
The Secret Language of Leadership
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Reviews / Votes
Named one of the "Best Business Books of the Year" (2007) byFinancial Times: "Leaders don't just executestrategy, they must inspire others to follow...This book explainshow." (Financial Times, December 8, 2007) "Denning cohesively links the importance of narrativeintelligence and telling stories to leadership success."(Library Journal, December 2007) "...if there's one person who knows more than anyone else aboutthe power of business narrative it's...Steve Denning." (MyCustomer.com, Friday 7th December 2007) "This book's lucid explanations, vivid examples and practicaltips are essential reading..." (PublicNet.co.uk,Tuesday 4th December 2007) "...an array of glowing testimonials from truly famouspeople. Definitely one for those interested intransformational change." (Strategic CommunicationManagement, December 2007) "...an educational and informative book that can beeffortlessly read from cover to cover." (InsideKnowledge, September 2007)"If business leaders do not immediately grasp the vital insightsoffered by this book, both they and their organisations aredoomed."--Stefan Stern, Financial Times "Steve Denning is the Warren Buffett of business communication.He sees things others don't and is able to explain them so the restof us can understand."--Chip Heath, co-author of Made to Stick,Professor of Organizational Behavior, Graduate School of Business,Stanford University "I highly recommend you get it today and read it tonight.Tomorrow will be an entirely different kind of day if youdo."---Jim Kouzes, Co-author of the best-selling, The LeadershipChallenge, and A Leader's Legacy "The Secret Language of Leadership has been instrumental inhelping me overcome the challenges of rapid growth and intensecompetition. It's all about the story."--Reed Hastings, CEO,Netflix Inc. "I don't think I have ever read a more compelling preface. Andbest of all, the advice Denning gives to the reader about speakingand writing is exemplified in the way he has written thisimpressive book."--James MacGregor Burns, distinguished seniorscholar, James MacGregor Burns Academy of Leadership, University ofMaryland, and author of Leadership "The Secret Language of Leadership is not only the best analysisI have seen of how and why leaders succeed or fail, it's highlyreadable, as well as downright practical. It should be mandatoryreading for anyone interested in engaging a company with big ideaswho understands that leaders live and die by the quality of whatthey say."--Richard Stone, story analytics master, i.d.e.a.sMore details
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Content
The loss of my job hit me as a grave personal setback. Yet in retrospect, it's clear that there was nothing personal in it at all. The president, as it emerged in due course, planned to ditch everyone at my level, including the managing directors. He seemed to believe that if he appointed people himself, they would be more loyal and dedicated to his objectives. When this turned out not to be the case, he canned them with the same indifference that he dispatched the senior managers on hand at the time of his arrival. For those slated for elimination, the president's technique was simple. He refrained from dismissing them outright. Instead he appointed them to posts with lesser responsibilities or status, or left them with no position at all. The idea was that they would resign to avoid the public humiliation of being treated so demeaningly. In most cases, his judgment proved correct: they left without a protest, slipping quietly into the night. My case was different: I wasn't quite ready to leave.
I remained optimistic. Surely, I thought, there must have been a mistake. Surely my record counted for something. Surely, when lines of communication opened, my career would be back on track. I set about looking into information, since I was interested in the topic, having been an early computer enthusiast. I saw that if I combined my knowledge of World Bank operations with my interest in computers, I could make a unique contribution. The issues were immediately obvious-systems that weren't compatible with each other so that every question had multiple answers, a huge and growing duplication of effort, utter unresponsiveness to operations on the ground, antiquated, paper-bound relations with clients, and inexcusable delays in doing even the simplest thing. I began putting together a plan for what I would do if I were to be offered a position in information. It became steadily more apparent that cleaning up information was a necessary but largely menial task. It would save the organization money but it wouldn't fix the fundamental strategic issue: a lending organization-even if it became more agile-could never solve the problem of global poverty. Global poverty would only be solved when people in poor countries themselves knew how to solve their own problems. Money could facilitate the relief of poverty, but it could never be the solution, unless combined with knowledge. In 1996, the World Bank had a great deal of knowledge relevant to solving the problems of global poverty. We had world-class experts in a wide array of fields-agriculture, banking, finance, health, education, you name it-but access to this knowledge was problematic. If you were involved in a lending operation with the World Bank, you might discover some of this expertise, but otherwise you were out of luck. I began to think: suppose we were to generate quick and easy global access to our knowledge for everyone, wherever they were? Then we could become a pretty interesting organization, even an exciting organization. Why not become a knowledge-sharing organization? I thought this was not just a good idea: once you thought about it, it was breathtakingly obvious. There was just one problem. In the World Bank of early 1996, no one was willing to listen.
Eventually, in April 1996, after weeks of buttonholing anyone I could find, I managed to get a few people's attention. As a result, I was offered ten minutes in front of the Change Management Committee of the World Bank to explain my ideas on sharing knowledge. This committee comprised the managing directors as well as a few vice presidents and some senior advisers to the president. It had been set up to "orchestrate change" in the World Bank. It wasn't obvious to anyone that this was what it was up to, but clearly I needed its support. To be offered even a few minutes before it was a major breakthrough. So now I had ten minutes in which to persuade a group of skeptical, change-resistant senior managers that we should embark on a new strategy to make sharing knowledge a central preoccupation of the organization. My presentation, which is included in Appendix 1, was quite simple in structure. It talked about the problems the organization was facing in sharing its knowledge. It included a brief anecdote from Zambia, which suggested what the future might look like. And it gave a couple of simple road maps as to how we might get from here to there. After I gave my presentation, I was taken aback by the overwhelmingly enthusiastic reaction. One of the vice presidents, Jean-François Rischard, raced up to me very excitedly. "Why don't we do it?" he asked. "What's the next step? Why isn't it being implemented? What's the blockage?" At the time, my first thought was that this was a very strange conversation. Until ten minutes ago, vice presidents had hardly been willing to give me the time of day. And now it was as if I wasn't doing enough to implement Rischard's idea. Then it dawned on me. How wonderful! The idea of sharing knowledge with the world was no longer just my idea. Now it was also his idea. And indeed it was Rischard who shortly afterward played a key role in communicating the idea of knowledge sharing to the bank president and sponsoring its implementation across the entire organization. These were among the first inklings that there was something remarkable in that simple ten-minute presentation. And yet if I had been asked at the time why it was effective, I would have answered that the underlying idea was a good one and people recognized a good idea for its merits. At the time, I was only dimly aware that in most organizations good ideas go nowhere, because they aren't compellingly communicated. I had no notion then that I had, almost by accident, stumbled on a...
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