Okay, now this is getting ridiculous.

Or maybe not. Given all my harrumphing about leadership and courage and brand and yadda-yadda on these pages, this was downright eerie.

Rob over at BusinessPundit has this:

A Harvard initiative has brought us the Great Business Leader database. There is an interview with Tony Mayo, the project director, here. This project has given us a new buzzphrase - contextual intelligence. According to the project, it can make all the difference.

Contextual intelligence is the ability to understand the macro-level factors that are at play during a given period of time. For our study, we looked at six contextual factors that shaped business during the last century and continue to shape it in our present century: government regulation, labor, globalization, technology, demography, and social mores. Within each decade of the twentieth century, these six factors ebbed and flowed, coalescing in unique combinations. A business leader's ability to make sense of his or her contextual framework and harness its power often made the difference between success and failure.

Interesting. I'll have to chew on this for awhile and post more on the topic once I have digested it.

Hmmmm.... Contextual Framing. Contextual understanding. Leading by context. Sensemaking. Harnessing latent power. Sounds familiar.

Here you go, Rob, some food for thought.



You quantify these according to a super-hyper-top-secret approach and optional Dick Tracy Decoder Ring that I can't blab about here. What's the general idea? From our old (sorry, being revamped) website...

What is a conceptual framework? In our view it's not getting caught up in your knickers--keeping your eye on the big picture while not floating off into space. Most important, it's a means to guide thinking, careers, organizations, brands or bake sales to self-replicating and surprising results.

A conceptual framework is not a box to put people in or to get outside of. It's literally a frame and a frame only. It's a geometric and philosophical diagram of what you do, what you believe, what you want and what you will and won't do to achieve those things. As a leader or owner of an organization, it's what you create before anything else, because, in times of indecision or crisis or plenty it will be your only intuitive, impartial and sublimely practical partner. it will make decisions for you. It will manage while you're on vacation. It will hire the best available people and turn away the unacceptable and unmotivated.

It's a counter-intuitive concept at first glance, since many of us have been taught that management and leadership, or persuading and inspiring, or acting and achieving, are the same thing. Well, they're not.

Leadership is not management. Management is management. Leadership is not inspiring others. Leadership is guiding others to self-inspire. Simplicity is not brevity. Simplicity is clarity. And simplicity is not an elevator speech.

Elevator speeches designed to impart the essence that something is worthwhile and worth listening to are myths. They are the result of impatient people trying to appease other impatient people. An elevator speech, if there is such a thing at all, should be a powerful connective moment that has the receiver reaching for the emergency stop button between floors. And then, cancelling her "important meeting" to beg you to share more. Seldom do "elevator speeches" even get close to this level of resonance or relevance or coherence.

Feature advantage benefit will not do it. Flowery prose about your company's competitive advantage won't do it. What will? The only thing that matters. The most basic thing that our impatience does much to squelch, yet the one thing that business or anything worthwhile is fundamentally all about: your search to become the idealized version of yourself. Your, our, everybody's need to be "a bigger better me."

When you create a brand, or a workspace for your people, or a retail environment where consumers meet your products and your people, do these things intuitively answer: "How can this experience make me a better version of myself?" That's an important question, because the answer is what separates the winners from the losers in an increasingly complex age where companies and employees and consumers are growing apart, not closer together. In this context, an organization's shared purpose, it's brand, is DNA . And it is the most important thing you can discover, not create, for your company.

©2001-2003 Alchemy LLC

Double hmmm... I like how all these guys are thinking. Finally.

Now, should I sue or ask them for a job? Maybe I should just "go Trump" on our web guys tomorrow?

Yeah, that's it. Then I'll fire myself.

[edited 4-14-04]