by Semira Soraya-Kandan on 29. Februar 2012
This week’s headlines are filled with news from The Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. They refer to latest technological advances such as quad-core processors, large HD screens, or NFS, among many others.
In constrast to this focus on ever growing speed, and ever new functionalities, Arne van Oosterom challenges the notion of ‘owning a phone’ in his blog post on “Value Co-Creation” today. The design thinking perspective offers a challenging frame for many organizations that struggle with unlearning basic assumptions about customers’ values. Arne’s post prompted one of the many inspiring little chats in my timeline among some of my much appreciated twitter pals about the meaning of value.
The absurdity of material cults around mobile phones nicely shows in developments such as the vertu – more „ a concierge service than a phone“, as Symant Sandhir (@syamant) pointed out, topped by another folly: a diamond-studded iphone 4 priced at Five Million British Pounds (via @Graham Hill)
This chat reminded me of a story recently told by my dear colleague Rudolf Dörfler (Hernstein Institut, Vienna) in one of our leadership seminars:
A man is walking down the street. He sees a beautiful parrot in the window of a pet store. He goes inside and asks how much the parrot costs; the owner says „A Million Dollars“. „A million dollars!“ „Yeah! It’s a free country; I can ask what I want for it. Look how beautiful this parrot is. It’s worth every penny.
Marvellous Mollucan Tango
Weeks pass, and the parrot remains in the window. The man stops in regularly and asks whether the owner has come to his senses regarding price. The answer remains the same: a million dollars or no deal.
One day the man sees the parrot is gone from the window, so he goes in and asks the owner, „Did you sell that parrot?“
„Yes.“
„How much did you get for it?“
„A million dollars.“
„Someone really paid a million dollars!?!“
„Well, yes. Actually I got two chickens wort five hundred thousands dollars each.“
Now, it’s your turn: What do you overvalue?
by Semira Soraya-Kandan on 21. Dezember 2011
Many people are very fond of taking things at face value. In the contexts of expert organizations many are focused on the factual dimensions of their tasks. Dealing with any social aspects of cooperation and collaboration is straining and challenging for experts.
People taking things personally as soon as some conflict peeks around the corner are a big challenge for leaders.
From a leadership perspective it is much more useful to have a broader concept of conflict and to develop a positive, even welcoming attitude towards it. This requires considerable and sustainable change in the leadership and organizational culture.
We recently had a leadership workshop with such an expert organization wanting to change its leadership culture from a traditional top down authoritarian leadership style to a more participatory and empowering leadership style. Then the question came up: What do people in the organization understand when they hear the word conflict? Many associate it with something negative and with something personal.
Yet, conflicts are often not what they seem to be. They cannot easily be taken at face value. In conflict avoiding contexts, people often agree with each other too quickly not recognizing that in fact they only found an apparent consensus. The covered dissensus comes up later when actions don’t abide. But people also often disagree too early, going on in a blind dissensus, not realizing that in fact they may not be so much apart, if they only found out what was behind an apparent opposition.
So, as a spontaneous response to our discussion, I shared a Sufi wisdom by
Idries Shah:
The Unsuspected Element
Two men were quarreling outside of Nasrudin’s window at dead of night. Nasrudin got up, wrapped his only blanket around himself, and ran out to try to stop the noise. When he tried to reason with the drunks, one snatched his woolen and both ran away.
“What were they arguing about?”, asked his wife when he went in. ”It must have been the blanket. When they got that the fight broke up.”
What ideas do you have about helping others to learn that conflicts cannot easily be taken at face value?
