Democratizing Thought Leadership | Michele Zanini

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Democratizing ideas to scale thought leadership

An interview with Michele Zanini about democratizing strategy and thinking to unleash the power of the individuals in an organization.

Today’s guest is Michele Zanini, the co-founder and Management Director of Management Lab. He is co-author with Gary Hamel of the best-selling book Humanorcracy a thought-provoking book about organizational change. The book will help you scale the creative ability of each person in your organization and break through the bureaucracy that often kills innovation.

Michele discusses why many organizations continue to operate with a top-down bureaucracy heavy structure that is outdated. Then, he explains that those who embrace change and enable the power of each individual in the company are having record-breaking production and innovation.

In addition, we discuss the struggle of creating and transmitting thought leadership ideas internally across a company with thousands of employees. Afterwards, Michele explains how enabling the voices that are often not heard, both inside and outside of an organization can be part of the solution.

Also, Michele and Bill talk about the need for a clear and solid strategy and how it will be impossible to create compelling thought leadership without it.

If this deep conversation leaves you wanting more, pick up Humanorcracy and for a limited time you can get a four-hour free course filled with tools and tips that will help you create a resilient, creative, and daring organization!

Three Key Takeaways from the Interview:

• Thought leaders should consider an approach that unleashes the creative potential of each individual in an organization.
• Thought leaders will need to develop a clear and well thought out strategy if they want to cultivate persuasive thought leadership.
• Thought leaders in an organization should reach out to the voices that are often not heard to find new points of view that are likely valuable and overlooked.

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Join the Organizational Thought Leadership Newsletter to learn more about expanding thought leadership within your organization! This monthly newsletter is full of practical information, advice, and ideas to help you reach your organization’s thought leadership goals.

And if you need help scaling organizational thought leadership, contact Thought Leadership Leverage!

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Transcript

Bill Sherman Hello. You’re listening to Leveraging Thought Leadership. I’m your host, Bill Sherman. How do you keep good ideas flowing freely across an organization? Well, it’s not easy. Sometimes it’s feels like the organization itself has been designed to slow down ideas and trap them within functional silos, geographies. If you want your ideas to reach scale, then you need to create an organization where both people and ideas flourish. That’s why I invited Michele Zanin to join me in today’s conversation. Recently, McElwee and Professor Gary Hamil co-wrote a fantastic book that has set me thinking deeply. It’s titled Humanorcracy Creating Organizations as Amazing As the People Inside of Them. Michael is the managing director of Management Lab, and he’s focused on reinventing management for the 21st century. Michael has a deep history as a consultant working with both McKinsey and Rand. So in this conversation, we’re talking about overcoming bureaucracy and unleashing people and their ideas. Ready? Let’s begin. Welcome to the show, Michaele.

Michele Zanin Thank you, Bill. Delighted to be here.

Bill Sherman You’ve written what I think where is one of the must read books for people who are practicing thought leadership within organizations? This year, you and Gary Hamill and the concept of Humanorcracy and unleashing the power of individuals with the organization I think is absolutely essential as we look at the concept of thought leadership. Maybe in a couple of sentences there. Two. What is the problem with bureaucracy as it is in centralization? And how do Humanorcracy as a concept come about?

Michele Zanin Okay. Yeah, I’ll keep this brief, but the premise of the book is that the tools, the mechanisms, the methods we have for bringing people together collaboratively and developing new knowledge, new insights management, in other words, is is a very important technology for social technology, as we call it, is what allows us to leverage all the capacity that we have as individuals at scale. And that’s led to this tremendous increase in productivity over the last 250 years. And it’s fantastic. However, it’s also desperately out of date because bureaucracy, as you mentioned, is still the dominant paradigm on how we manage that is we have a formal hierarchy. We have big leaders appointing literally leaders. You know, since making this kind of centralized direction is kind of comes from the top down and all of that, you know, that that would have been it was indeed a good paradigm, magic paradigm to have when you had very slow pace of change, when the employees were illiterate and all of that. But now the world has changed dramatically. So we are in need, desperately need for a management upgrade, a management model upgrade, if you will. And so in the book, we talk about, you know, we get into the case like, why do we need this change? We also provide some alternatives, companies that are indeed able to be large and very complex, but at the same time very bureaucratic, you know, very lean in terms of their bureaucracy. And then we get into the practical details of how do you know, how do you get from here to there? Right? Because you might buy the argument that we need to change. You might even buy the argument that we need to you know, there are there are alternatives. But then if you’re in a traditional managed organization, how do you make this change? It’s not as easy as cutting and pasting someone else’s model.

Bill Sherman Absolutely. And you made a point early in the book that the and something I didn’t know about the etymology of the word bureaucracy itself is it comes out of the early 18th century with a French government minister, Jean Claude Marie Van Song, that it translates as the rule of the desk. And as I think about it in organizations, there is this impulse to if there’s a new function or a new task to be done, let’s stand it up, a new role. And this is where I think it becomes absolutely relevant to the world of thought, leadership and heads of thought leadership. We have many people who are taking on the title of thought leadership within the last three years, 18 months, even this year. Right. And they’re there because someone typically in the C-suite has spotted a need that the role of overseeing thought leadership was not something that was met. And so there was an opportunity to say, we’ll put someone in charge. And so you have a sponsor on the Sea Committee or this is CSO as a sponsor and then a new head of thought leadership, whether they’re coming from executive communications, they’re coming from strategy, they might be coming from marketing, and they’re saying, What is my lane and how do I not replicate what is being done elsewhere? And right. And that creates a fundamental challenge when you’re looking at an organization where you have 20, 50, 100,000 employees, how do you manage something such as thought leadership ideas themselves, right? And the transmission of ideas across the organization internally, let alone externally. So you point out that people are much more resilient, creative and passionate than individuals. How do you unlock that resilience, creativity and passion?

Michele Zanin Yeah. So let me just maybe comment, Bill, on something you said about this tendency to essentially create new roles whenever a new challenge comes up. And that is a very, as you say, bureaucratic tendency. You know, we need a new desk in charge of this. That’s how we that’s how we kind of create order and out of chaos and how we have discipline and focus. And it’s not just that with thought leadership. I mean, literally, the, you know, the number of sea level roles that have has emerged over the last couple of decades is astounding. And some of it is rebranding. So going from sea turtle to chief people officer or going right head of chief revenue officer. So, you know, it’s kind of you could kind of say, well, whatever, that’s the same thing, new name. But there are indeed lots of other new roles. Chief Transformation Officer You know, Chief Knowledge officer, Chief Diversity officer, you know, and so on. And it’s understandable, right? I mean, these are new priorities. But what we try to do in the book is just to show that you can still solve a complicated problem and a new problem, an ambiguous problem, without necessarily creating a whole new organization to crack it. And often that’s the wrong way to do it because you are, you know, still taking this very kind of elitist and kind of top down idea of how do you solve the problem, which is you put someone in charge, you create a plan and then you kind of Ramadan on the part of everybody else working in the organization. And often that’s that just doesn’t lead to a very good outcome because A, you know, there’s only so much that the person at the top in this like little organization can really understand and focus on. So can they really solve the problem by on their own? That’s number one. Number two, as you say, you know, they end up being one silo out of many silos. And so, you know, it gets into kind of competition. And even though you’re trying to create order and discipline by creating a new organization, ends up creating more complexity and like, who’s really in charge of this, you know, and so on. And third, there was a lot of resistance because people are just being told, these are the people that have all the answers. But actually, I don’t believe that I know as much as they do or, you know, I wish they had taken some of my input into account. So and I think this is a problem that applies to all kinds of functions, including thought leadership, where, you know, we in the book, we talk about that, you know, the fact that leadership, the concept of leadership so that maybe, in fact, thought leadership. Right. So leadership is itself as a as an idea compromised by this bureaucratic frame where somehow when we talk about leaders, we almost implicitly, you know, almost automatically think of people at the top of the organization. So we confuse leadership with positional, you know, position in the hierarchy. Right. And when you say leadership team, you don’t typically be in the C-suite. And I could argue that not if the conception of leader my definition would be someone that, you know, catalyze a positive impact in your organization. Right? That you could argue that a lot of the people at the top are necessarily leaders and they’re often not very much of a team either. Right. So if you think of thought leadership and said more, you know, and in a more distributed way, you might get to a completely different answer and a different way of managing that, or at least harnessing that across the organization. You know, we can get into that if you want.

Bill Sherman Well, and that’s one of the things that I’ve seen and heard from some organizations where a CEO says, how do we make thought leadership, everyone’s responsibility in some way across the organization rather than a centralized function? And this sense of distributed ness and getting closer to the customer, empowering people on the front lines, I think relates very much to some of the things that you talk about in the book.

Michele Zanin Yeah, Well and I think there I would say two things. Thought leadership is often something that is in support of a strategy, right? So you have a particular set of priorities. And so now we need to kind of beef them up with thinking ideas. And that could be helpful to, you know, within the company and outside. So as long as you have a very kind of stale, unclear and differentiated strategy, you’re not going to have very compelling thought leadership either. And I think and we think there’s a whole chapter around openness where we talk about how do you make your organization truly open to ideas and insights from inside the company, you know, from all across all boundaries internally and then externally. And we advocate a process where you really are diverging a lot and you are eliciting a lot of input and then you’re converging. So you still have a direction, but it’s done in real conversations with, you know, employees, customers and so on, where you really are opening up yourself. And so, you know, in a way like you have truly. Deep thought leadership. I think you have to have a complete, you know, very open strategy, a process that gets you to a very differentiated point of view. And so so you got to democratize sense making, right? And so unless you do that, you’re not going to get very unique and differentiated thought leadership. And then once you have maybe that common point of view and a shared point of view around the future and priorities for thought leadership, then I think you also need to democratize, you know, knowledge, creation, knowledge building, right. And finding ways to do that. And to me, the way that happens is you need to give people the skills, you know, so you equip them with the tools, right? You can’t just say, well, you know, come up with new ideas and have them have them to me, you know, schedule your thought leadership time on Wednesday night, 9 a.m., you know, because that’s just not how it works, right? So but you can train people, you know, to generate new insights, new ideas. We have an example in the book from Adidas where we ran it Innovation Academy with 3000 people where the whole point was applying new lenses to see the world in general ideas as a result of that. And, you know, if you train people in those kinds of methods and tools, they’ll come up with differentiated ideas and which then you can kind of extract and build and so on. So you have to train them, you have to give them the time and the opportunity to do so, and then you have to give them the incentives, right? So what is it that you know, what’s in it for them, right? Why would they contribute to these kinds of ideas and insights if it’s not really something that they’re kind of praise for evaluated on? Right. So to me, like just going back to your question, you have to open up the strategy process, the sense making process so you have a better and more distinctive point of view. And then you’ve got to open up, you know, the you know, once you have that, you’ve got to open up the, you know, the thought leadership process itself that the generation by being an infrastructure for people to do that right across the firm.

Bill Sherman So one of the things that strikes me is in the book, both you and Gary talk about the concept of principles over practice. And when you’re talking about just democratizing sense making or knowledge creation, it feels very important to equip people with principles rather than a checklist. Can you give an example of how that brings to life? I’m thinking, for example, some of the stories that you tell from Nucor.

Michele Zanin Yeah. So Nucor is the largest steel maker in the United States, is the most productive, one of about 27,000 people working there. And you know, the they’re organizing a set of mini mills and fabrication plants across the U.S. These they have about 80 of these. And the company was molded in the way. It kind of works now by Ken Iverson in the late 60s. And he created the company explicitly with the understanding that the genius of the organization is distributed and it mostly resides at the bottom, Right. And so he set out to create an organization where, you know, the collective intellect and capacity of everyone was constantly stretched and then leveraged. And so the way they do that and I’ve been to a couple of these mills, you have people who are very skilled, but they’re all like, you know, mostly working class, you know, blue collar workers. But they have an amazing capacity to change production processes, to tinker with, changing that, optimizing the flows of these complex machines that they operate and so on. I mean, they even have the ability to, you know, contract out with the power company. You know, they use electric furnaces, so a lot of electricity to melt the scrap metal and turn it into steel. So they contract with the company themselves. You know, there there’s very little centralized, so there’s no purchasing department. But they do collaborate on purchase, you know, pulling their buying power across these plants. Interestingly, they don’t have a technology function yet that the most innovative technology that steel, you know, the most technologically bent steelmaker in the industry and you know, the CEO says, you know, it’s not quite right to say we don’t have a technology, a CTO. We do. And it’s 27,000 strong. Everybody acts like a little like a mini CTO. And, you know, as I said, you know, the way they do that, it goes back to what I was mentioning earlier. So they have you know, they have deep training in kind of process improvement and technology and so on. You know, there’s a lot of cross-training that happens. So, you know, even in, let’s say you are in, you know, in in one part of the melt shop, you might go and train in another part and you get paid for that. You know, you’re taking off the production line, but you still have the incentive to do that. You’re also trained very deeply because there is this expectation that if you do your job well, you won’t get fired. So the people that really have long tenure, which is kind of crazy in a very cynical industry like steel making most of the time other producers when there’s a down cycle, the shed staff and Nucor doesn’t do that. They just cut pay and hours for everyone. So, you know, everybody tightens their belt. So they have a lot of training. You know, they pull knowledge across these plants that operate independently. But they have these things called best marketing visits. So and they do thousands of these a year. So let’s say you need to install a new piece of equipment in a plant. You know that another plant did that. You call up the other plant, they’ll come and spend a week with you to tell you how they did it. And it’s a particularly complicated job. They’ll help you do the installation so they rotate kind of talent and knowledge in a very kind of seamless way. Again, you know, very kind of decentralized peer to peer more than kind of top down and formalized. But it’s really, really effective. And, you know, the other thing that they do, which is really remarkable given the fact that everybody is, you know, compensated and this is an important part, the compensation is based on productivity of your work unit and it’s weekly. So beyond a certain capacity, you know, there’s a bonus that you get for producing more steel. And so and there’s no limit unless you change the equipment. And so what that means is that you’re constantly looking for things to change and improve. And the paradox is also that they’re the most aggressive user of automation technology. And it’s, you know, it’s the employees themselves that want automated, you know, task automated because, you know, they don’t want to do things that are not productive because their compensation depends on being maximally productive and they know they won’t lose their job. Right. So that that’s really important. The other thing that they do is they train everyone to think like a business owner so they everybody knows their what working capital is, what return on assets are return assets. Statistics are posted in the cafeteria wall. Everybody knows what that is. And so, yeah, so they’re empowered, they’re motivated, they have all the opportunities. And it’s through that kind of alchemy that you get like a deeply knowledge intensive organization in an industrial context where, you know, all the sense making and knowledge building is done in a very decentralized way, but in a way that eventually might, you know, amounts to to more than just like this loosely connected, you know, you know, some of the parts, it’s more because there is a lot of sharing that happens.

Bill Sherman So building on that, I think where this goes, really. Eisley with thought leadership is that there are many organizations when they get large, they become incredibly siloed. They do not know what they know in each other zones or in each other’s functional areas. And so there’s a inefficient flow of knowledge within the organization and ideas, let alone to the top on strategy and vision. Right. Things become disconnected here in the example from Nucor. There’s an encouragement in alignment to understand and to do that sense making. It’s been baked into the DNA. If you are enjoying this episode of Leveraging Thought Leadership, please make sure to subscribe. If you’d like to help spread the word about the podcast. Please leave a five star review and share it with your friends. We are available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and all major platforms as well as at Leveraging Thought Leadership dot com.

Michele Zanin Yeah, and where it makes sense to coordinate, you know, everybody has incentive to do that because there’s the culture that enforces that. But then also, you know, especially, you know, they don’t have many management leaders, but the few that they have, you know, people are compensated on the kind of performance of the entire firm. So the silos there are not very strong. I mean, they say we compete. No, they say we operate independently. Well, we compete collectively. And so another example is automotive, you know, the automotive industry. So they were nowhere in automotive in terms of supplying the Toyotas, the Hondas of the world, because the steel that they make didn’t used to be high grade enough to fit in a car. You know, those good for like steel beams and so on, but not for like grooves and shafts, you know, gearshifts and so on. But they made a concerted effort to get into automotive because they’re hitting their quotas. They’re almost like, you know, triggering market power investigations by the Justice Department being overly or really kind of dominant in a particular sector. So they decided to get into automotive. But the way they decided it wasn’t like they had an automotive czar at Nucor headquarters, which is, by the way, like this nondescript building in outside of Charlotte. You could even tell that it’s like a Fortune 500 companies walking in. It’s like 100 people. So very, very small. So there’s no one like in charge of this. But rather they had all these plants saying, we need to get into this industry that’s like our next growth opportunity. And they coordinating with each other and saying, okay, well, you may be focused on this kind of product. I focus on this other product. We’ll hire metallurgists and they’ll coordinate. And so they found a way to kind of crowdsource, you know, the strategy. And now they’re being fantastically successful and more so then, you know, had they kind of done it the other way, you know, with an automotive czar, I mean, you obviously still need capital and so on. That’s the role of HQ that you need to support this. But it was amazing to me how they were able to kind of bring everyone together around this really big opportunity in a in a more in a more kind of decentralized but yet disciplined way.

Bill Sherman Well, and I think this works very, very related to ahead of thought leadership not in a top down way, but keeping the pulse of the organization. What are front line salespeople hearing that customers want, need? What are problems are they trying to solve? What’s coming from research? You have to. And one of the things that I’ve said is be very comfortable moving fluidly across the organization to understand where ideas are and help evangelize the ones that are worthy of time, effort, resources and attention. And you have to a lot of people we in the distribute the creation and distribution of ideas get self-conscious and go yeah, I could talk about that or I could write about that, but maybe it’s not important. You’ve got to get people beyond that self-consciousness and get them to that step to sharing the ideas so that the good ones rise to the top.

Michele Zanin Yeah, well, and the question for Alicia would be for me. You want to do what A leader do you want to follow? Do you want to basically take someone else’s menu of ideas and then try to kind of put some interesting content around it? Or do you want to be at the forefront And if you will be at the forefront, you do need to open this up very broadly. And you know, yeah, even go outside. But you know, inside the firm, there’s just the premise of the book is that we squander so much capacity examples of how we’re organized and thought leadership could help amplify that and leverage some of that, right? I mean, I’ll give you one example from a retailer. We had we helped them. They have 60,000 people across a bunch of countries. And the reason employees are having. Zillions of insights with the customer. Right. But there’s like no way to capture any anything. Any insights emerging from those interactions with the customer. So, you know, we help them create this this platform that allows people to share their insights. So we post questions and they can then they can then respond to them and it’s done, you know, at the store level and then geographically and so on. And they just generated a ton of, you know, they had a very large group of people at headquarters who are supposed to come up with the, you know, the solution set or the themes that they needed to work on and so on. And they were just constantly surprised by, you know, the things that they were hearing. And some of them were validation, but all of them were like completely using things that they would not have ever heard because there’s only so much you could capture at the center. So my advice with publishing would be that, like, if you really want to be at the bleeding edge, you almost need to be ahead of the CEO. Right? And the CEO, you can expect to have it all figured out because even if the CEO has a as a big brain, her brain is still one brain. And if a company has 100,000 brains, you know, you’ve got to find a way to just leverage all of that and get away from this very formulaic. I mean, I remember, you know, this is 20 years ago, Bill, but I started I worked at McKinsey for about a decade. And, you know, because it’s really good at knowledge management, you know, great. And, you know, maybe out of all the big strategy firms. And they have these like knowledge, taxonomies and so on, which is fine. It’s great. But. But I think even that is limiting, right? So because you’re, you’re, you’re trying to impose your own frame and your own thinking about what is knowledge, what is valuable knowledge, what is not so valuable. And so kind of resist that, Right. And just like be much more diverse, you know, and be much more open. And then obviously you got to converge. You got to you have to have a point of view. But resist the temptation getting there too early and or just or just looking up, you know, to get to get your cues.

Bill Sherman And I think that bottom up approach and thinking expansively first is absolutely essential when it comes to thought leadership. So, Michael, a question for you. How did you get into your journey of thought leadership? You mentioned you were at McKinsey for a while. Give me a sense of how your journey led to thought leadership on a personal side for you.

Michele Zanin Yeah. Well, you know, maybe I could take a further step back. I started really my professional career working at the Rand Corporation, which is a public policy think tank. And there that’s what I did thought Leadership. I mean, I was a grad student, so I was working on my Ph.D., but my work was ideas and writing and, you know, really, you know, that was a formative experience for me because I just saw the power of analysis and ideas in shaping the policy debate. You know, one of my most memorable pieces of analysis there was for the U.S. Air Force in the wake of Khobar Towers bombings that were claimed by al Qaeda in 1996, 1997. And we were tasked to help the Air Force think about patterns of terrorism. And so we got into this whole discovery around the fact that terrorist groups were not harnessing information technology to organize themselves very differently, you know, from hierarchy to networks, and that you needed to have a similar organizational response. Like, you know, the US government was very siloed, very bureaucratic. You needed to like needed a network to fight a network. So anyway, so I did a really cool work there. Then I went to McKinsey and then McKinsey. I was their client work because that’s what you got to do, right? That’s it’s, you know, it’s a consulting firm. But I found every time I found an opportunity to do something that was like more about insight generation and knowledge building, I would jump on it, you know, and whether it was an article or working with partners that were more maybe into that and so on. And I, you know, so I, I did a lot of that. And that’s really what led me to work with Gary, because the head of the knowledge committee at McKinsey, who was one of my mentors, said, you know, we have this. This is 29. We have this opportunity to collaborate with Gary. He has a new book out, Future Management, his previous book. And you need some we need someone to kind of help them think about like an agenda and how do we move this forward. So I just jumped on that and I was supposed to do that for a quarter or two, and then that became a year or two. And then eventually I left McKinsey. But I still do that. I still like to I still like to combine practice, you know, working with companies, helping them on these kinds of issues with knowledge and thought leadership. I mean, that’s just for me, that’s I don’t think I could do one without the other. But I think that having a balance of the two is essential because otherwise, you know, if I only did consulting, I would wither. And I’m really excited by the ability that we have now to develop knowledge in such new ways and much faster than we ever could before.

Bill Sherman So I say more about that. Can you give an example? What do you think?

Michele Zanin Well, the ability I mean, just think about thought leadership. Even when you did it at Rand, you know, yeah, there was the Internet, but it was like new. I remember that I had to read articles from newspapers. I had to use this like, you know, this weird system that was only available to a few people. It was like a government system that allowed, you know, articles to be, you know, downloadable. And some of them were translated from different languages, you know, from Farsi or whatever, you know, now there’s like the Internet, Google Translate. The ability for us to collect information about people ideas is just enormous. You know, some of it is, you know, and algorithmic, you know, and, you know, statistical nature. But others are not like this. Even the example that I mentioned to you about this retailer with 60,000 people, we can now ask them like every day, like, what was the most interesting interaction you had? What happened, you know, or how did that product launch go? Like you would, you know, 20 years ago we could not have done any of that, right. So there’s a vast array of information that we can we can use and a vast number of brains that we can tap now for even elaboration, not just like raw insight generation so we can leverage peoples and their creativity in a different way. So we have all that amazing capacity now that is much easier to tap. Yet I feel like the way we sometimes approach thought leadership, like we approach any other problem is still and you know much more about this industry. I’m sure you can point out to me lots of examples where this is not true, Bill. So I don’t want to paint this cartoonish picture of the industry, but I know from my interactions with some companies that have this auction, it’s like not really caught up to that reality yet.

Bill Sherman And I think you’re touching on and you’ve mentioned it before. How do you unleash talent and really get the most out of the people, people that you have? If things can be automated, whether it’s Google Translate or you can automate at the steel mill, that’s great. But the reason that we have people in organizations and we’ll continue to have people in organizations is the intellect, the ability to solve problems, to do sense making. And there are things that automation will be able to do in the years to come that will be even more amazing than can do today. I was seeing an article over the weekend in the New York Times and how AI is being used for generating faces on an entirely new level and creating basically on sliders images of people that have never been on this world but are incredibly difficult to tell the difference. Okay, so that process gets automated. How do we use that in a new way to solve a problem? And so thought leadership insights, the ability to look around the corner to the future and say, this is where the future’s going. What do we need to do today to be prepared for that? Doesn’t matter if you’re working on the line in a factory or if you’re in an office. Those questions will always be essential. And the tools that we have today are much, much more agile. But since making Without it, we’re just drowning in information.

Michele Zanin Yeah, no, we are. I mean, when you talk about originality, creativity, you know, there was a new report from the World Economic Forum about the future of work that came out in October. And, you know, unsurprisingly, originality was one of the top five skills for 2025. No argument there precisely because of what you said when we did. You know, we look carefully at the skill distribution within the US economy. The Bureau of Labor Statistics allows you. Well, what they do is they categorize each occupation by skill content. And so one of the skills that they quantify is originality, original, original thinking. And, you know, 100 is like, you really, you know, region is really important for this job. Zero. Not so much so like choreographers, you know, a movie director, you know, very, very high CEOs are like 70 and so on. But if most occupations had less than 50, so it was not that important. And then if you multiply the number of people working in those occupations by that score, what you find is that 70% of people work in jobs. Where originality is not important, is considered not important, which doesn’t mean that people are aren’t original or have the capacity to be original, to have creative thinking. It’s just it reflects our prejudice that, you know, the originality is, you know, in a particular set of occupations and a particular set of, you know, layers in the hierarchy. And everybody else is like, they should shut up and kind of get you get their job done, right?

Bill Sherman Well, that’s true. Like strategy in the 90s had the rarefied air that only a few people were involved in strategy. It was a very elite task, etc.. And instead now you’re looking at the democratization of strategy in terms of getting as close as you can to the edge of the organization and where the work is being done.

Michele Zanin Yeah. And but even strategy, I mean, maybe you have some examples that, you know, kind of, you know, kind of countervailing to do this. But when we looked at what executives, how they feel about strategy, most of them still feel like they haven’t gotten it nailed, like they feel like our strategy isn’t particularly unique. Our strategy process is still this kind of cloistered thing where, you know, we go around offsite and we invite the consultants and so on, and we get to an answer that is like late last year or, you know, plus or -10% or yeah, we have a new initiative here, but it’s still not the kind of open process that I, I mean, there are examples, but it’s still like a fairly top down and closed closed process where you’re figuring things out and they and that needs to change, as you say, because, you know, it’s just not going to get you very far. You know, and it seems like people are not happy, so most executives aren’t anyway. So yeah, you need that and you need and I think there’s a huge opportunity for thought leadership to be, you know, the stimulant to that, you know, to bring out new ideas and be really proactive. And maybe go out a little bit and experiment with what are new ways in which we could just, you know, get some get some insights, get some ideas and bring them to the fore and shape and maybe shape. That’s a strategic discussion as opposed to the kind of the other way around.

Bill Sherman And you’ve got a wonderful chapter on experimentation in the book that I’d encourage people who are listening to read if they want to learn more about that. So as we come to the end of this conversation, Kelley, I think you and I could talk for another hour. My question is this. Many of the folks who are leading the thought leadership function are responsible for the function. They’re also leaders. And if you were to give them a piece of advice or to something they could do tangibly in the next week or two, what would you encourage them to try to start moving towards the mindset of humans ocracy. What can they do that’s practical?

Michele Zanin So two thoughts there. One within their team. You know, just think about like, how are how can I share some of my power or some of my authority with people who are colleagues of mine in the function. And we have a set of ideas on what you could do, you know, changing, you know, finding a way for everyone to maybe craft a little a slightly different job description for themselves or, you know, creating a more participative way of setting, you know, departments goal or units goals for the next year and beyond. So we have a set of ideas like that, you know, so try to be less of a bureaucrat and more of a leader inside your inside your organization. Then when it comes to how leadership interacts with the rest of the organization, I would say, you know, try to experiment with broadening, you know, participation, setting the thought leadership agenda or the operation of this thought leadership themes, you know, And so look for voices that are typically not heard right inside and outside and just and it’s not that hard. I mean, you just blog about it like we you know, we’re trying to come up with our thought leadership agenda for 2020, 20, whatever. And, you know, we’re looking for, you know, what might be the emerging themes and so on. What is your idea? What are you what are you thinking? What what are things that are not on the radar screen? It should be. And, you know, again, that doesn’t take a lot of time. And I think once you open this up and people really feel like this is a credible initiative, you’re not just doing this for show, then they’ll really eagerly participate. And I think you’ll be blown away by the level of kind of creativity and insight that you’ll generate like this. And, you know, you may not need to call the the consultants anymore because, you know, you have so much amazing insight from from people that work there or are part of your ecosystem.

Bill Sherman Thank you for taking time to sit down with us today and talk about unleashing the power of individuals within organizations and reframing that dynamic. If someone wants to get in touch with you or learn more about your work, where should they go? What should they do?

Michele Zanin Yeah. Well, the probably the most straightforward thing to do is to visit Humanorcracy.com. There you’ll find a lot of really interesting content. You know, you can download the preface and the first chapter of the book. And there’s even a course that we’re now making for free with book purchase, which is four hours of content and lots of tools and tips and so on. So that will be number one. And if you are on Twitter, you can follow me at Michael and Zanini.

Bill Sherman Wonderful. Thank you very much.

Michele Zanin Thank you, Bill.

Bill Sherman If you’ve enjoyed this episode, please join our LinkedIn group. Organizational Thought Leadership. It’s a professional community where thought leadership practitioners talk shop about our field. So if you’re someone who creates curates or deploys thought leadership for your organization, then please join the conversation in the organizational thought Leadership LinkedIn.