Military analysts call this “asymmetrical” war (as if
war has a terrible symmetry); and we know that it will be
as different from conventional war as three-dimensional,
blindfolded chess is from conventional chess. But one thing
is certain, leadership lies at the heart of achieving victory.
You only have to look to history to understand that when people
needed to accomplish great things, whether in war or peace,
great leaders had to rise to the occasion.
Because asymmetrical war is a new kind of war, a war that
is more about waging peace on many different levels than
waging actual war itself, a war/peace in which accountants,
logisticians, diplomats, economic experts will also be the
front-line troops, it calls for a new kind of leadership —
asymmetrical leadership.
Just as asymmetrical war is fluid, multi-dimensional,
and global, asymmetrical leadership must be too. But we don’t
have to create asymmetrical leadership from scratch. To some
extent, it’s already being developed and modeled in a few
forward-thinking American businesses. What does business
leadership have to do with waging asymmetrical war? During the
past 15 or 20 years, many businesses have had to compete in
asymmetrical markets, markets that are global, multi-faceted
and swiftly changing. To succeed in these markets, the leaders
of these businesses have had to discard old leadership methods
and practices and put into action new ones. In short, they’ve
had to develop asymmetric leadership.
To understand such leadership, first, let’s look at the
basic concept of leadership itself. The word “leadership”
itself comes from old Norse root meaning “to make go.” But
leaders often stumble when trying to understand who makes what
go? Generally, the conventional view of leadership has been
one of an order-giving process. Many leaders believe that
they must “make” people go by ordering them to do things.
Order-leadership in business has its roots in the beginnings
of the Industrial Revolution. “Order” comes from a Latin root
meaning to arrange threads in a weaving woof. The captains of
the Revolution dealt with the relatively uneducated country
people who flocked to their factories by ordering them where,
how, and when to work. The most efficient and effective
production methods resulted from workers being “ordered” or
ranked like threads in the woof of production lines. Refined
and empowered by the Victorian commercial culture, with its
patriarchal power structure and strong links to Prussian
military organization, the culture of the order-giver leader
reached its zenith in the United States after World War II.
During the post-war years, many U.S. businesses were like
ocean liners plowing through relatively calm seas, their leaders,
like liner captains and mates, running things by getting orders
from superiors, giving orders to subordinates and making sure
that those orders were carried out.
But roughly since the mid-1980s, with competition
increasing dramatically on a global scale, business leaders
have come to need skills not akin to ocean liner piloting but
white-water canoeing. Order leadership founders where lines of
authority are blurring, the volume and velocity of information
proliferating, markets rapidly changing, and alliance and
coalition building multiplying. This is where asymmetrical
leadership comes in. Asymmetrical leadership is to traditional
leadership as white water canoeing is to ocean liner piloting.
Here are a few characteristics of asymmetrical leadership.
Asymmetrical leadership is motivational: Businesses that
engage in asymmetrical leadership find that motivation is a
critical factor in achieving success. After all, since leaders
do nothing more important than get results and since they can’t
get results all by themselves, they need the people they lead
to get results. In markets where speed, innovation, change
acceleration, and global reach are important, motivated people
get far more results than people who are simply responding to
orders. And if our nation’s leaders expect to meet the
challenges of asymmetrical warfare, they must come to grips
with the motivational aspects of asymmetrical leadership. In
fact, if asymmetric leadership isn’t motivational, it’s simply
running around in the dark.
But leaders often misunderstand motivation simply because
the English language fails to describe how it takes place.
English construes motivation as an active verb — as something
one person does to another person. The truth is that leaders
can’t motivate anybody to do anything. Leaders communicate —
the people whom they lead motivate. They motivate themselves.
Only they can motivate themselves. In asymmetrical leadership,
the motivators and the motivatees are the same people.
To engage in asymmetrical leadership, leaders must
recognize that they are motivating people only when they, the
leaders, create an environment in which those people are
actively motivating themselves. Motivation is the people’s
choice, not the leader’s choice. It’s the people’s free
choice. If that principle is not driving leadership
activities, people are not engaged in asymmetrical leadership.
For instance, a critical battlefield of the war are the
streets of the Islamic world where hatred of America seems to
be rampant. As long as masses of people hate America, as long
as they continue to see the American government as the actual
terrorist, our nation cannot bring this war to a just conclusion.
Clearly, this isn’t a command-and-control issue. People cannot
be ordered to stop hating. We have to employ asymmetrical
leadership. We have to motivate them — in other words, we must
set up, through a variety of means, the environment in which
they motivate themselves to become our allies, in which they
make the choice to work along side us as full partners in
concluding the war. It will take a long, superhuman,
multifaceted endeavor, an endeavor that cannot succeed without
our employing asymmetrical leadership.
Asymmetrical leadership is action-based: Businesses faced
with rapid, global change have come to understand that motivation
isn’t what people think or feel but what they physically do. A
key aspect of how asymmetrical leadership views motivation lies
in the first two letters of that word. Those letters — “mo” —
are also found in the words “motion,” “momentum,” “motor,”
“mobile,” etc. The words denote action — physical action. To
engage in asymmetrical leadership, leaders must constantly be
challenging others to take specific physical action across all
the dimensions that leads to results.
Our motivating people who hate us to ultimately become our
partners in peace will entail not our simply paying lip-service
to such a partnership. We must undertake concrete actions that
will begin to establish the motivational environment.
Asymmetrical leadership demands that we and “they” ultimately
take action together to redress the many social, political, and
military wrongs that breed hatred.
Asymmetrical leadership is results-driven: Businesses have
discovered that in order to succeed in asymmetrical markets,
their leaders and employees must have a passion to achieve
results. After all, people who simply take action are useless
to a business. Only those people who get results are useful.
This seems like a simple enough dictum; any leader will say
that they have a passion to get results. But I have found out
that what most leaders have a passion for, whether they know
it or not, is engaging in the tradition, linear,
captain-to-mate-to-crew leadership — either because they know no
other way of leading or because they are more comfortable being
engaged in such leadership. For such leadership has a materially
different focus than asymmetrical leadership. Traditional
leadership focuses on the activities that get results; whereas
asymmetrical leadership focuses on the results that get the
activities. When you are leading organizations in asymmetrical
markets, you must not be wedded to activities but instead to
results and only to those activities that achieve those results.
This means that if activities are not getting results, you
change them or eliminate them and institute new activities. In
organizations run by traditional leadership, changing activities
means changing the status quo, a vastly difficult job.
For instance, to get results in asymmetrical markets, many
businesses have had to eliminate those traditional activities
that achieve results and engage in new, innovative ways. They
had to break up their linear lines of reporting. They’ve had
to reduce the tiers of leadership, they’ve had to downsize their
staffs and decentralize their functions, they’ve had to institute
just-in-time inventory systems, they’ve had to cultivate the
capability of quickly formulating and disbanding results-focused
teams — all with one aim in mind: to get more results, faster
results, and “more, faster” on a continual basis. In short,
they have had to become masters of asymmetrical leadership.
America’s new war demands new leadership. We don’t have to
invent this leadership. It already exists. With the emergence
of new, global markets, a corresponding new vision of leadership
has been emerging with some businesses. Asymmetrical leadership
is being developed and applied in the crucible of global business
competition. It is the very kind of leadership that can and must
be applied to all the multi-faceted endeavors of asymmetrical
war.
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2005 © The Filson Leadership Group, Inc. All rights reserved.
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