Growing Leaders Courageously Exploring the New

We are closing the central chapter of my book "Manifesto for Humane Leadership" with the last two of its six theses.

Encounter at Eye Level

Leadership is a question of attitude. Unfortunately, leadership is still defined in terms of rank, power, and subordination. The relationship between the leader and their people is usually asymmetrical: the boss has more experience, information, and power than his employees, who are, therefore, more dependent on their boss than the boss is on them.

Historically, this attitude stems from Taylorism, where the manager was, in fact, the one who understood the work processes best and was able to break them down into tiny work steps for the then mostly unskilled workforce. However, those days are long gone. The nature of the work and employees' expertise has changed radically since then. Unfortunately, in many cases, the only thing that hasn't changed is the dependency between boss and employee.

Peter Drucker coined the term knowledge work back in 1959 (well ahead of his time). Since then, he has repeatedly addressed the fundamental differences between knowledge work and the manual work of Taylorism. He reframed leadership as a professional collaboration between adult experts on eye level. The relationship between managers and knowledge workers is more akin to that between a conductor and the instrumentalists in an orchestra. The position of knowledge workers to their manager is entirely different from that of the arbitrarily interchangeable worker to his boss in Taylorist structures. A knowledge worker can sabotage his superior just as easily and effectively as an instrumentalist can sabotage an autocratic conductor (see Section “Species-Appropriate Keeping of Knowledge Workers”).

Even sixty years after Peter Drucker invented knowledge work, we are unfortunately still in the early stages of implementing it. Of course, the relationship between managers and employees has changed significantly for the better in recent decades, and many managers have now adopted a more parental and supportive attitude toward the people entrusted to them. The direction is correct, but the traditional dependency has mostly remained unchanged. And while children demand their independence more or less vehemently at various stages of their development, employees today remain well-protected children throughout their whole career.

Leadership is only legitimate if it aims at the self-management of the employees entrusted to it.¹ Götz Werner has thus summed up what a contemporary relationship between leaders and their people looks like. It is not about being superior or subordinate but an encounter at eye level.

Leadership is an equally important function; its task is to make others successful. That is why the fifth thesis of the Manifesto for Humane Leadership is: "Growing leaders over leading followers." Leading dependent employees is one thing and is still an important skill. The other, and much more crucial, is the attitude to lead employees out of this dependency and turn them into leaders. "Leaders don't create followers, they create more leaders.", as Tom Peters puts it in a nutshell.²

The Art of Ambidexterity

We are experiencing a world in which it is "normal that many things have become different and are becoming more different faster and faster," as Karlheinz A. Geißler aptly put it.³ Life's perceived speed is increasing daily, driven by fascinating and sometimes frightening technological developments such as artificial intelligence or blockchain. These advancements enormously increase the pressure for change and innovation in companies. The half-life of products and business models is getting shorter and shorter.

In plain language, this means that companies have to reinvent themselves again and again and at ever shorter intervals to survive. In addition to focusing on efficiency and profitability in today's business, it must become second nature for companies to boldly explore new opportunities and constantly try out new business models. However, because today's urgent business tends to crowd out what is vital in the long term, namely the ideas for tomorrow's business, the sixth and final thesis in the Manifesto for Humane Leadership is: "Courageously exploring the new over efficiently exploiting the old."

Building a company around one product or product family with one single profitable business model and scaling this business is a considerable achievement. That's why most companies don't even make it through this start-up phase. The few who succeed have all hands full operating their business.

For some companies, things go exceptionally well, such as Xerox with photocopiers, Kodak with films, or IBM with mainframe computers. What happens in this phase of incredible success is described excellently by Steve Jobs⁴: While in the initial phase, the company is led and driven by the products and the passion for great products, marketing and sales gradually take over the helm. On the one hand, fully exploiting existing products and business models makes sense. On the other hand, it also carries the seeds of decline because the focus shifts from new and innovative products and business models to the profit of the current business.

To solve this problem, companies set up research laboratories or research departments. At Xerox, for example, this was the well-known Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). The list of inventions from Xerox PARC is impressive: "Xerox PARC has been foundational to numerous revolutionary computer developments, including laser printing, Ethernet, the modern personal computer, GUI (graphical user interface) and desktop paradigm, object-oriented programming, ubiquitous computing, electronic paper, a-Si (amorphous silicon) applications, the computer mouse, and VLSI (very-large-scale integration) for semiconductors."⁵ Being located on the West Coast with a distance of 3,000 miles to the headquarters in Rochester, New York, gave the scientists great freedom to work on exciting things. However, it also disconnected them from management. Xerox failed to bring most of those inventions to market successfully.

For true organizational ambidexterity, i.e., the ability to exploit the existing and explore the new simultaneously, it is not enough to place the two side by side. Xerox was very successful in the copier business model of the time, and Xerox PARC was highly innovative. The problem was transferring the ideas into new products and business models. Xerox was so fixated on its well-known copier business that many of Xerox PARC's groundbreaking innovations were too far away. Conversely, Xerox PARC was fixated on technology and innovation and paid little attention to translating them into business models and integrating them into Xerox.

This ambidexterity works better for Amazon, for example. Initially, Jeff Bezos expanded the online bookseller's product range in an obvious way to create a complete online department store. But then came new business models. Amazon became a marketplace, a logistics service provider, a leading cloud service provider with AWS, a hardware manufacturer, and much more.

Despite its size and core operating business, it is essential for Amazon's long-term success in a competitive and fast-moving industry to always think and act like a start-up and to constantly experiment with new business models and services, sometimes with considerable investments at stake. Striking the right balance and seamlessly integrating the optimization of the existing business model on the one hand and the invention of new business models on the other is undoubtedly a challenging but crucial leadership task in the VUCA world.

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Table of Contents

The links lead to the parts that are already published here on Substack.

• Pain of Adaptation

  • Love it

  • Leave it

  • Change it

• Persistent in Efforts, Modest in Expectations

  • I have a dream

  • Enabling Self-Leadership

  • Species-Appropriate Keeping of Knowledge Workers

  • The Coronavirus Pandemic as New Work Boost?

  • Leadership at a Distance

• The Human in the Digital

  • A Brief History of Digitalization

  • Here, I Am Human—Here, I Can Be Curious!

  • The Whole and Its Parts

  • When the Method Becomes the Problem

  • The Eighth Type of Waste

  • Respect for People

  • Super Chicken

• Six Theses for New Leadership

  • Manifesto for Humane Leadership

  • Human Potential, Not Human Resources

  • Diversity and Dissent

  • Leading with Purpose and Trust

  • Network and hierarchy

  • Encounter at Eye Level

  • The Art of Ambidexterity

• The 14 Principles Behind the Manifesto

  • People are at the Center

  • Start With Self-Care

  • Strengthen Strengths

  • Leadership Means Relationship

  • Context Not Control

  • Gardener Not Chess Master

  • Principles Not Rules

  • Less is More

  • Questions Not Answers

  • Trust Is the Foundation

  • Safety Not Fear

  • He Who Says A Does Not Have to Say B

  • Integrity Over Charisma

  • Disturbing the Comfort Zone

• Get to Work!

  • Leading by Example

  • Incitement to Rebellion

  • Set Priorities

  • Enduring Dissonance

  • Doing Your Best

The next chapter will follow next Friday. In case you want to read on as soon as possible, the book is available on Amazon in many countries as hardcover, paperback, and for your Kindle. (also on Leanpub). And all my German readers can get the German edition in every book store.

1. Götz W. Werner, Womit ich nie gerechnet habe: die Autobiographie, 5. Auflage, List-Taschenbuch 61254 (Berlin: List Taschenbuch, 2019), 173.

2. Tom Peters, "Rule #3: Leadership Is Confusing As Hell," Fast Company, no. 44 (February 28, 2001).

3. Karlheinz A. Geißler, Alles hat seine Zeit, nur ich hab keine Wege in eine neue Zeitkultur (München: Oekom Verlag, 2014), 232.

4. Designer's Digest - Steve Jobs on the role of product and marketing people., accessed July 14, 2023,

5. "PARC (Company)," in Wikipedia, August 30, 2024, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=PARC\_(company)