Are leadership and management really two sides of the same coin, or do they demand entirely different skill sets? Uncover the profound distinctions between these roles as we dissect Seth Godin's thought-provoking speech at the Nordic Business Forum. We'll revisit historic milestones like Henry Ford's assembly line and McDonald's operational model to understand how management prioritizes efficiency and obedience. In stark contrast, leadership's essence lies in fostering innovation and spearheading proactive change, beautifully exemplified by LeBron James' transformative IPromise School.
Discover Viktor Frankl's compelling vision for a Statue of Responsibility to balance America's iconic Statue of Liberty, signifying the deep connection between freedom and responsibility. Supported by figures like Stephen Covey and sculptor Gary Lee Price, we delve into how true leadership inspires and guides rather than dictates, challenging the constraints of traditional education systems designed for compliance. Finally, we'll share a treasure trove of resources, including books and programs, to further your leadership journey and invite your invaluable feedback to shape future episodes. Tune in for a rich exploration of management versus leadership, responsibility, and the promise of true innovation.
Are leadership and management really two sides of the same coin, or do they demand entirely different skill sets? Uncover the profound distinctions between these roles as we dissect Seth Godin's thought-provoking speech at the Nordic Business Forum. We'll revisit historic milestones like Henry Ford's assembly line and McDonald's operational model to understand how management prioritizes efficiency and obedience. In stark contrast, leadership's essence lies in fostering innovation and spearheading proactive change, beautifully exemplified by LeBron James' transformative IPromise School.
Discover Viktor Frankl's compelling vision for a Statue of Responsibility to balance America's iconic Statue of Liberty, signifying the deep connection between freedom and responsibility. Supported by figures like Stephen Covey and sculptor Gary Lee Price, we delve into how true leadership inspires and guides rather than dictates, challenging the constraints of traditional education systems designed for compliance. Finally, we'll share a treasure trove of resources, including books and programs, to further your leadership journey and invite your invaluable feedback to shape future episodes. Tune in for a rich exploration of management versus leadership, responsibility, and the promise of true innovation.
Hello everyone and welcome to Success Secrets and Stories. I'm your host, john Wendeloski, and I'm here with my friend and co-host, greg Powell, greg.
Speaker 1:
Hey, everybody yeah.
Speaker 2:
So what are we going to be talking about today? Today's podcast? I would like to talk about the difference between leadership and management, leadership and management, and while researching this podcast, I found a very interesting speech from YouTube from Seth Golden, from the Nordic Business Forum in Sweden on January 24th of 2018. It's such an interesting and obscure way of finding something that I thought was really interesting. His speech, his presentation, I should say, was really well done, and I'm only going to touch on part of it that I think is relevant to today's subject of leadership and management and how he defined it as really being different.
Speaker 2:
When he wanted to try to talk about management, he was trying to get examples that would make the most amount of sense, and his best example was Henry Ford, and Henry Ford would probably be the best application of that robotic approach to making a car back in what, 1908. And Henry Ford came up with the assembly line mentality. But Henry wasn't alone. Henry had some help, and one of the interesting consultants that were identified with that process was a gentleman by the name of Frederick Wilson Taylor, and he was an American mechanical engineer and his approach was how to come up and improve the efficiency of the lines and was considered one of the first management consultants. An interesting side note is that his book from 1909, the Principles of Scientific Management it actually won awards in 2001 from the Academy of Management, voted as the most influential management book in the 20th century. And the secret here is Frederick Taylor was talking about the idea of a job that an obedient person can do, create value and could get paid a lot. The most important word in that description is an obedient person, because it's a repetitive action that has quality because it's repetitive. Now, another example of repetitive that I thought was an interesting highlight of his of Seth's was McDonald's. And just like in the US, there's over 13,000 locations, they're in over 5,000 cities and McDonald's works basically because it's cranking out the same product all the time During a bad time or a slow period. Mcdonald's isn't interested in people being innovative and maybe selling spaghetti or seeing what else would possibly sell. They're really not designed for creativity. Now there are a couple examples. I'm just going to digress because I find it humorous.
Speaker 2:
I have a little McDonald's background. The Filet-O-Fish sandwich was where innovation happened, but that individual that was a manager at a McDonald's took a heck of a lot of grief because it was a very good presentation of something that not McDonald's the corporate system didn't didn't think up on their own. They had the Hawaiian burger and I won't tell you it was. It was based on a pineapple and lettuce and the secret sauce. So it obviously didn't go that well and they begrudgingly accepted this innovation. But they're not designed for that. They're working with the obedience, the obedient worker, the obedient leadership, I should say the obedient management, because if it was leaders, they would have been listening to this guy on any different ideas that they might have.
Speaker 2:
So the other concept that Seth is talking about is it works until it doesn't, and you can think about the world and the changes that they've seen in terms of how management fails because they didn't have the ability to look forward. Great examples would be, like the newspaper industry, that they're really doing it and it's all working really great until it doesn't, or things like how many people really use travel agencies and how that really don't use travel agencies. How about the 4 million truck drivers? Right now they can see Ian Musk coming up with the driverless car and it's just a moment in time before trucks that can be able to move interstate commerce without a driver. Is it going to happen? I believe it is, but right now there's a bunch of truck drivers that are hoping it doesn't. A bunch of truck drivers that are hoping it doesn't. How about the planet Earth? And as weather changes, it works until it doesn't. If we don't know what we're doing with the planet, it's going to change, whether you like it or not.
Speaker 2:
That's the challenge in terms of leadership Leadership, trying to make a difference. Management is, after it all goes awry, sitting in the circles saying what happened. I'm pretty sure that people that are in companies like there are stalwarts, like Kodak and how the film industry just vaporized before their eyes, still had a lot of assets, had a lot of equipment, had a lot of equipment and no customers. So you have to be able to. You're not going to manage your way out of it. You have to lead, and leadership has to be able to challenge that process. It kind of is all wrapped around.
Speaker 2:
A concept that greg and I have talked about a lot is responsibility, and responsibility and authority are different things. Authority is what managers do and get. They get the authority. Leaders take responsibility and, and one of the interesting terms that tells the difference between a manager and a leader is basically. The leader will look at the team and say come with me Now. You have to do the following I want to achieve this goal, come with me Now. When I went through this process, I was trying to look for a good example and, greg, maybe you can talk about this example. I think it's a very good application, but it needs a little background.
Speaker 1:
Thanks, john. So we're going to talk about LeBron James, but not LeBron James, the Los Angeles Lakers on the basketball court getting ready for the next season. We're going to talk about LeBron James, founder of I Promise Schools. So think about a world where low income often equates to undereducation. Basketball star LeBron James' biggest off-the-court goal has been to change the face of urban education. We all know he's from Ohio right Grew up in Akron.
Speaker 1:
In his first year of his operation, students at James I Promise School in Akron, ohio, posted extraordinary results in the first set of district assessments. So in fact, 90% of students about 240, who started the school year at least one year behind grade level met or exceeded their expected growth in math and reading. The school also provides a family resource center where parents can get their GED prep work, advice, health and legal services and even get groceries. Now this is a cost of about eight million dollars that LeBron James and legal services and even get groceries. Now this is a cost of about $8 million that LeBron James from his basketball side and endorsement side funds. But he actually had a plan, he had a vision and let me take it to the next level here with Mr James. You don't think about LeBron James as someone who was a highly educated individual. He's got the street smarts, of course, but he is not necessarily an authority on education. So he's taking responsibility to help his hometown, but he's got support to make that happen.
Speaker 1:
Now the great Viktor Frankl author of man Searching for Meaning in 1959, said that one of the problems with the US is that we have a Statue of Liberty but we don't have a statue of responsibility, and this is the reason why People have trouble stopping being managers and starting to be leaders. We're talking about the difference between management and leadership In Man's Search for Meaning. Frankl states freedom, however, is not the last word. Freedom is only part of the story and only half of the truth. Freedom is but the negative aspect of the whole phenomenon, whose positive aspect is responsibleness. In fact, freedom is in danger of degenerating into mere arbitrariness unless it is lived in terms of responsibleness. That is why I recommend that the Statue of Liberty on the East Coast be supplemented by a Statue of Responsibility on the West Coast.
Speaker 2:
Now this is the part that I thought was really bizarre when I was researching it. There is a statue discussion. Why don't you talk about the statue of responsibility?
Speaker 1:
Thanks, john. So we like to try to paint a picture for you. Sometimes when we're looking at an illustration, I don't think I can paint this picture for you very well, but I'm going to try. So Frankl's concept for the statue grew in popularity and drew the affection of somebody we were real high on Stephen Covey, author of the Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. Covey teamed up with Kevin Hall to push this idea of the statue forward back in the 1990s and eventually commissioned a sculptor by the name of Gary Lee Price, who came up with the concept of two hands clasped together. Right for that responsibility sculpture design. The design was approved by Frankel's widow and they began looking for a location to construct it. So the first choice was California, the West Coast, right To have it in a Pacific Ocean harbor to complement the Statue of Liberty position which, of course, we have in the Atlantic Harbor in New York. However, the state regulations proved to be difficult to navigate.
Speaker 2:
What Surprise, there's problems getting something built in California. What?
Speaker 1:
So there's problems getting something built in California. What so? The governor of Utah, Spencer Cox Steptoe, suggested a location in his state for the project, which was approved in 2023. But construction has not yet started.
Speaker 2:
John. So I just thought that that was such an interesting story. So I just thought that that was such an interesting story, but about as far as micromanaging and dictator and those things of doing it because I said so, there isn't the leadership approach of I'm going to take the hill, why don't you come with me. So a little bit of what Seth was trying to talk about was a manager would normally be saying things like do it because I said so, which, when we were dealing with Dr Durst, there was that micromanager or the dictator. That that whole element of not asking he's telling a leader is really the direct opposite. It's pulling people together, let's go over there and then he turns around and sees who's going to come with that. That's kind of the essence of what you're talking about, when somebody understands the role of leadership, when somebody stuck in terms of telling and one of the interesting examples that Seth gave was meetings, boring meetings, meetings where you know the ones where no one has eye contact with the presentation, that they're all pretending to sit there in their nice colored clothes, pretending to pay attention for hours in a row. And why do we go to those kinds of meetings? This is the question he posed. If all it was was just trying to talk about the facts, why not send a memo? Because they're waiting out everyone else on who's going to take responsibility for the subject? That's usually the bottom line. No one wants the responsibility in that meeting, so they pulled everybody together and then it's a waiting game to see who's going to finally raise their hand. Unfortunately, you see it in meetings that happen all the time. Want another example? That's kind of interesting.
Speaker 2:
Seth goes on and talks about the effect that school and how school is designed was really first designed by industrialists, and this is the part that I don't know if it's 100% agreeable, but I can understand his point of view. What he's talking about is, especially during the years with Ford, the mentality that they were looking for compliant factory workers. So 100 to 150 years ago there was this effort that it was too hard to get. Somebody who was independent thought that are working on the farm or in the woods and doing interesting things and developing and creating things with their hands. I mean, if you want to see creativity, look at what some farmers do on developing tools on their own. The inventiveness is there all the time. It is too hard to take that mentality and find a way to push that person into a nine by five job in a dark room and doing it over and over and over again. They're looking for obedience and compliance. You're not being tested on a school kind of environment once in a while. It's regimented, it's done at half, it's done at the end. There's quarterly tests. It is meant to show conformance. That's the challenge.
Speaker 2:
So we invented a way that school can get people ready to be basically capable of doing this repetitive work, Not really teaching them to be innovators, not really interested in trying to solve problems, being able to perform. That is the nuance that Seth was trying to talk about. So if you figured out how to take responsibility and this is kind of like the hard part that he was highlighting that you were taught actually in school not to take responsibility, what could go wrong? And then they're going to blame you. So His point was that innovation is repeating the process of being wrong and learning from it and taking responsibility to do it again, and those words I've heard from Steve Jobs and really Ford and some of the great inventors, of being able to do it wrong. Edison is probably the most famous of doing it wrong so many times. He got it right that innovation is just having the ability to see it to the end and then understand when it's being achieved. Greg, I think you have an example of leadership, too, that we should talk about.
Speaker 1:
I do, john. So this is a back in my past. Sales and marketing organization in a company, the consumer package company, and these two groups between sales and marketing were arguing. Each one was pointing at the other, saying the reason for the lack of success of new product launch was because it was somebody else's fault. And the marketing guy said hey, sales guys, if you would get out there and sell, we'd be great. The sales guys said hey, marketing guys, if you give us some good support, marketing support for the product, we'd be fantastic. So they went back and forth, and back and forth.
Speaker 1:
So the CEO, who was in charge of both marketing and sales, brought the two groups together and he'd already talked to the marketing and sales managers and this gentleman was really there to provide leadership. He was there to provide coaching. He was there to say hey, let's grab this hill and take it. This is the hill I want us to take. Are you with me? And he went on to say that the enemy is not our sales team, it's not the marketing team. The enemy is outside these walls. So let's quit our bickering, let's take that first step to being successful with this product, relaunch and meet those expectations we were looking for and I'm happy to say he was inspirational. He was a leader. People bought into it. They climbed the mountain and were able to be very successful in that product relaunch. So he didn't just manage that, we had other people do that. He was leading Right, he was coaching, he was mentoring.
Speaker 2:
He was leading right, he was coaching, he was mentoring, chief Operating Officer, coo it's almost like you're by design in his title. He was applying the skills that got him into that position of leading. Stop the bickering, let's take the hill. I mean, that's a great example. And what's interesting?
Speaker 2:
is Greg and I have talked a lot about MBR and kind of the basis of what we've found fun doing the podcast and Dr Durst made the point that MBR isn't unique. Everybody has elements of MBR that they've dealt with, that they've dealt with and Seth was just supporting that concept that he understands responsibility and he's showing different examples. I still have to laugh about California and finding a spot for the responsibility statue in Utah, which is the furthest west they could get with the responsibility statue. I find that really interesting. So if you like what you've heard on this podcast, my book is available on amazoncom. My ebook is available in bronze and noble. This podcast is available on what you're listening to, thank you. It's also available in a lot of other popular formats. Dr Durst, his books and his MBR program is available on successgrowthacademycom and you can email me at wandos75.jw at gmailcom, and you can also get a hold of Greg Greg.
Speaker 1:
I can be reached at gpowell374 at gmailcom. Yeah.
Speaker 2:
And the music has been brought to you by my grandson. So we want to hear from you. Drop us a line, and the more we hear and the more we understand, the more it helps us give you something that you might want to hear. Well, thanks, greg.
