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Two unique formats help to showcase thought leaders at the 2012 Global Water Summit

Posted by Constance Ward on May 8, 2012 | Comments Off

Rome, Italy, known as the City of Fountains, was an appropriate host city for this year’s Global Water Summit, sponsored by the publication Global Water Intelligence. As the publisher Christopher Gasson pointed out in his speech to the CEOs gathered for a dinner the night before the event, Ancient Romans had aqueducts and viaducts — they even had a Goddess of the Sewers named Cloacina.

Rome’s historical tradition of being progressive is continuing, according to Jerome Douziech of Nuove Acque SpA, who explained that their water/wastewater concession had reduced energy consumption by 25% in ten years. However, a statistic they should be less proud of is that Italy consumes the most bottled water in the world — about 200 litres per capita.

Format #1 – A Pecha Kucha-style format with immediate feedback: Douziech was one of the five candidates for the Water Performer of the Year award (click here for a list of all Global Water Award winners). Each presenter in the session had the opportunity to show 20 slides for 20 seconds each, like a Pecha Kucha format, and then the audience used voting machines that showed the results immediately. The winner pictured here was from Armenia.

Award winners: Global Water Summit 2012

Format #2 – The “Rapid Roundtable” Session: Another effective conference format to show industry thought leaders in action was the rapid roundtable session. During the two one-and-a-half hour workshops, about 75 presenters held half-hour mini-roundtables on their area of expertise. Click here to read coverage of one of the other compelling presentations, this one on the future of toilets by the Gates Foundation.

Throughout the conference, a live Twitter feed of quotable quotes kept the audience, the media and subscribers informed about the content highlights of the event.

Are you as a thought leader finding the right conference venues, prestigious forums and creatively structured events to showcase your ideas? Ask, assess, then ask.

Up Close with Two Very Different Thought Leaders

Posted by Constance Ward on May 2, 2012 | Comments Off

Pope Benedict XVI in Rome, Italy, May 2012 It was a most unusual week. On Sunday I attended a service in St. Peter’s in Rome, Italy, and found myself standing quite close to Pope Benedict XVI as he left the service of ordination for some select new priests and headed to an upstairs palace window to say a multilingual blessing for the crowd gathered in Vatican Square.

Then on Monday night at the GWI Global Water Summit gala dinner, Dr J. Craig Venter was the keynote speaker. The first person to sequence the human genome and a renowned scientist who is now pioneering the development of synthetic organisms, he told the water industry leaders that this will be the ‘Century of Synthetic Life.’

You could say these two men are as different as chalk and cheese, and you’d be right. But what they have in common is that they are both respected thought leaders, even if you disagree with the views of one or both of them.

Will you ever command the respect due to the Pope or to the ‘Father of Synthetic Life’? Probably not. But you certainly can be better recognized as a thought leader in your own particular field. Ask, assess, then ask.

pope benedict xvi mobile phone video capture

From St. Peters in Rome, Italy: A low-fi view of Pope Benedict XVI from my mobile phone

Test Yourself Now: Take the Thought Leadership Self Assessment

Posted by Constance Ward on April 28, 2012 | Comments Off

At Thought Leader Zone, We frequently suggest that you ask, assess, then act; but remember, there is an absolute order to this process.

We have an easy way for you to get started. Click the link below for a quick 10 question survey designed to pinpoint where your thought leadership strengths and weaknesses lie and to help you assess where you need to be.

The results of the self-assessment are private and confidential. You don’t need to supply your name or other information, and we can’t see what you scored. Of course, if you’d like to assess your score in detail or learn more about what the results mean, just contact us. We’re ready to help with a free consultation.

Start Here: Self-Assessment – How good is your thought-leadership strategy?

How to Persuade Others to Persuade

Posted by Constance Ward on April 26, 2012 | Comments Off

Do you ever have to persuade others to persuade others? Then here are some modern hints for you from a very old source.

A friend sent me the link to a fascinating (well, fascinating for a rhetorician like me) article in Business Week called “Jay Heinrichs’s Powers of Persuasion” by Peter Heller.

Rarely do you read an article in mass media that mentions Aristotle, but this piece points out how the Greek philosopher’s teachings apply in today’s business world. One of the three stalwarts of classical rhetoric – along with Socrates and Plato – Aristotle taught that the three purposes of discourse were

to teach
to move
to delight

In a business setting, before writing a speech or even an email, it’s critical to ask yourself which of those three goals you are intending to fulfill and then analyze what would be the most appropriate way to do that for your particular audience.

Emphasizing the power of rhetoric (the science of argumentation and debate), Aristotle also taught about the three tools of persuasion:

ethos – appealing to the “character” or inner goodness of the audience member
logos – appealing to the rational, logical thought processes of the audience member
pathos – appealing to the emotions of the audience member and stirring up empathy or sympathy

Jay Heinrichs, the rhetorician featured in the Business Week article and author of Thank You for Arguing, says that the first tool, appealing to a person’s character or better self, is the most effective for persuasion. Logos, he says, doesn’t draw the audience in as much, so it’s harder to convince that person.

Convincing others – especially those who need to then persuade others – often takes a gentle hand. Someone once described a good rhetorician as a person who has the ability to “convince without seeming to argue and compel without seeming to urge.”

To do those things well, Heinrichs suggests you may need to change verb tense to future tense as that’s the “language of choice and decisions.” The past, however, focuses on “blame and punishment,” and the present is more about “belonging,” which is why using the future tense may be the better rhetorical approach.

If you’re interested in reading more about the topic of rhetoric in the workplace, two rhetoric websites that Heinrichs produces are www.figarospeech.com with some great current examples of persuasion at work and www.wordhero.org, which features his latest book.

Are these hints helpful? Have I successfully persuaded you to consider how rhetoric can help you in your daily work as a thought leader? Ask, assess then act.

What’s in a Name…or an Acronym?

Posted by Constance Ward on April 23, 2012 | Comments Off

What's hot, what's not

Erin McKean, founder of the Wordnik online dictionary, reviewed some of the new words and acronyms introduced during 2011 in the Wall Street Journal. Two of the most interesting “blended words” in business are “acquihire,” which describes the practice of acquiring a company mainly to get access to their human capital, and “solomo,” which combines social networking, local commerce and mobile communications.

She also described some popular new acronyms in 2011 and defined “acronyms” as a string of letters pronounced as words, like RADAR (for RAdio Detection And Ranging and now accepted as an actual word). These differ from “initialisms,” which are letters pronounced as themselves, like the IRS.

Two new acronyms this year that McKean noted in the article sound like familiar words: CARBS and CIVETS. CARBS (Canada, Australia, Russia, Brazil and South Africa) are the countries most affected by fluctuations in the price of commodities and CIVETS (Colombia, Indonesia, Vietnam, Egypt, Turkey and South Africa is a clever acronym because it stands for the next generation of young tiger economies.

Are you in touch with language trends when you communicate with internal and external audiences? Is your “voice” up to date and authentic or is it antiquated and academic? Ask, assess then act.

Leveraging (and Losing) Luck in Business: More About Your Professional Jar of Luck

Posted by Constance Ward on April 19, 2012 | Comments Off

In the previous posting Luck versus Experience: Pushing Boundaries in “Extreme Business”, I referred to the jar of luck and the jar of experience that thought leaders draw from when running an “extreme business.”

Venture capitalist Anthony Tjan recently wrote a blog for the Harvard Business Review that discusses “How Leaders Lose Their Luck,” which was based on his upcoming book called Heart, Smarts, Guts, and Luck. Luck can actually be cultivated in a business, he believes. He listed seven attributes and attitudes of lucky people in business.

Are you demonstrating the right attributes and attitudes to help you open your business life – your jar of luck – to serendipity? Ask, assess, then act.

From the Harvard Business Review article, How Leaders Lose Their Luck
While researching our forthcoming book — Heart, Smarts, Guts, and Luck — my co-authors and I made a fascinating discovery: a surprising number of company founders and business-builders attribute much of their success to luck. Almost 25% of those we surveyed came out as “luck-dominant” on the Entrepreneurial Aptitude Test we devised; many more gave luck at least partial credit.

As we dug deeper, it became clear that it was not just random chance that these people were talking about. Luck in business can be cultivated, through the combination of what we call a lucky attitude and a lucky network. A lucky attitude is a disposition open to serendipity and, well, luck. A lucky network is a wide network of relationships that may at first have little to do with any business objective, but somehow later come into great relevance. We can all think of an example.

Here’s the paradox, though. Once they have made it to the top — after they’ve reached high levels of entrepreneurial or corporate success — leaders often become disconnected from the crucial lucky qualities and relationships that helped get them there in the first place. By definition, the top is less of a journey and more of an arrival point. A newfound reputation is difficult to risk.

Photo credit

Luck versus Experience: Pushing Boundaries in “Extreme Business”

Posted by Constance Ward on April 17, 2012 | Comments Off

Jeb Corliss and Karina Hollekim are extreme athletes doing extreme sports. Jeb’s YouTube video is called “Grinding the Gap” and includes some amazing footage of the hang-glider’s maneuvering mountains and the narrow gaps between them. It takes experience – and luck – to survive such a glide.

Karina is a Norwegian base jumper or more accurately a B.A.S.E. jumper. B.A.S.E is an acronym the stands for Building, Antenna, Span (a bridge, arch or dome), and Earth (a cliff or other natural formation), which are the types of fixed objects these athletes parachute from – and often don’t live to tell the tale. Karina is still alive and a film about her called “20 Seconds of Joy” won the Best Documentary on Mountain Sports at the Banff Mountain Film Festival in 2007.

Karina is lucky – an extreme athlete who proclaims on her film’s website, “I don’t want to die – I want to live.” But she recognizes that she has to have both luck and experience to stay alive. It’s described as taking a piece of luck out of your “luck jar” and putting it in your “experience jar.”

In the world of “extreme business,” you as a thought leader also have a jar of experience and a jar of luck – are you using your experience to ride your luck? Are you pushing the boundaries inside your organization? Are you grinding the gap and “flying” close to danger but still succeeding? Ask, assess then act.

The Challenge of Clarifying Ideas – Part 2

Posted by Constance Ward on April 12, 2012 | Comments Off

Following up on the last blog on Franklin Roosevelt, I wanted to refer to a book about ideas that need clarification in the nation today. The book, Why Nations Fail, by M.I.T. economist Daron Acemoglu and the Harvard political scientist James A. Robinson, is getting a great deal of publicity right now. The authors wrestle with some ideas connected to political and economic institutions in the United States.

If you don’t have time to read the full book, Thomas Friedman recently wrote a compelling editorial piece that covered some of their key concepts. At the end of the article, he made the point that

“When one person can write a check to finance your whole campaign, how inclusive will you be as an elected official to listen to competing voices?”

Are you acting inclusively and allowing alternative voices inside your organization to be heard? Have you institutionalized the practice of considering points of view that differ from your own? Ask, assess, then act.

The Challenge of Clarifying Ideas – Part 1

Posted by Constance Ward on April 10, 2012 | 1 Comment

Franklin Roosevelt once said, “All our great presidents were leaders of thought at times when certain ideas in the life of the nation had to be clarified.”

If you substitute the word “company” for “nation” in Roosevelt’s quote, you’ll see how this concept applies to the world of business, not just politics.

Before you communicate your ideas, ask yourself whether you’re able to express your thoughts clearly and lucidly. Clearness of thought, particularly about fundamental issues inside your organization, is a prerequisite to communicating ideas in a compelling way.

Are you a great leader of thought at a time when ideas inside your firm need to be clarified? Ask, assess, then act.

Lean Forward, Lean Back

Posted by Constance Ward on April 7, 2012 | Comments Off

I recently heard an unusual comparison between two technologies: a computer and a television. A computer is a lean-forward technology, whereas a television is a lean-back technology. It made me think that management styles also could fall into those two different categories.

A lean-forward leader would tend to be engaged and actively listening, but a lean-back leader would be comfortably disengaged and relaxed. While the lean-forward leader would be ready to pounce on a new idea or trend, the lean-back leader would be contented to wait for the future to unfold and only then get on the bandwagon.

Picture the lean-forward leader driving a car while gripping the steering wheel and bearing down on the gas pedal. Now imagine a relaxed, lean-back leader steering the car confidently with one hand on the wheel. And then, as the car is rounding a curve, it hits a speed bump.

If you think of the car as a company, who would you prefer to have in the driver’s seat when the car hits the bump? Someone leaning forward or leaning back? What’s your leadership style? Ask, assess, then act.

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