PERF RMANCE 04 - The Performance Portal - Ernst & Young

Coolfarming
The second principle is to seed a
community with ideas, to come up with the
new ideas that are outside the box. This
entails thinking the unthinkable, engaging
others in collective brainstorming and
establishing a common vision.
Third, mandate intrinsic motivation and
thus unleash swarm creativity. This ties in
with giving power to the community, letting
it self-organize while providing a nurturing
ground for creative ideas to flower. Trends
can be created with good ideas. Set an
innovative idea free and share knowledge
for free in a community or network. If
the community accepts the new idea and
the community begins to grow, the idea
becomes a new trend. Coolfarmers provide
everything at their disposal to potential
swarms to be creative, and then they let
swarm creativity happen. In a sense, they
“mandate” swarms into action to create
something cool.
The fourth principle is to recruit
trendsetters. To create intrinsically
motivated teams, they need
crystallization points in the form of
leaders who embed themselves in their
networks not to be stars but to function
as galaxies. These kinds of leaders have
succeeded in setting trends that literally
changed the world at zero budgets.
COINs ask for a new style of selforganizing,
emergent leadership. Leaders
of self-organizing swarms need to be
“balloon pilots,” not “race car drivers.”
They need to know how to nurture and
create an environment of innovation.
Such leaders must be able to let go,
empowering individual and swarm
creativity by personal example and
trust, not by organizational authority.
This new style of leadership is based
not on best practices, not on cook book
recipes of how to do it one right way,
but on creativity — individual creativity,
and swarm creativity. The step I am
proposing is a bold one — empowering
individual people at the company, instead
of collecting power in the hand of the chief
executive who is also the chief executor.
In this new type of organization, there
is no chief executor anymore, this role
has been given away to the stakeholders
of the company. Stakeholders are the
employees, the customers, the suppliers
and the management of the company. The
managers are not CEOs anymore, but they
are “chief creators,” chief creative officers.
Being highly creative themselves, they
stand out by unleashing the creativity of
their swarm — their employees, their lead
users, their customers and anybody they
touch through their vision and products.
If we look at the leaders who stand out
today, Steve Jobs, Larry Page and Sergey
Brin, founders of Google, Mark Zuckerberg
at Facebook, or Oprah Winfrey, they are
all leaders of multibillion-dollar businesses
which are highly resilient in today’s difficult
economic climate. None of these leaders
has come up the conventional management
way. They were never the CEOs of their
companies in the conventional sense,
never the chief executors. Rather, they
are the chief creators of their respective
enterprises. They might have assumed
the CEO title to make them recognizable
in their role to the rest of the world.
What they really did, however, is not
execute somebody else’s strategy, but
create radically new products, and create
real, sustainable value. They did what
they thought would be the right thing;
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