Building a WikiLeaks That Would Last

I recently argued that while WikiLeaks' activities may be decentralized, it appears that its leadership under Julian Assange is not, and that makes the organization vulnerable. So, how might you build a better WikiLeaks?

Make it look more like Al Qaeda.

Given the controversial nature of its activities and the tendency to make powerful enemies, you’d need a WikiLeaks that could function well even when one or more pieces or people were out of commission. WikiLeaks would be better off if there were actually multiple WikiLeaks organizations. For example, WikiLeaks could be a network of regional groups unified by common goals, principles, and shared methods for doing the work, but functionally independent. In organizational parlance, this is what’s called an affiliate network, and it’s common in the nonprofit world and among social movements. Contrast an affiliate network with a branch structure where there are multiple locations that are wholly controlled by a central entity, kind of like McDonalds or Starbucks. (There's plenty of research about how affiliate models can best be used.)

This Lesson on Nonprofit Leadership Brought to You By MLK

How can you fix a rudderless organization without bringing in a real leader? In the nonprofit world, you can't.

It hasn’t gotten much front page treatment, but the Southern Christian Leadership Conference—Martin Luther King’s civil rights group—appears to be close to the end. There have been years of mismanagement, a lack of direction, some hanky-panky with funds, and a board rift that sent two board factions to court trying to decide which was the real one. After a judge ruled last year who was in charge, the plan was for Bernice King, MLK’s daughter, to become president. Well, now there’s a rift between the newly empowered board and King. Apparently she doesn’t want to be a figurehead, and the board wants to be in charge. I don’t necessarily think King was the SCLC’s savior. (MLK’s children have a pretty sketchy leadership history.) But I do know that in the nonprofit world, you never see a turnaround without a strong leader at the center. And interference from meddlesome boards is one of the main ways leadership is thwarted.

Why does leadership matter so much in the nonprofit world? In the for-profit world, making money is all that matters. There are many cases of mediocre business leaders turning around a company and managing to make money. (The history of U.S. car companies is full of these kinds of CEOs.) The typical nonprofit exists to address a social problem or serve a population (one place it can fail); it has to engage allies in addressing its core issues (a second place it can fail); it also has to please funders and monetary supporters (another place it can fail); and it has to keep mission-oriented employees engaged (yet one more place it can fail). That's a lot of things for a good leader to address, and virtually impossible to do successfully with weakness at the
center. 

Why WikiLeaks Won’t Make It From Here to There

Whether you agree or disagree with what WikiLeaks is up to these days, from an organizational perspective the group has a whiff of failure about it. Strangely enough, the champion of decentralized leaks to expose the world’s secrets seems too centralized around one person—Julian Assange—to be a lasting player once Assange is out of the picture.

WikiLeaks has explained where it’s trying to go:

Our goal is to bring important news and information to the public. We provide an innovative, secure and anonymous way for sources to leak information to our journalists (our electronic drop box). One of our most important activities is to publish original source material alongside our news stories so readers and historians alike can see evidence of the truth.

So how is Assange undermining this purpose? For an organization as controversial and dangerous as WikiLeaks to really last, its long-term aspirations can’t be dependent on a single person. Yet if you believe the New York Times (de facto WikiLeaks ally), Assange’s behavior makes it all about him. He’s the face of the organization, the guy who says he likes crushing the bastards, who lives undercover and constantly under threat of arrest or worse. And a thorough look at Assange's essays makes it pretty clear that the WikiLeaks founder has his own agenda, one that extends much farther than just exposing important secrets. He wants to make it impossible for governments or pieces of governments (Assange calls these conspiracies) to function by providing a constant torrent of leaks that prevent them from doing anything in secrecy.

Pretending To Be Adventure Boy: A Trip in a Blizzard (Part II)

Stopping in the ghostly arch

Day two of our trip to the Berkshires began with the blizzard still howling and virtually no visibility. We trudged our way over to the Mass MoCa complex, occasionally stumbling into snow drifts. (Luckily the museum did not close for the day, merely opened late.)

Mass MoCa is housed in a 19th century brick mill complex along a river. It has space for some of the largest museum art installations I’ve ever seen. They’re so big that the museum doesn’t keep most of them permanently. It rotates each art exhibition space around once a year. We first passed through a gallery of some vaguely creepy pieces covered with silk roses in dark wax and preserved peacocks hanging on a dead tree. Then up the stairs to something utterly surprising: a 150-foot-long gallery crossed by dozens of fishing filaments lit to create an arc of light points above a phantom tunnel. Wow. (The piece, Re-projection: Hoosac, by Tobias Putrih, echoes a local train tunnel known for its ghosts.)

Pretending To Be Adventure Boy: A Trip in a Blizzard (Part I)

Getting going to beat the snow

When it comes to braving extreme weather, I start thinking in a voice not so different from my grandmother: “There’s a storm coming? Snow? Wind? A blizzard? Why would you leave the house, Bubelah?”

So, should Lani and I drive across the state to the Berkshires on a day when there was a big ol’ blizzard warning? At least two different times—night before and morning of—we nearly said no. But it was 9 a.m. and the snow was just falling lightly. The main event wasn’t due until midday. We decided to act like hardy New Englanders (even though we’re really wimpy New Englanders) and get on the road. The grandmother part of me insisted that we pack plenty of food and add a snow shovel to our luggage, just in case.

The result: We zipped out of Boston and outran the storm for a good part of the day.

Not Getting There—Spammer Style

For a con artist, the old-fashioned pursuit of lucre could be a life-changing event...especially if it involves messages from an old flame and a sprinkling of Tuscany-inspired love poems.

If you’re someplace where you can let out a guffaw or two, check out this email interchange between a would-be conner and UK-based theater writer/director James Veitch. This con artist missed a few of the key rules of the trade (yes, there are rules of the trade), including the concept of a quick exit. I can’t remember the last time I got three full-throated cackles out of a New York Times piece.

[Photo courtesy of DitB]

"Just Show Up": The Uncle Paul Principle

Paul's focus shifted from the law to music composition

My Uncle Paul has a music studio set up in his house. The room is populated with drums – djembes, congas, snares, bass drums, and high hats. It’s also full of recording equipment he uses to compose his own music, meticulously assembled from samples and remixed with a computer and soundboard. Right now he has multiple albums – based on world beat, jazz, latin fusion, and whatever else suits his fancy – for sale through iTunes and other online services. What fascinates me is not where he is now but how he got there. Once he was a lawyer in Pittsburgh who dabbled in music; now he’s a musician who dabbles in law. That transition took more than 30 years. But it started with something pretty simple – just showing up.

A Crack in the Door in Congress? Looking for a Evidence of a Shift

I was once hired to help a group of organizations work together after years of squabbling and rivalry. The goal was to convince the organizations, which focused on similar mental health issues, to communicate smoothly, stop competing for money, and spend less time stepping on each other’s toes. Oh, and this had to be done through a two-day workshop. Yup, totally impossible.

All I could do was open the door a crack for the executives involved to change the way they related to one another. I helped them identify some shared motivations for the work they do. Then we used those motivations to generate just a few modest projects they agreed to pursue together—projects that allowed them to model behavior they might hope to repeat in the future.

So, can such a change happen with the partisan rancor Washington?

Uh, I have no idea. But I know what kind of evidence to look for. Does the door open a crack? Does something happen that causes rival sides to talk in terms of shared emotions and motivations? Much as some may wish it, I doubt the shooting of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords is such an event. But it has some of those elements. (Members of Congress rallying around a colleague, hoping to turn down the rhetoric level that leads nut cases to think violence is OK.) Do influential politicians on both sides of the aisle start to focus on a few shared goals – no matter how modest? We’ll see.

Resolutions To Change: Small Movement vs. Willpower

The Wall Street Journal regularly does stories about New Year’s resolutions, including this one. (Here’s the same reporter at it a year ago.) My problem is that these stories make it seem like the New Year is the one time to change. Not true, of course. But Sue Shellenbarger does put her finger one key fallacy—thinking that force of will is what will make change stick:

Most people get stuck thinking willpower is the answer. In a survey of 1,134 adults released last month by the American Psychological Association, willpower was the top reason people cited for failing to make positive changes.

But in fact, the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that helps you impose your will, especially when choosing among multiple options, can easily get tired out. Relying on continuous brute psychological force doesn’t make a good foundation for change.

Ira Glass — On Being Wrong

The fear of being wrong leads people to resist change. Then again, the state of actually being wrong is a big reason why people (and organizations) change. I’m fascinated by people who are willing to talk about their own wrongness and how they got past it.

Through an interview on Slate.com, you can see that the career of NPR’s Ira Glass was initially a tale of his dogged persistence in the face of his own incompetence. Glass used an extreme version of the Uncle Paul Principle ("Just Show Up"); he spent a decade showing up in radioland despite a total lack of outside encouragement. He burrowed his way step-by-step into skills needed for audio storytelling.

Everybody has a drama, a struggle that they went through, and for me it was turning myself from somebody who wasn't any good at this thing into somebody who's really, really good at it. I was a great intuitive story editor from the start, but writing, interviewing, performing on the radio—I was just terrible at all of that. All through my 20s, my parents were like, "Why are you doing this?" I wasn't making any money, and I was so bad at it. I was 19 when I started at NPR and I was 27 or 28 before I could competently put together a story that I had written. All that time, I just stubbornly pushed toward this thing because I thought it would work out in some form. I was right about that, but I was wrong about pretty much everything along the way.

New Year Brings Change to Government's Day-to-Day Managers, Not Just Top Dogs

We are asking for a lot from our government leaders right now: Help us out of this economic mess. Cut budgets. Create jobs. Keep essential services.

Governors and mayors act as communicators and direction-setters, creating a vision for where they are trying to lead both the people they govern and the government bureaucracy. They also act as managers, with responsibility for overseeing day-to-day activities by a range of people and departments. It’s rare that you find someone at the top who is able—or has the time—to do both roles. Businesses often have the same problem, which is why companies frequently have one person who is the president or CEO, and someone else who handles the day-to-day, usually with a title like chief operating officer (COO).

In companies, when things go off the rails, it can be as much a problem with execution as with vision. For example, Lehman Brothers was sunk by all the crazy maneuverings and risk that it took on to carry out what originally seemed like a basic vision—to be a leading Wall Street investment bank.

So shouldn’t there be a lot more scrutiny of the COO-types in the public sector? These are people with titles like chief of staff, deputy director, deputy secretary, deputy mayor, etc. The new year is bringing more than 20 new state governors, hundreds of mayors, and multiple changes at key federal departments and the White House. That means just as many new COO-types managing day-to-day execution at a time when the consequences of missteps are magnified.

Personal Change: The Role Dark Chocolate

I’m a dark chocolate guy. I like its depth, its round feel in the mouth. The sweet and slightly bitter combined. I didn’t set out to write a blog about shifts in perspective; I set out to write about chocolate. Over the past decade, there’s been an explosion of high-end artisanal chocolate-makers: people who are meticulous about getting involved in every piece of the chocolate production process – starting with close contacts with cocoa growers to machinery that lets you make chocolate in small, minutely adjusted batches. (They remind me of craft-brewed beer, only earlier in the cycle.)

My brainstorm was to explore the personalities in the world of artisanal chocolate through a sort of travel narrative. So, I talked to a lot of people and tried a lot of chocolate. What I found in almost every case was that the people who came to the world of artisanal chocolate started out doing something completely different. They were yacht captains, musicians, golf course managers, and engineers. Something just happened to each one of them on the way to wherever they were going that shifted their perspective. In future posts, I’ll tell some stories about individuals behind companies such as Taza Chocolate, Black Mountain Chocolate, and Bittersweet Café.

New Year's Resolutions: White House Edition

President Obama and some key staffers are planning out a White House reorganization. It’s partly in response to the Republicans holding more power in Congress and the impending re-election campaign. That said, the reorganization plan appears to have an awful lot of goals, some of which are, well, insanely broad. Parsing the New York Times, here are just a few:

• Get fresh perspectives from outside the White House echo chamber
• Streamline operations and reduce bureaucracy
• Improve internal communication
• Maximize the power of the executive branch
• Modernize the White House (whatever that means)
• Better seize opportunities available in divided government
• More effectively use the White House bully pulpit

Hmm.. it seems like you'd need the MVP of reorganization plans to do all that in one fell swoop.

[Photo courtesy of Elen Uska at http://www.flickr.com/photos/9590458@N03/3669948882/]

Learning to Change While Cleaning a Disaster Zone (aka my office)

Clear guidance for sorting crap

I am a horizontal filer. The desk in my office mainly exists as a repository for papers. So does my side table. So does the floor, for that matter. Pretty much every surface, in fact. (There’s enough stuff buried there to take core samples.) It’s not that I like it that way. It’s that I always seem to be busy, and the idea of cleaning up that whole place has been far too daunting to get started.

I know the big goal here. The question is, can I come up with a simple structure that lets me feel like I’m making progress from the very beginning, even if that progress will be slow? So here comes my first change principle: Keep it simple.

The most likely way for me to get bogged down is to try to file each thing in its proper place as I get to it. (This is a trap I’ve fallen into during several previous – and short-lived – attempts to clean the disaster zone.) My wife has a piece of advice to keep me focused at the right level: “Don’t try to find a cure for cancer buried in there somewhere; you just want to see the rug again.” The best way to keep it simple is to choose a few categories and just sort it at the top level. Get rid of the obvious junk, pile up the stuff for immediate action, and another pile for things that can wait. It amazed me how quickly I got rid of a huge volume of stuff. Not that I’m done yet, but the movement is palpable. I’ll check in on this project down the line and see if I can keep up the momentum.