My friend Sarah Jane Adams is undertaking research on leadership and asked for what people thought being a good leader meant. Here are 10 that I gave her on her Linkedin. They are in no order and are the first 10 things that popped into my head. Not saying I’ve managed to do all of them consistently, but I try.
Recognize every individual for who they are and what they bring to the table.
Acknowledge your own limitations.
Donât assign someone something you arenât prepared to do yourself if you were in their shoes.
Work with people who can think beyond themselves and who can look at the bigger picture.
Communicate clearly and succinctly. Jargon is for losers.
If you have a good team, being transparent with them is a good thing.
Do not put up with anyone who thinks they can hold you to ransom or to hold up your work. Replace the buggers.
Are you instilling love or fear? If itâs the latter, you havenât led.
Do what you love. Itâs easier to lead when you do.
I hope the media will say more because David MacGregor had packed so much into his 50-something years on this planet. Here is my tribute on Lucire. Not everyone can claim to have discovered Rachel Hunter, created the Family Health Diary TV commercial format (and others), founded the first online men’s lifestyle magazine in New Zealand (Emale, or to give it its official form, eMALE), conceived and co-founded Idealog, and won a heap of advertising, marketing, and magazine publishing awards in the process. A brilliant man who never stopped creating.
Big Tech often says that if theyâre broken up, they wonât be able to compete with mainland China.
Folks, youâve already lost.
Why? Because youâre playing their game. You believe that through dominance and surveillance you can beat a country with four times more people.
The level playing field under which you were created has been disappearing because of you.
Youâre the ones acquiring start-ups and stifling the sort of innovation that you yourselves once created.
If the US believes it should create more tech champions, or more innovators, then Big Tech needs to get out of the way and let people start the next big thing.
But we know this isnât about China.
Itâs about them trying to preserve their dominance.
We all know theyâll even sell data to Chinese companies, and theyâre not too fussed if they have ties to the Communist Chinese state.
To heck with America. Or any western democracy. Their actions often underscore that.
Without the innovation that their enterprise system created, theyâll increasing play second fiddle in a game that mainland China has played for much longer.
I already said that Chinese apps have surpassed many western ones, based on my experience. Through a clever application of The Art of War.
And if the world stays static, if all everyone is doing is keeping the status quo in order to get rich, and innovation is minimized, then itâs going to look like a pretty decaying place, sort of like the alternative Hill Valley with Biff Tannen in charge. Just recycling the same old stuff with a whiff of novelty as a form of soma. Pretty soon that novelty turns into garishness as a few more moments are eked out of a decaying invention.
Whereâs the next big thing, the one thatâs going to have a net benefit for life on this planet?
At the beginning of July I noticed Facebook had changed its reporting options. Gone is the option labelled âFake accountâ, replaced by âHarmful or spamâ. Itâs a small change that, I believe, is designed to get Facebook off the hook for failing to remove fake accounts: since you canât report them, then you canât say theyâve failed to take them down.
Except, if you choose âHarmful or spamâ, Facebook does acknowledge that your report is for a fake account:
Of course theyâre harmful. Harmful to us regular people who have to pay more and more money to reach our human supporters since the fakes command an increasing amount of fans on our pages, for instance. It isnât harmful for Facebookâs revenue or Zuckerbergâs wealth. So it really depends how you define harmful; one would imagine that a competent court would define it from a consumerâs point of view. Their new group policy, where Facebook has also given up against the bot epidemic, letting fake accounts join public groups, is a disaster. As you can see, the majority of new members to one group I overseeâand where I usually get tips to new bot accountsâare fakes. They’ve used scripts to join. It’s a bit of a giveaway when there are brand-new accounts joining groups before they’ve even made friends. The legit names have been pixellated; the fakes I’ve left for you to see.
It’s not as bad as, say, giving up on the people who elected you to run the country and letting COVID-19 do whatever it wants, killing citizens in the process. But it comes from the same dark place of putting people second and lining your pockets firstâMark Zuckerberg does it, Robert Mugabe did it, etc. Distract and plunder. In The Guardian:
Boris Johnson will revoke hundreds of Covid regulations and make England the most unrestricted society in Europe from 19 July despite saying new cases could soar to 50,000 a day before masks and social distancing are ditched.
On this, let our own Prof Michael Baker have the last word. Also in The Guardian, which I shared three days ago on Mastodon:
Baker said public health professionals were âdisturbedâ by the UKâs return to allowing Covid to circulate unchecked, and that the phrase âliving with itâ was a âmeaningless sloganâ that failed to communicate the consequences of millions of infections, or the alternative options for managing the virus.
âWe often absorb a lot of our rhetoric from Europe and North America, which have really managed the pandemic very badly,â he said. âI donât think we should necessarily follow or accept Boris Johnson and co saying: âOh, we have to learn to live with virus.â
âWe always have to be a bit sceptical about learning lessons from countries that have failed very badly.â
We really need to be confident of our own position on this. There are too many, especially those propelled by foreign forces with their friends in the foreign-owned media, advocating that we follow other Anglophone countriesâprobably because they lack either intelligence, imagination, pride, or empathy. I’ve spent a good part of my career saying, ‘Why should we follow when we can lead?’
When you see the utter dog’s dinner the British government has made of COVID-19, namely turning their country into a petri dish for mutations while they plunder the place with impunity, you have to wonder why many there still prefer these current Tories, when even Max Hastings and Sir Nicholas Soames don’t. Is it because Labour has no direction? That they don’t like Sir Phony Blair? The latest balls-up is this, by the Cabinet’s own Karl Pilkington, (now former) health secretary Matt Hancock:
I jokingly Tweeted (italics added): ‘Terrible casting in the Hancockâs Half-Hour remake. I can deal with the sidekick now being a woman called Sydney James but you never saw scenes like this with Tony and the original Sid.’ Not many liked the post so I assume I am getting a bit on the old side for the mainstream to get these references. And I thought I was doing so well matching the grey from the original titles and the Clarendon type.
The answer of why Boris Johnson still appears to be their preferred prime minister, how he can constantly fall upwards (reference below), appears to lie in Hancock, too, specifically Tony Hancock.
For those of us old enough to remember Tony Hancock’s sitcoms (note: I saw them as repeats), he played a version of himself, but one who was poorer, more outspoken and exaggerated. (Surely as he was voted Britain’s greatest comedian this side of the 21st century, enough of you must know what I am talking about.) But most of all, he lived in a world of self-delusion, that he was the cleverest man around and if only the right people would just see his genius. This is part of the same British comedy tradition as Alan Partridge and David Brent. As I said in a Toot on Mastodon tonight (inter alia): ‘Audiences sympathize with failures, and none have failed as much as this PM.’
When I was a kid and wanted to hit back at someone for being mean to me, my parents would often say that successful people, true leaders, would be 性æč, which is roughly akin to saying that one should rise above it. I would say that goes with nations as well: you can tell when a country is in a good state by the way its citizenry behaves, and online behaviour is probably a proxy for that.
As many of you know, my literacy in my mother tongue is just above the level it was at when I left Hong Kong, that is to say, itâs marginally better than a kindergartenerâs. And where I come from, that means age 3, which is already in the big leagues considering I started at 2Âœ, having passed the entrance exam, and had homework from then on. What I can write is in colloquial Cantonese, devoid of any formal structure that someone with a proper education in the old country would know. If youâre Cantonese, youâll be able to read what I write, but if your only idea of Chinese is Mandarin, youâll have little clue. (Bang goes the official argument in Beijing that Cantonese is a âdialectâ. It canât be a dialect if a speaker of one finds the other unintelligible.)
With Meizu having essentially shut its international forum, I decided to head to the Chinese one to post about my experience with its Music app, and was met by a majority of friendly, helpful people, and some who even went the extra mile of replying to my English-language query in English.
But there were enough dickheads answering to make you think that mainland China isnât a clear global leader, regardless of all the social engineering and online credit scores.
When I used Facebook, I had ventured on to a few groups where people simply posted in their own language, and those of us who wished to reply but didnât understand it would either use the siteâs built-in translator, or, before that was available, Google Translate. I still am admin on a group where people do post in their own language without much issue. Thereâs no insistence on âSpeak English, I canât understand you,â or whatever whine I hear from some intolerant people, such as the ones sampled below.
That makes you despair for some folks and one conclusion I can draw is that members of a country who demand such a monoculture must not see their country as a leader. Nor do they have much pride in it. For great nations, in my book, embrace, or believe they embrace (even if they fall short in practice) all tongues and creeds, all races and abilities. They revel in their richness.
Of the negative souls on the forum, there was the crap youâd expect. âWrite in Chinese,â âWhy is a Cantonese person writing in English?â âThink about where you are,â and âI donât understand youâ (to a comment I wrote in Cantoneseâagain supporting the argument that it isnât a dialect, but its own distinct tongue).
Granted, these are a small minority, but itâs strange that this is a forum where people tend to help one another. And it tells me that whether youâre American or Chinese, thereâs nothing in the behaviour of ordinary folks that tells me that any one place is more likely to be a centre for 21st-century leadership than another.
Iâve had far worse responses to Tweets, by a much greater proportion of people (the UK still stands out as the worst when I responded to a Tweet about George Floyd), but itâs the context. Twitter is, as Stephen Fry once put it, analogous to a bathing pool into which too many people have urinated, but a help forum?
Itâs the globally unaware, those who engage in casual xenophobia, who are intolerant of other languages, who are the little people of our times, having missed out on an education or life experience that showed them otherwise. They reside in the old country as much as in so many other places. The leading nation of the 21st century does not look like itâs one of the obvious choices. Future historians, watch this space.
Buzzfeedâs article, on departing Facebook staff who write âbadge postsâ, wasnât a surprise; what was a greater surprise was just how long it took for such news to surface.
Badge posts are traditional farewell notes at Facebook, and not everyone has had rosy things to say. One wrote, âWith so many internal forces propping up the production of hateful and violent content, the task of stopping hate and violence on Facebook starts to feel even more sisyphean than it already is ⊠It also makes it embarrassing to work hereâ (original emphasis). Buzzfeed noted, âMore stunning, they estimated using the companyâs own figures that, even with artificial intelligence and third-party moderators, the company was âdeleting less than 5% of all of the hate speech posted to Facebook,ââ a claim that Facebook disputes, despite its points having already been addressed in the badge post:
Thanks for the response. The data scientist's analysis took this difference between views and content into account and argued that their methodology was still sound. I've typed out the full part of their badge post detailing this for you and our readers. Any thoughts? pic.twitter.com/VvgxBYi8fC
The rest is worth reading here.
Meanwhile, this Twitter thread from Cory Doctorow, sums up a lot of my feelings and has supporting links, and it is where I found the above. Highlights:
The ones that joined to fix Facebook from the inside have overwhelming evidence that Facebook doesn't actually want to fix its problems, particularly disinformation.
Reality has a leftist bias, so any crackdown on disinformation will disproportionately affect conservatives.
When that happens, Ted Cruz gets angry at Zuck and drags him into the Senate. Plus, Zuck really enjoys the company of far right assholes, and his version of "listening to both sides" boils down to "I meet with Stormfront AND the RNC."https://t.co/7M4UWd0V95
I realize US conservatives feel they are hard done by with Facebook, but I know plenty of liberals who feel the same, and who’ve had posts censored. Even if Silicon Valley leans left, Facebook’s management doesn’t, so I’d go so far as to say right-wing views get more airtime there than left-wing (actually, also right-wing by anyone else’s standards) ones. On Facebook itself, during the few times I visit, I actually see very few conservatives who have complained of having their posts deleted or censored.
That isn’t a reason to shut it down or to break it up, but misinformation, regardless of whom it supports is. Inciting genocide is. Allowing posts to remain that influence someone to commit murder is. Facebook has proved over 15 years-plus that it has no desire to do the right thing, in which case it may well be time for others to step in to do it for them.
My partner Amanda and I are part of Medingeâs presence at Dutch Design Week this year.
Since Medinge couldnât celebrate our 20th anniversary due to COVID-19, some of our Dutch members, helped by many others, took the opportunity to get us into the event, which is virtual this year.
We had done a lot of work on Generation Co earlier in 2020, thanks to a load of Zoom meetings and emails. This takes things even further, but builds on it. The programme can be found here, and is titled âPutting the Planet First: a New Orientationâ.
The description: âInstead of thinking about the 3Psâyour challenge is to adopt a new perspective. Always put Planet first. Then people. Then profit.â
After signing up for free, you can head into our virtual rooms.
From the page: âOnly 21/10/2020, 10:00â13:00 lectures and livestreams from members of the Medinge Think Tank: a group of brand experts and visionaries from around the world whose purpose is to influence business to become more humane and conscious in order to help humanity progress and prosper. With international speakers who have worked on these rights and bring in the perspective from indigenous people who co-exist with the rivers.â
On Tuesday the 21st at 10 a.m. CET is Amandaâs presentation on the Whanganui River, which was given the rights of a legal person in legislation enacted in March 2017.
Amanda worked at the Office of Treaty Settlements at the time, so this is really her talk. I just set the laptop on the table, with a microphone generously lent to me by my friend Brenda Wallace. Then I edited it in video-editing software with all the skill of an amateur.
But thatâs the year of COVID-19 for you.
The way the talk came about was in discussion in 2019 with my colleagues at Medinge Group. The concept of legal rights on natural resources and indigenous rights came up, as did the case of the Whanganui River, which is known beyond our shores.
They had no idea Amanda worked on it, and proudly I mentioned her role.
From then on she was part of the programme, and it all came together last Friday.
In the talk, youâll see me on a much lower chair than her, propped up by a bag of rice that slowly sags as the recording wears on.
Thereâs only so much furniture at her Dadâs studio but it was the most comfortable place we could think of for the filming.
More important are the contents of her talk, which I thoroughly recommend. She worked really hard on the responses over a few weeks to make sure it was thoroughly rigorous.
Itâs followed by a talk from my good friend and colleague Sudhir John Horo. Pop over, itâs going to be a really eventful day in virtual Eindhoven.
