 percent of the InnoCentive portfolio, up from virtually none only two years ago. In this Q&A, InnoCentive president and CEO Dwayne Spradlin explains why crowdsourcing is becoming a powerful tool for doing good.

--Is InnoCentive doing more in the non-profit space?

We’re doing more in the non-profit space than ever. We’ve all come here to change the world and you do that by helping organizations of all types really address their challenges. It’s particularly rewarding to work in a challenge realm that can impact human life like people’s ability to drink clean water in sub-Saharan Africa. We’re keenly interested in developing the non-profit sector. I think the data overwhelmingly supports this as an extremely powerful tool that foundations and philanthropies can use.

--People often talk about crowdsourcing as a way to tap technical expertise around the world. Is there also an untapped pool of altruism?

That’s absolutely the case. For our solver community, oftentimes this is the vehicle by which they’re able to contribute. They may not have the financial resources, but they may have the know-how to solve problems that no one else can. That gives them great satisfaction.

I’ll give you a wonderful example. We ran a challenge for the Oil Spill Recovery Institute out of Cordova, Alaska. They needed to find a new and novel way to get oil of the bottom of Prince William Sound from the Exxon Valdez spill. For 15 years, that oil has been sitting down there at the bottom of the ocean. They could get the oil off the bottom and onto the barges, but the surface temperature drops so dramatically that the oil almost solidifies and they can’t pump it through the barge system.

The solver ended up being an engineer out of the Midwest and he recognized a way to solve that problem using technology that’s fairly common in the construction industry. He recognized that was very similar to the problem of keeping cement liquid when you’re pouring a foundation. They used commercial-grade vibrating equipment on the barges to keep the oil fluid enough so they could process it through the system.

Anyway, the moral of the story is he won $20,000 for solving the challenge and he spent part of that money to fly himself to Cordova, Alaska because he wanted to meet the people from the foundation he was most directly associated with helping. He’s now made himself available to do work for them pro bono on future projects. There’s very little likelihood he would have had an opportunity to use his skills and resources in this philanthropic way without InnoCentive.

--How is a non-profit challenge different than a commercial one?

Certainly in the commercial space, we’re not able to be as open. Commercial entities oftentimes are running challenges anonymously. They’re very careful not to identify themselves for fears that they’ll tip their hands on business strategies. But in the not for profit space, the rules change entirely. It’s much more about openness. It’s much more about trying to drive collaboration and almost a planetary learning to drive something that ultimately benefits humankind in general.

The way we handle intellectual property between the two models is vastly different. In the commercial space, we’re typically transferring intellectual property and trade secrets. In the not-for-profit space, it really is much more about an open source form of licensing and putting into the public domain the learning and outcomes of the challenges.

--Does that make it easier to generate solutions in philanthropic efforts?

It definitely can be. We know our global solver community works on challenges for three reasons. First, they want to work on problems that matter. Second, they want to be part of an elite group of problem solvers that are making a difference. And third, it’s because of the money. Not-for-profit challenges, where there’s clearly some sort of a global good associated with it, tend to draw the attention of globally-minded solvers. That means that a $10,000 or $20,000 prize—which could be quite a bit for a not-for-profit to offer—is amplified dramatically because the dividends to the solver are not only the money but also for the

--When you post a challenge, how often are they actually solved?

We solve about 40 percent of challenges on network. But what’s interesting here, particularly when you’re looking through the philanthropic lens, is we solve well in excess of 40 percent of not-for-profit problems. It’s closer to 60 percent.

There are two reasons for this. The first reason is there is a fundamental desire for people to work on problems that are important to the global good. We get tremendous participation for these kinds of challenges on our network, which drives higher solve rates. The second reason—and I think it’s equally important—is the not-for-profits in general have not had access to the same kinds of innovation, research and development tools as commercial enterprises. With InnoCentive and prized-based innovation, these organizations can access to the same kinds of brilliant people around the world on demand that companies have for years.

Many of them are without question cutting edge innovations. But many of them are problems that have probably been solved before, and no one has recognized the easy applicability of an existing solution to that foundation’s or philanthropy’s problems. In the case of the Oil Spill Recovery Institute, that was not brand new science, that was an innovative application of existing technologies. You have to ask yourself: if they went 15 years without solving that problem, was it because they were just looking in the wrong place? I think for a lot of the organizations that’s the case.

--Oftentimes people in specific fields tend to descend into groupthink. When you flip a challenge to the outside world, do outsiders see things that people in the silo don’t see?

Innovation often happens at the boundary. The way we’ve structured innovation the last 100 years is probably insufficient to meet the world’s challenges the next 100 years. We’ve tended to build large, monolithic views of the world—if you want to solve a problem in chemistry, you hire a PhD from Stanford in chemistry. If that problem isn’t solved by that PhD or his cohort of 99 other PhDs from Stanford in chemistry, then it must be an unsolvable problem.

For the last 100 years, organizations have focused on building labs full of the smartest people in the world in a particular area. But after a certain amount of time, that silo effect envelops the organization and keeps the organization from fresh and entirely new perspectives on how to solve these kinds of problems. This prize-based model helps an organization to not only maintain that large internal organization of the best people in the world, but to augment it with up to 7 billion of the other smartest people in the world.

--Can you give us an example?

We do work with an organization called Prize4Life, which is focused on ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease. They wanted to find a biomarker to help identify and treat Lou Gehrig’s disease patients. They decided to run the challenge in multiple phases. The first phase was a prize to anyone on earth who can come up with a new and novel way of identifying where a promising biomarker might be.

What’s amazing about this was that solutions were coming from not necessarily from the medical field. The solutions were coming in from people they had never heard of before—computer scientists, experts in bio informatics who were suggesting algorithmic approaches, machine manufacturers who knew enough about the disease to say the following kind of approach might provide a highly predictive model of who might be susceptible to this disease. They were getting solutions from outside the establishment that ended up generating some of the most innovative thinking in that field in recent years.

They ended up paying out five winners, even though their initial intent was to pay out only one, because the solutions were so much more intriguing than anything they had seen. It’s the stuff happening on the boundary, outside the silo, that actually drives innovation.

--InnoCentive has been operating eight years. What has this whole experience shown the world about how you generate ideas?

Whether it’s for a commercial entity or a non profit entity, the business of business is innovation. We all need to move our agendas, we all need to take new products to market, and we all need to find innovative ways to improve the lives of people everywhere. One of the most exciting things to happen in the last decade has been the emergence of the Internet, connected systems, social networking—all the tools to allow hundreds, thousands or millions of people to work on problems that matter. We’re clearly proving the ability of this model to do more, faster and better than existing innovation models.

Remember, in this prize-based world, companies are paying predominantly for success. Most innovation efforts fail. With the monolithic view of R&D and innovation, one of the main reasons it’s insufficient is that you’re paying for failure. In this model, you’re paying only for the winning solutions.

--How are you continuing to build a better mousetrap when it comes to prize-based philanthropy?

Imagine challenges to which people can vote and contribute with their donations—prize amounts that grow in relation to public interest. This approach could focus millions of dollars and an extraordinary amount of attention in a way that merges free market activist philanthropy with the power of prizes. Perhaps 100,000 people could speak with their hearts, minds, and wallets to bring a challenge related to climate change into the forefront more easily than industry or government. We call the idea "crowd-funding meets crowd-sourcing" and could represent the truest form of democratic engagement in the process of innovation. This is an idea we are spending a lot of time developing and would welcome any thoughts and reactions from your readers.

--Do you see more interest in philanthropic or non-profit challenges during holiday season?

We do know that many of our solvers take time during the holidays to work on challenges and we’re particularly hopeful this year due to increasing number of philanthropic challenges on InnoCentive.com website. Again, many people are doing this for more than the money, they are doing it to make a difference. As true as ever this time of year.