Making a #hash of leadership

I’m a twenty-first century kinda Villain. I blog (of course), I use about seventeen different apps every day (game of Pointless, anyone?) and my main source of news is online.

But when it comes to taking Twitter seriously, forget about it.

Yes, I know that many of HR’s great and good are on Twitter all the time. And I know that it’s a handily quick way to pick up industry HR news. But practically all the ‘content’ on Twitter – particularly with regard to HR and non-HR ‘leadership’ – is the kind of schmaltzy cack that’s better off hidden inside a Hallmark card.

I suppose whenever you try to say anything in 140 characters or less, you end up diluting it so much that it becomes the intellectual equivalent of baby food. But that doesn’t seem to stop those sound-bitey leadership gurus from having a go.

So here’s my quiz for the week. Which of the following lines are taken from the corny, age-old motivational posters currently available at Successories, and which are from today’s SoMe leadership experts, such as Harvard Business School Professor Rosabeth Moss Kanter?

1. ‘The most effective way to do it is to do it.’
2. ‘A real leader faces the music, even when he doesn’t like the tune.’
3. ‘Our aspirations are our possibilities’.
4. ‘Things do not happen. They are made to happen.’
5. ‘Leap, aim high and build your wings on the way down.’
6. ‘Leadership is service, not the quest for power.’
7. ‘Problems become opportunities when the right people join together.’
8. ‘If you don’t feel it in your heart, no-one else will.’
9. ‘Some people dream of success, while others wake up and work hard at it.’
10. ‘One of the most courageous acts of leadership is to forgive.’

The odd numbers are the posters, the even numbers the experts.

The last one is Rosabeth’s. Not sure whether she means we should forgive fraud, racism, willful ignorance and arson in our teams. There’s probably a link to a blog that clarifies the thought. But until the tweet itself is less of a platitude and more of a usable insight, I’m unlikely to click on it.

In the meantime, back to Richard Osman and those obscure Oscar winners…

About the author

The Villain

The Villain is not here to be nice.