Heroes of Leadership (BetaCodex14)

The men and women who advanced
organizational thinking in theory and practice
BetaCodex Network Associates
Niels Pflaeging
BetaCodex Network White Paper No. 14 - February 2013
Make it real!
HEROES
OF
LEADERSHIP

Why do these heroes
matter for
leadership today?

Most books, articles and concepts on leadership are ridiculous.
Mainly, that´s because they fail to consider history, available science,
and the systemic nature of work and organizations.
This paper approaches leadership by looking at it through the lens of
history, and by presenting more than thirty notable men and women
who enriched and shaped the way we (should) perceive leadership
today.
We will start our journey at the time when large-scale corporations
and the profession of management started to gain weight, at the
height of the industrial age. It stretches to some of the leadership
“heroes” of this day. We have selected a wide range of notables of
the field - some famous, some less so. Many thinkers and
practitioners have been left out – for practical, for obvious or less
obvious reasons. Let´s just say that the notables we selected were
chosen after careful and rigorous consideration.
The choices made may have been subjective.

“A complete
mental revolution
on the part of
the workingman,
as well as on
management´s
side, is required“
Frederick W. Taylor.
The Father of Management

Frederick W. Taylor is, at the same time, hero and anti-
hero in the story of leadership. He is considered, by
some, the most influential figure in human history. Maybe
rightly so. Management begins with Taylor - he was the
one who defined its core characteristic and who thus
consolidated the then nascent caste of management into
a profession that was here to stay.
The guiding principle of hierarchically dividing the
thinking from the doing, and then finding the optimal way
to fulfill each task, outlined in his seminal book The
Principles of Scientific Management, co-promoted
previously unknown leaps in industrial efficiency and
productivity. This division became the defining principle
of management per sé, shaping organizations, business
education, work methods and practices everywhere, until
this very day. Taylor´s approach became core content at
Harvard Business School. His quest for the one best way
profoundly impacted life-style in the 20th century.
Taylor saw restriction of industrial output as a
consequence of poor method, not worker inferiority; he
thought that labor strife was not inevitable, and he spoke
eloquently and passionately for labor-management
cooperation – an ideal that his techniques could not
support. Later-on, consultants, technocratic engineers
and managers alike mastered Taylor´s method, and
forgot the intent.

Mary Parker Follett.
The Leadership Sage
“To free the
energies of the
human spirit
is the high potentiality
of all human association”

Mary Parker Follett was a pioneer in the field of human
relations and democratic organization. Peter Drucker
called her the "prophet of management” - meaning
leadership, of course. Her contribution to the
development of the field was in stark contrast to the
scientific management theory of the early 1900’s: Unlike
efficiency engineers such as Taylor, and later behaviorists
such as Elton Mayo who would “humanize” the
command-and-control model, she argued for a human
relations approach that was decades ahead of its time.
Follett is increasingly recognized as the originator of ideas
that are today commonly accepted as cutting edge in
organizational theory. These include the idea of seeking
win-win solutions, strength in human diversity, and
situational leadership. She stressed the interactions of
managers and workers, presaging modern systems
approaches. She was also a successful management
consultant.
Follett was concerned about the misuse of the term
leadership that had already become common in her time.
In her definition, a leader was someone who sees the
whole rather than the particular: "The best leader knows
how to make his followers actually feel power themselves,
not merely acknowledge his power.” She was one of the
first to integrate the idea of organizational conflict into
leadership theory.

Kurt Lewin.
The Practical Theorist
“You cannot
understand
a system
until you try
to change it”

Kurt Lewin pioneered the field of social
psychology. His enormously influential
body of work includes the creation or co-
creation of concepts such as group
dynamics, action research, experiential
learning, and the understanding of the
toxic effects of both autocratic and laissez-
faire leadership styles. His Harwood
experiments are the first recorded
attempts at participative systems change
through direct participation.
Lewin sensed that not tools matter in
organizations, but that involving all
stakeholders does. The core principle of
participation: we are more likely to carry
out decisions we have helped make. This
notion would evolve into the theory of
participative management. Lewin thus
added a new value to organizational
leadership and development: democracy.
The consistent theme in all Kurt Lewin’s
work was his concern for the integration of
theory and practice. This was symbolized
in his best known quotation: “There is
nothing so practical as a good theory”.
It’s a lesson we still need to internalize.

C.G.Jung.
The People Decypherer
“sddss”
Carl Gustav Jung.
The Inventor of Development
“We cannot
change anything
until we accept it.
Condemnation
does not liberate,
it oppresses”

Carl Gustav Jung was a pioneer of
analytical psychology, but he can also be
considered the founder of what today we
call positive psychology– the idea of
“developmental psychology of the
healthy”. He was a life-long advocate for
self-awareness and reflection as a means
to human progress.
The central concept of human develop-
ment, according to Jung, is individuation -
the psychological process of integrating
the opposites, including the conscious
with the unconscious, while still main-
taining their relative autonomy. A notion
inseparable from contemporary concepts
of the individual, as well as of modern
leadership.
Jung proposed and developed concepts
such as the collective unconscious,
archetypes, extraversion and introversion,
the complex, and synchronicity. Jung's
theory of psychological types, or
preference theory, has found especially
wide-spread application in organizations.

“Effectiveness
of organizations
could be
doubled if
managers
discovered how
to tap into the unrealized
potential present in
their workforces” Douglas McGregor.
The Missionary of Humanism

Douglas McGregor was a consultant, a professor
and for six years president of Antioch College.
Together with contemporaries such as Abraham
Maslow and Frederick Herzberg, he was at the
forefront of motivational research and theory
development in the 1950s and 1960s.
McGregor, better than anybody else, understood
the interdependence between the beliefs about
human nature that we hold in our hearts, and the
organizational systems that we end up creating.
External controls demotivate, he figured, inducing
the behavior they predict. McGregor described the
two opposite approaches to leadership and
organizational design, and the Theory X and
Theory Y concepts of human nature that underpin
them, in his book The Human Side of the
Enterprise. It became one of the most influential
business books of the 20th century.
McGregor was decades ahead of his time, which
explains the mixed receptions of his work since the
60s. He went as far as suggesting how to abolish
the then young HR function, and staff departments
overall. “It is probable that one day we shall begin
to draw organization charts as a series of linked
groups rather than as a hierarchical structure of
individual reporting relationships”, he mused.

Eric Trist.
The Group Whisperer
“External
supervision
may correct errors.
But only internal
supervision can
prevent their occurrence”

Eric Trist was a psychologist, researcher, teacher, and
consultant and a leading figure in the field of
Organizational Development. He was co-founder of the
Quality of Work Life movement and of the influential
Tavistock Institute for Social Research in London that
pioneered so-called T-groups, studying self-organization
and group dynamics during the 1950s and 60s.
Trist coined the phrase sociotechnical system to
underscore that the interaction of people (social) with tools
and techniques (technical) results from choice, not
chance. Together with his frequent collaborator, Fred
Emery, he then enlarged this concept, creating the
theories necessary to contemporary work redesign. Trist
also organized early field studies that led to new work
designs, and inspired major change efforts in cities and
communities.
In 1949, Trist and his colleagues discovered a British coal
mine near Yorkshire that demonstrated how all the features
of highly autonomous, self-organizing and responsible
teams would come together in a new workplace reality.
The case proved that a new match between customer
needs, producers and their technology could be achieved.
It was an economic and a social breakthrough.
Sociotechnical design put the fragments of dumbed-down,
taylorized jobs at every level back together, by treating the
work system, not discrete tasks, as the unit of analysis.

Y^
Virginia Satir.
The Relationship Decipherer
“We get together
on the basis of
our similarities;
we grow on the
basis of our
differences”

Virginia Satir is sometimes referred to as
the Mother of Family Therapy, but indeed
pioneered systemic approaches to
psychology and therapy: she took context
into account, instead of focusing on
trying to repair the individual. She is
probably best known for idealizing a
widely recognized psychological change
process model, which she developed
through clinical studies.
This model is about how individuals
experience change: while coping with
unexpected or significant change, we
predictably move through the stages of
Late Status Quo, Resistance, Chaos,
Integration, and New Status Quo. These
are accompanied by sets of emotions,
behaviors and performance patterns.
Satir´s unique contribution lies in her
positive, consistent notion of human
nature, and her insight that we need to
adapt and adjust to others, in order to
improve relationships. Her work became
a substantial influence to various
movements in psychology, such as NLP.

“90% of what
we call management
consists of making
it difficult for
people to get
their work done”
Peter Drucker.
The Management Consolidator

Peter Drucker had a highly productive,
enduring and influential career spanning more
than six decades, as a management writer,
consultant, researcher and professor– starting
with the publication of his first book The End of
Economic Man, in 1939, and stretching to his
death in 2005.
Austrian-born Drucker was a genuine
intellectual who delivered some great writing
and many accurate predictions. Among the
concepts he introduced were the ideas of
empowerment and the knowledge worker.
Unfortunately, his idea that would become most
widely adopted in practice was also his most
destructive one: Management by Objectives.
Drucker was the leadership thinker who
“invented” the importance of managers by
holding them up as cultural and economic
heroes, during the 1950s and 60s. With
unfavorable consequences. In the 1980s, he
began falling out of love with the manager
caste, when the trend towards executive greed
became apparent. Drucker was a vocal critic of
current business education: "The purpose of
professional schools is to educate competent
mediocrities”, he said.

“94% of the
problems in
business are
system-driven
and only 6% are
people-driven”
W. Edwards Deming.
The Anti-Taylor

W. Edwards Deming was the first to apply rigorous
systems thinking, and indeed systems theory, to
organizations. He did so starting in 1950 in Japan,
where his work gained wide-spread attention, and
profoundly impacted many Japanese firms, including
Toyota. Later, this culminated in the “Japanese quality
miracle”.
Deming condemned management by objectives,
incentive systems, merit ranking, appraisal, and
command-and-control: "Long-term commitment to new
learning and new philosophy is required of any
management that seeks transformation. The timid and
the fainthearted, and the people that expect quick
results, are doomed to disappointment.” A charismatic
and humorous figure, he only became well-known in
the West when in 1980 he was featured in an NBC TV
documentary titled If Japan can... Why can't we?
His work became hugely influential to the international
Quality Management movement of the 80s and 90s,
but the decidedly systemic nature of his thinking
became side-trapped here. His 1986 book Out of the
Crisis consolidated Demings thinking. He continued
teaching and consulting for industry throughout the
world until his death at the age of 93, in 1993. Deming
remains one of the greatest and wide-ranging thinkers
of leadership history.

“Social systems
consist entirely
of communication”
Niklas Luhmann.
The Theorist of Everything

Niklas Luhmann was a leading complexity
theorist. A social scientist who taught at the
University of Bielefeld, Germany, he insisted that
approaching science inter-disciplinarily was the
only way to move forward, and claiming that his
approach to systems theory was evolving into no
less than the “science of everything”, or what is
sometimes called grand theory.
To achieve this, it was necessary to develop
powerful distinctions and profound semantic
meanings - which make his work difficult to read
and hard to translate. He deliberately kept his
prose enigmatic to prevent it from being
understood "too quickly", which would only
produce simplistic misunderstandings. Luhmann's
systems theory is being applied or used worldwide
by sociologists and other scholars. His organization
sociology proved highly useful for contemporary
organizational researchers and consultants.
Luhmann wrote 70 books and nearly 400 scholarly
articles published on a variety of subjects,
including law, economy, politics, art, religion,
ecology, mass media, and love. Trapped in a pre-
wiki-age, Luhmann collected and systematized his
research and wisdom in his fabled, highly indexed
“Zettelkästen”, a labyrinth of paper card boxes.

.Russell Ackoff.
The Don of Complexity
“You rarely
improve an
organization
as a whole by
improving the
performance of
one of its parts”

Russell Ackoff was an American organizational theorist,
consultant, and professor - noted for combining theory and
practice, escaping disciplinary bounds, and driving students
and practitioners alike toward independent thought and action.
Ackoff early-on understood the consequences of the onset of
the Systems Age that had started in the 1940s: The Machine
Age, bequeathed by the industrial revolution, had been carried
by two concepts – reductionism (everything can in the end be
decomposed into indivisible parts) and mechanism. Here,
everything was explained by using only one simple relationship:
cause-effect. According to Ackoff, however, “managers are not
confronted with problems that are independent of each other;
but with dynamic situations that consist of complex systems of
changing problems that interact with each other.” Ackoff called
such situations messes. “Managers do not solve problems,
they manage messes.”
Ackoff would patiently and humorously explain the necessary
paradigm change. During the last years of his life, he
developed what he called f-Laws, a series of over 100 distilled
observations or subversive epigrams of bad leadership and the
misplaced wisdom that surrounds management in
organizations: “f-Laws are truths about organizations that we
might wish to deny or ignore – simple and more reliable guides
to managers' everyday behavior than the complex truths
proposed by scientists, economists, sociologists, politicians
and philosophers.”

Chris Argyris,
The Learning Analyst
“In fact, people
themselves
are responsible
for making the
status quo so
resistant to change.
We are trapped by
our own behavior”

Chris Argyris is a writer, researcher and academic
teacher, commonly known for his seminal work in the
area of Learning Organizations. He advocated the
Action Science research approach, as well as the
notions of Single and Double Loop Learning, a concept
that he applied to both individuals and organizations.
Argyris’ early research explored the impact of formal
organizational structures, control systems, and
management on individuals - and how they responded
and adapted to them). He came to the conclusion that
problems with employees are mostly the result of
mature personalities being managed by using
outdated practices.
One of his main interests is in uncovering the subtle
patterns of reasoning which underlie our behavior; and
how those patterns continually get us into trouble,
individually and collectively. Argyris showed that
humans tend to use two theories, mental models or
“guiding maps” that dramatically influence their
actions, but that few are aware of. One is the
Espoused Theory, the other the actual Theory-in-use.
Trouble is: more often then not, these two theories of
action are opposed. Effectiveness results from
developing congruence between the two.

Charles Handy.
The Philosopher of Knowledge Work
“Work is
something
you do rather
than something
you go to”

Charles Handy is an Irishman and widely
considered to be Europe´s most influential
leadership guru. The Economist once said of
Handy: “More common sense is what he stands
for, and fewer common rooms.” His main
interest always was in organizations, and about
the search for ways in which companies can go
beyond the pure pursuit of profits. Organizations,
he said, are “not machines that can be neatly
designed, mapped, measured and controlled.”
Handy came up with colorful metaphors, such as
the shamrock organization which, like the plant,
would have three leaves: management,
specialists and an increasingly flexible labor
force. Or portfolio working, a lifestyle in which
the individual holds a “number of jobs, clients
and types of work” (i.e. roles), all at the same
time.
Handy had a key role in shaping Britain´s
management education in the 1960s and 1970s
and later regretted having borrowed too heavily
from the American MBA, and taking too few
lessons from professions such as law,
architecture and medicine, which “all
consistently mixed formal learning with some
form of apprenticeship.”

“Bad management
theories are, at present,
destroying good
management practices” Sumantra Ghoshal.
The Academic Rebel

Sumantra Ghoshal´s early academic work focused on
matrix structures in multinational organizations, and the
"conflict and confusion" that reporting along both
geographical and functional lines created. His later work
grew more ambitious, and hence more important: the idea
that it is necessary to halt flawed economic theory from
contaminating organizations. This, he theorized, is
important since firms do not play on the periphery of
human life today, but have taken a central role.
His understanding of organizational issues led him to
conclude that “all management theory focusing on the
economic aspects of man to the exclusion of all others” is
incorrect at best. “A theory that assumes that managers
cannot be relied upon by shareholders can make
managers less reliable.” Such theory, he warned, would be
a self-fulfilling prophecy - a particularly stinging critique of
the output of a majority of his colleagues in business
schools that made this popular and gentle man
controversial.
To his death, Ghoshals fight was against the "narrow idea"
that led to today's management theory being "under-
socialized and one-dimensional, a parody of the human
condition more appropriate to a prison or a madhouse
than an institution which should be a force for good.”

Warren Bennis.
The Hemingway of Leadership
“The best thing
a leader can do
for a Great Group
is to allow its
members to discover
their greatness”

Warren Bennis is a laid-back, silver-haired professor
at the University of Southern California who has been
an influential authority on leadership for decades.
Beginning in the 1960s, Bennis challenged the
prevailing wisdom by showing that humanistic,
democratic-style leaders are better suited to dealing
with the complexity and change that characterize the
business environment. “Groups become great only
when everyone in them, leaders and members alike,
is free to do his or her absolute best”, he said.
His fundamental tenet is that leaders are made, not
born. According to Bennis, leadership is not a rare
skill; leaders are not at all supposed to be
charismatic, nor should they control and manipulate.
One of the famous phrases going back to him is the
notion that “Managers do things right. Leaders do
the right thing.”
Together with Ghoshal and Henry Mintzberg, Bennis
(whose CV includes a tenure as college president), is
one of the fiercest critics of current business
education: “Business schools have quietly adopted
an inappropriate, and ultimately self-defeating,
model of academic excellence.” he wrote. “No
curricular reforms will work until the scientific model
is replaced by a more appropriate model rooted in
the special requirements of a profession.”

“Let the flow
manage the processes,
and not let management
manage the flow” Taiichi Ohno.
Toyota

Taiichi Ohno is considered to be the father of the
Toyota Production System, TPS, which became known
as Lean, or Lean Manufacturing in the West. He wrote
several books about the system, including Workplace
Management. Possibly because he rose to be a public
figure, Ohno was denied the normal executive track at
Toyota and instead became a consultant with suppliers
in his later career.
As a young production engineer at Toyota, Ohno set
out to eradicate inefficiency and eliminate waste in the
part of production he was responsible for. This became
the core of TPS that he and others subsequently
developed between the mid-1940s and the mid-1970s.
Several elements of this system have become familiar,
like muda (the elimination of waste), jidoka (the
injection of quality) and kanban (the tags used as part
of a system of just-in-time stock control).
Ohno insisted we should never codify method - write
tools: for it is thinking, or the way how you
conceptualize your problem, that is the key.
“Why not make the work easier and more interesting”,
Ohno mused, “so that people do not have to sweat?
The Toyota style is not to create results by working
hard. It is a system that says there is no limit to
people’s creativity. People don’t go to Toyota to ‘work’,
they go there to ‘think’.”

“We don't manage
people here. There
is a fundamental
difference in
philosophy between
a commitment
and a command” Bill & Vieve Gore.
W.L.Gore

Bill & Vieve Gore founded W.L.Gore & Associates in 1958. The
company since gained international attention and respect for evolving
in one of the world´s most innovative companies, and one of the best
places to work. The Gores nurtured the firm from a home-based
business into a worldwide, 10.000 employee corporation, while
embedding into it a unique leadership style that emphasizes freedom,
fairness, commitment and consultative “waterline” decision-making
in unusually open and entrepreneurial work environments.
Bill Gore presented the concept of the firm´s unique structure and
cultural principles in a paper entitled The Lattice Organization – A
Philosophy of Enterprise that was distributed to Gore employees in
1976. It proposed a decentralized organization where everyone would
share the same title of “associate.” There would be neither chains of
command, nor predetermined channels of communication.
Leadership was disconnected from position and would always be
temporary only, replacing the idea of “bosses”: Associates choose to
work with leaders rather than have bosses assigned to them. The
firm pioneered concepts such as job sculpting: matching roles to
employees, not employees to job descriptions.
At Gore, hands-on product innovation and prototyping are
encouraged. Teams organize around opportunities, new product
concepts, or existing businesses. As teams evolve, leaders emerge
as they gain followership. This culture has shown to be a significant
contributor to associate satisfaction and retention, as well as to the
company´s economic success. The company motto: “Make money
and have fun”. The lattice became a state of mind.

“We must
eliminate
the organization's
bureaucratic complex”
Jan Wallander.
Handelsbanken

Dr. Jan Wallander joined Handelsbanken, Sweden's
biggest bank, as CEO in 1971, after a stint as CEO at a
small regional bank in the country's North.
Handelsbanken was in a crisis, both economically and in
terms of regulation. Wallander, an economist, accepted
the job under the condition that he would have carte
blanche for reinventing the firm: What he intended was,
in his own words, to “eliminate the bank's bureaucratic
complex”.
And so he did. In the following years, the organization’s
hierarchy was reduced to three managerial levels. Fixed-
target-setting, budgeting, and incentive systems were
discontinued, the marketing department dissolved, as
were many other central areas. There hasn´t been an
org chart, a bonus system, annual financial planning or
strategic planning of any sort at the firm for over 40
years. Instead, “the branch is the bank”, decision-
making is radically decentralized and consultative. No
product costing, volume or growth targets interfere with
the branches' autonomy and responsibility.
Handelsbanken now as around 10.000 employees and
has been Europe´s most successful bank for decades,
consistently outperforming competitors in any possible
measure, including ROE and the cost/income-ratio. It is
also one of the best companies to work for in its
markets, and has performed well during financial crises.

“We have a
‘strategic’ plan.
It´s called
doing things”
Herb Kelleher.
Southwest Airlines

Herb Kelleher co-founded Southwest Airlines in 1971,
against fierce resistance from established competitors.
The company´s low cost, no-frills business model would
reshape the US airline industry, making flying widely
affordable. Kelleher, a colorful, enjoyable and
charismatic character, headed the company as CEO until
2008.
Southwest has been the world´s most successful airline
by any possible measure, continuously earning money in
a notoriously loss-making industry. Says Kelleher: “The
business schools used to pose it as a conundrum. They
would say, `Well, who comes first? Your employees, your
shareholders, or your customers?' But it's not a
conundrum. Your employees come first. And if you treat
your employees right, guess what? Your customers
come back, and that makes your shareholders happy.
Start with employees and the rest follows from that.”
The company is proud to have few rules, and employees
are invited to break them if it is in customer´s best
interest. Southwest built a corporate culture that made
employees well known for taking themselves lightly - but
their jobs seriously: YouTube videos of Southwest cabin
personnel rapping in-flight announcements or singing
them to the tune of popular songs became legendary.
“The business of business is people. Yesterday, today,
and forever”, Kelleher says.

“Our ‘architecture’
is really the sum
of all the conventional
business practices
we avoid” Ricardo Semler,
Semco

Ricardo Semler took over control of Semco, the
company founded by his grandfather, at the age of
24. He had previously concluded an MBA at Harvard
Business School. Bright, jovial and fast-thinking, he
started not only to reinvent Semco´s business model,
but to radically transform its organization model as
well – creating a company guided by coherent,
democratic principles. It’s hard to find a single aspect
of traditional management that Semco did not either
blow up, reinvent, abolish or turn upside down -
including work hours, pay, and HR as a whole.
Semler achieved super-star status in his native Brazil
through his first book, Maverick, and provocative
columns in Sao Paulo´s Folha daily. About ten years
later, he wrote The Seven-Day Weekend, a book that
went even further in describing life in an organization
beyond management, and command-and-control.
Later, Semler would grow wary of the leadership
industry, and of being part of the international
speaker circuit, feeling he had achieved little there.
Today, he is an active investor, and also founder of
several social initiatives, among them Lumiar School,
a highly innovative, democratic school for children
aged to 14.

“The hard part
is to eliminate
the arrogance of
people at
headquarters”
Goetz Werner.
dm-drogerie markt

Goetz Werner co-founded dm-drogerie markt in 1973,
after having the insight that German drug stores needed
to adopt the discount retail model, while at the same time
widening their product portfolio dramatically. Today, dm
has more than 40.000 employees in 12 countries, and is
acknowledged as the leader of its industry, being more
effective than its competitors by any possible measure.
Initially, dm was managed rather conventionally. But after
an eye-opening experience at one of dm's stores, in
1991, Werner decided that the firm´s organization model
had to change - practically and philosophically. He
initiated a project called “Power to the branches”,
flattening formal hierarchy and decidedly devolving
decision-making to the branch network. dm pioneered
democratic and empowering organization practices in
employee recruiting, training, and development, and also
developed a value creation accounting system strikingly
similar to Handelsbanken´s. Today, dm´s branches
decide on everything from store design, work practices,
staffing, salaries, to product range, delivery frequency
and even pricing.
An intellectual and an autodidact, Werner led dm for 35
years. He never studied at a university, but headed the
department for Entrepreneurship at the University of
Karlsruhe for seven years. He is the most influential
advocate of the basic income movement in Germany.

“Businesses often
forget about the
culture, and ultimately,
they suffer for it
because you can't
deliver good
service from
unhappy employees” Tony Hsieh.
Zappos

Tony Hsieh is an entrepreneur and venture capitalist. He is CEO
of the online retailer Zappos.com. Prior to joining Zappos, Hsieh
co-founded internet advertiser LinkExchange. He sold the firm to
Microsoft for $265 million, an experience from which he says he
learned the importance of building a culture able to stay alive as
a company grows: “The culture of your company and your
company’s image are really just two sides of the same coin.”
Hsieh originally got involved with Zappos as an advisor and
investor in 1999, but ended up spending more and more time
with this company that was both the most fun and the most
promising out of the projects he was involved with. The Zappos
culture of “WOW” under his leadership would become defined
by: make your customers happier (through relentless focus on
customer service); make your employees happier (by focusing
more on company culture) and make you happier (to learn more
about the science of happiness).
Zappos pioneered revolutionary techniques not only to satisfy
customers, but also to work and run the team, and make more
profit – and in less time – than with the old formulas governing
large companies. Most famously, Zappos at some point started
to offer new employees a few thousand dollars to leave if they
were not satisfied with being part of the company. They also
created a Culture Book, where staff writes about what the
Zappos culture means to them: Every year, a new edition is
produced and distributed to prospective employees, suppliers
and even customers.

Larry Page & Sergey Brin,
Google
“The future is ambiguous,
so one way to deal with it
is to have the smartest
people working with you.
We are good at
provoking internal debate.”

Larry Page and Sergey Brin co-founded Google in
1998, while both attended Stanford University. The
company's mission statement from the outset was "to
organize the world's information and make it universally
accessible and useful” and the company's unofficial
slogan is "Don't be evil”.
Ever concerned with Google´s informality, spirit and
values, Page and Brin promised in a report to potential
investors in 2004 that the firm´s IPO would not change
the company's culture, and that it would not sacrifice
long-term impact for short-term financial results.
Google's corporate philosophy embodies such casual
principles as "you can make money without doing evil”,
"you can be serious without a suit”, and "work should
be challenging and the challenge should be fun”.
Even though Google is most famous for its innovative
and popular products, the firm´s major accomplishment
may be how it re-shaped the way we look at work.
Google impresses observers with its generous perks on
the Googleplex and in offices worldwide. It made 20%-
time (for innovative side-activities) a standard, and
turned all employees into shareholders. It has among
the world´s most rigorous selection processes,
practices total internal transparency and completely
flexible work-hours. The firm has consistently been one
of the world´s best companies to work for.

“Leaders don't
create followers,
they create
more leaders”
Tom Peters.
The Prophet of Transformation

Tom Peters was propelled to instant stardom in
1982 when, together with fellow McKinsey
consultant Bob Waterman, he published In
Search of Excellence - the book that would
become the world´s first business mega-best-
seller. In Search kick-started Peters´ career as a
notoriously angry preacher for continuous
change in a chaotic world. “Excellent firms
don't believe in excellence - only in constant
improvement and constant change”, he said.
Extraverted, dynamic and popular as he is,
Peters´ message has been by no means
shallow. And proved to have unusually broad
interests. Different than other leadership gurus,
Peters developed a fine understanding for
preparing management for the current era of
staggering change, starting in the mid-1970s.
"We create and then get caught up in, me
included, an endless parade of fads,” Peters
claims, "but while the world is indeed
changing, the basics of 'getting things done
through people,' my great passion, remain the
same as they were a hundred, or hundreds, of
years ago - and it is failures in implementation
that trip us up in 9 cases out of 10."

Alfie Kohn.
The Educated Sociologist
“If you want to
kill innovation,
reward it”

Alfie Kohn has been a leading voice in
education for more than two decades.
He is author of 11 books, among them
Punished by Rewards, in which he
addressed competition and "pop
behaviorism" in workplaces - as well
as in families and schools.
Kohn calls into question practices such
as the use of internal competition,
incentive programs and rewards,
conventional discipline, standardized
testing, grades, homework, and
traditional schooling. In his conviction,
learning should be organized around
"problems, projects, and questions --
rather than around lists of facts, skills,
and separate disciplines” in schools
and in organizations.
“Punishment and reward proceed from
basically the same psychological
model, one that conceives of
motivation as nothing more than the
manipulation of behavior.”

Gareth Morgan.
The Organization Metaphorist
“It is impossible
to develop
new styles of
organization and
management
while continuing
to think
in old ways”

Gareth Morgan is an author, professor and social
entrepreneur who pioneered the use of metaphor
to read, analyze and facilitate organizations to
change. And in fact thinking about organizations in
more varied and change-inducing ways. His most
well-known book, Images of Organization put him
and remains at the forefront of leadership thinking.
Morgan exposed that all theories of organization
and management are based on implicit metaphor,
and that metaphors play a paradoxical role: they
are vital to understanding and highlighting certain
aspects of organizations, while at the same time
they restrict understanding by back-grounding or
ignoring others. An example for this is the very
common metaphor that an organization is like a
machine. “Networked organizations are vital for
creating collective forms of intelligence that can
‘self-organize’ on a continuous basis”, he muses.
Morgan pioneered creative methods for dealing
with paradoxes and contradictions blocking
effective change, putting complexity theory to
action. “Many organizations are wasting millions
of dollars on programs designed to manage
change instead of finding creative breakthroughs
that can focus energy and lever what’s truly
important.”

“Organizational
effectiveness
does not lie in that
narrow-minded
concept called
rationality.
It lies in the blend
of clearheaded
logic and powerful
intuition” Henry Mintzberg.
The Constant Contrarian

Henry Mintzberg, throughout a career that started in
the early 1970s, wrote prolifically on subjects such as
organizational configurations, strategy and its
shortcomings, the theory of organization, and
management education. Always controversial, his
large body of written work at times tends to obfuscate
his radical insights and messages. Despite of this,
Mintzberg, a Canadian, is widely recognized as one of
the leading thinkers on leadership, and as the ultimate
maverick of today´s business academia.
In 2004, Mintzberg took the helm among business
education heretics, delivering Managers, not MBAs, a
book that outlines what is wrong with management
education (which is pretty much everything). He claims
that prestigious graduate management schools,
obsessed with numbers, analysis and overzealous
attempts to make management a science, are
damaging the discipline of organizational leadership.
Mintzberg advocates emphasis on post-graduate
programs that educate practicing managers (rather
than students with little real-world experience) by
relying upon action learning and insights from their
own problems and experiences. He co-founded and
runs two such education programs, McGill´s IMHL and
the independent IMPM. “Management is, above all, a
practice where art, science, and craft meet”, he says.

Peter Senge.
The Change Buddhist
“People don't
resist change.
They resist
being changed”

Peter Senge is credited with the idea of the learning
organization, based on his study of social systems and
the relationship of the whole to its constituent parts.
Organizations, he figured, obtain competitive advantage
from continuous learning, both individual and collective.
That necessarily would also involve continuous
unlearning, and forgetting old ways of doing things.
“The only sustainable competitive advantage is an
organization's ability to learn faster than the
competition.” he emphasized.
Senge rose to prominence with the publication in 1990
of The Fifth Discipline, the book that popularized the
notion of systems thinking in the business world.
Though profound, knowledgeable and no easy read, it
would sometimes be criticized as being “utopian”.
Senge wrote: “Business and human endeavors are
systems…we tend to focus on snapshots of isolated
parts of the system. And wonder why our deepest
problems never get solved.”
In his best work, Senge captured the essential aspects
of profound change, and transformation, while avoiding
the “pervasive reductionism” so common in western
thinking. “People with high levels of personal mastery...
cannot afford to choose between reason and intuition,
or head and heart, any more than they would choose to
walk on one leg or see with one eye” he says.

John P. Kotter.
The Change Master
“Difficulty to
manage relationships
sabotages more
business than
anything else - it is
not a question of
strategy that gets us
into trouble, it's a
question of emotions”

John P. Kotter was the youngest professor ever to be given
tenure at Harvard Business School. He spent years doing
serious research on the the nature and success factors of
leadership and change. The latter studies led him to write
several world-bestselling books, such as Leading Change, the
change fable Our Iceberg is Melting, and A Sense of Urgency -
all notable for their crisp prose and profound insight.
Kotter is widely regarded as the world’s foremost authority on
change, standing out as the premier voice on how
organizations actually “do” change – as opposed to just how
they should do it. Kotter acknowledged the cynicism, pain,
and fear people faced in implementing large-scale, profound
organizational change. He also armed them with a an
actionable eight-step, but still systemic framework for bringing
forward profound transformation in a turbulent world.
Kotter figured out how to lead change through deep, “social”
process, instead of superficial, managed processes, which
would inevitably lead to shortcomings and failure. While most
managers and consultants believe change happens by
making people think differently, Kotter says the key lies in
making them feel differently. He introduced a new dynamic:
“see – feel – change” that fuels action by showing people
potent reasons for change that spark their emotions.

Gary Hamel.
The Innovation Evangelist
“Management
is the least
efficient activity
in your organization”

Gary Hamel has been in pursuit of innovation
for decades. The former Harvard and now
London Business School professor authored
and co-authored a slash of books on strategy,
and co-originated popular management ideas,
such as core competences.
By the mid 2000s, after having to witness the
implosion of Enron, a company he had just
before lauded as heroes of business model
innovation, Hamel turned to what he began to
call “management innovation”. And thus to the
transformation of organization models. A
stream of HBR articles and a book entitled The
Future of Management set the tone for this re-
calibration and for what well might turn out be
his most significant work so far.
Hamel co- founded and heads the Management
Innovation Exchange, MIX, a progressive,
mostly virtual movement. His reputation as
“one of the most influential business thinkers“
allowed Hamel to pull a league of vocal
leadership innovators such as Semler, Mackey,
Mintzberg, Eric Schmidt of Google, and Terri
Kelley of W.L.Gore behind the idea.

Robin Fraser.
The Transformation Maverick
“There is an
alternative to
command-and-
control. Its
underpinning is
decentralization”

Robin Fraser had led a career as management
consultant spanning three decades when in
1998 he co-founded the Beyond Budgeting
Round Table, together with fellow researchers
Jeremy Hope and Peter Bunce.
Between 1998 and 2003, the BBRT
collaborative fleshed out the Beyond Budgeting
model, supported by in-depth case study
research and an international membership.
Much beyond the original vision of gaining
insights into better performance management,
the BBRT ended up outlining a “coherent and
principle-based alternative to command-and-
control” - and indeed to management itself.
Fraser and the BBRT had come across this
model at pioneering companies such as
Handelsbanken, and a dozen or two other
cases.
The first books on Beyond Budgeting appeared
in 2003. Fraser went on in his client work to
develop and refine a change methodology that
would be robust enough to transform any
organization towards the new model.

Gerhard Wohland.
The Systems Surveyor
“In dynamic
markets, the
center loses
its knowledge
superiority,
and steering
collapses.”

Gerhard Wohland is a practical systems theorist
with a background in physics. More rigorous
than others in working out, not around the
distinctions needed to explain dynamic-robust
performance, as compared to tayloristic
steering, he brings rationality into organizational
theory. “New distinctions are needed if you want
to think and describe dynamic phenomena” he
says. Wohlands work de-emotionalizes change,
transformation, and leadership.
After a career in software engineering, and
discovering that “computers are dead, but
people are actually alive and thus capable of
bringing about surprise” he turned to the theory
of complex dynamic systems for answers in
organizational development. “Most organizations
today suffer from dynamics, while a few are
capable of turning their ideas into other´s
market pressure. This high performance
mastery should be used as a transformational
force everywhere“. Wohland is author of the
book Thinking Tools of High Performance.
His work has yet to find a larger audience in the
English-speaking world.

This paper is work in progress - you can contribute
to its evolution. Your comments, feedback and hints
for improvement are welcome, and indeed desired.
Please also let us know if you think some hero might
be missing from the list. You may include citations,
texts, and photos, if you like.
You want to use this material for teaching,
or for educational purposes? Feel free to do so.
And please let us know about it. We make the
PowerPoint file to this paper available on demand.
Recommended reading to appreciate the linkages
between our heroes further are the books Productive
Workplaces by Marvin Weisbord, The Age of Heretics
by Art Kleiner, False Prophets by James Hoopes, and
Sumantra Ghoshals paper Bad Management
Theories.
Significant work contributions to this paper were
made by Silke Hermann and Valérya Carvalho.
This is a not-for-profit research paper published
for learning purposes. It was published by the not-
for-profit outfit betacodex.org.
Hero index:
1.  Alfie Kohn
2.  Bill & Vieve Gore
3.  Carl Gustav Jung
4.  Charles Handy
5.  Chris Argyris
6.  Douglas McGregor
7.  Eric Trist
8.  Frederick Taylor
9.  Gareth Morgan
10.  Gary Hamel
11.  Gerhard Wohland
12.  Goetz Werner
13.  Henry Mintzberg
14.  Herb Kelleher
15.  Jan Wallander
16.  John Kotter
17.  Kurt Lewin
18.  Larry Page & Sergey Brin
19.  Mary Parker Follett
20.  Niklas Luhmann
21.  Peter Drucker
22.  Peter Senge
23.  Ricardo Semler
24.  Robin Fraser
25.  Russell Ackoff
26.  Sumantra Ghoshal
27.  Taiichi Ohno
28.  Tom Peters
29.  Tony Hsieh
30.  Virginia Satir
31.  Warren Bennis
32.  W. Edwards Deming

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Get in touch with us for more information about leading BetaCodex transformation,
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Make it real!
Niels Pflaeging
contact@nielspflaeging.com
nielspflaeging.com
New York, Wiesbaden
Valérya Carvalho
mvaleriacarv@gmail.com
LinkedIn
São Paulo
Silke Hermann
silke.hermann@nsights-group.de
insights-group.de
Wiesbaden, Berlin, New York
Lars Vollmer
me@lars-vollmer.com
lars-vollmer.com
Hannover, Stuttgart

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