WomensLearningStudio

their employees spontaneously started building wikis to document important discoveries and share scientific information.

They are replacing offices entirely. For people who work in virtual teams, apps like Slack are the workplace.

social media works in the office when it brings like-minded colleagues together for collaboration.

But when you work on a virtual team, your choice is either adopt the new software or stop coming to work. In other words, there is no real choice. You have to accept the new platform, regardless of the changes it brings

The one user survey the company has conducted, however, shows that the majority of Slack administrators believe their teams are up to 40 percent more productive.

Slack founder Stewart Butterfield has said the boost in productivity comes from eliminating e-mail, but Henderson scoffs at that idea. He thinks Slack teams are more productive because they can communicate better. Plus, they can catch up on what's happened while they were gone because conversations are held in searchable logs. Most of all, he says, Slack is about stepping up productivity by "reducing meetings." That's the "big one," Henderson emphasizes.

t it’s important to “play in traffic.

Rost found that writers on leadership had defined it in more than two hundred ways. Often, they glided between incompatible definitions within the same book: they argued that leaders should be simultaneously decisive and flexible, or visionary and open-minded. The closest they came to a consensus definition of leadership was the idea that it was “good management.” In practice, Rost wrote, “leadership is a word that has come to mean all things to all people.”

“The End of Leadership,” from 2012, Barbara Kellerman, a founding director of the Harvard Kennedy School’s Center for Public Leadership, wrote that “we don’t have much better an idea of how to grow good leaders, or of how to stop or at least slow bad leaders, than we did a hundred or even a thousand years ago.” She points out that, historically, the “trajectory” of leadership has been “about the devolution of power,” from the king to the voters, say, or the boss to the shareholders. In recent years, technological and economic changes like social media and globalization have made leaders less powerful.

Max Weber distinguished between the “charismatic” leadership of traditional societies and the “bureaucratic” leadership on offer in the industrialized world.

Khurana found that many companies passed over good internal candidates for C.E.O. in favor of “messiah” figures with exceptional charisma.

Charismatic C.E.O.s are often famous, and they make good copy;

y the mid-twentieth century

“process-based” approach. T

if you read a detailed, process-oriented account of Jobs’s career (“Becoming Steve Jobs,” by Brent Schlender and Rick Tetzeli, is particularly good), it’s clear that Jobs was a master of the leadership process. Time and time again, he gathered intelligence about the future of technology; surveyed the competition and refined his taste; set goals and assembled teams; tracked projects, intervening into even apparently trivial decisions; and followed through, considering the minute details of marketing and retail. Although Jobs had considerable charisma, his real edge was his thoughtful involvement in every step of an unusually expansive leadership process.

some organizations the candidate pool is heavily filtered: in the military, for example, everyone who aspires to command must jump through the same set of hoops. In Congress, though, you can vault in as a businessperson, or a veteran, or the scion of a political family.

whether times are bad enough to justify gambling on a dark-horse candidate.

Leadership BS

five virtues that are almost universally praised by popular leadership writers—modesty, authenticity, truthfulness, trustworthiness,

and selflessness—and argues that most real-world leaders ignore these virtues. (If anything, they tend to be narcissistic, back-stabbing, self-promoting shape-shifters.) To Pfeffer, the leadership industry is Orwellian.

Reading Samet’s anthology, one sees how starkly perspectival leadership is. From the inside, it often feels like a poorly improvised performance; leading is like starring in a lip-synched music video. The trick is to make it look convincing from the outside. And so the anthology takes pains to show how leaders react to the ambiguities of their roles. In one excerpt, from the memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant, Samet finds him marching toward an enemy camp. Grant, a newly minted colonel who has never commanded in combat, is terrified: “My heart kept getting higher and higher, until it felt to me as though it was in my throat.” When the camp comes into view, however, it’s deserted—the other commander, Grant surmises, “had been as much afraid of me as I had been of him.” Leaders, he realizes, are imagined to be fearless but aren’t; ideally, one might hide one’s fear while finding in it clues about what the enemy will do.

States like California have made funds available to provide connectivity and digital literacy in low-income housing developments.

32KeyFindings•About26%oftheoverallNTENCommunityconsiderstheirorganizationstobeatthe“Leading”levelontheTechnologyAdoptionSpectrum.Thisisaslightincreasecomparedtolastyear’ssurveyinwhich23%reportedthattheirorganizationswereatthetopendofthespectrum.•Aswe’veseeninpastyears,NTENMemberstendtoratetheirorganization’sapproachtotechnologydecisionshigheralongthespectrum:over82%ofcurrentNTENMembersindicatethattheirorganizationsareatthe“Operating”levelorabove,comparedto59%ofNon-members.•WhileLeadingorganizationsdotendtohavelargerannualoperatingbudgets—aswe’veseeninpreviousyears—wealsocontinuetofindLeadersacrossallbudgetsizes,including20%whocomefromorganizationswithbudgetslessthan$250K.•Weseeasignificantincreaseinthepercentageofrespondentswhoseorganizationshavetechnology-relatedtrainingandprofessionaldevelopmentallocationsintheirbudgets:71%thisyear,comparedto49%previously.•WhilethereisclearcorrelationamongNTENMembersbetweenTechnologyAdoption(TA)levelandhavingtechnology-relatedtrainingbudget–withnearly90%ofLeadingrespondentsindicatingtheyhavetechnology-trainingbudgets–wedon’tseecorrelationbetweenTAandtrainingbudgetsamongNon-members.ThismightsuggestthatthereismorevaluetoNTENMembership,intermsofTAlevel,thantrainingalone.•“Tobepartofthecommunityofnonprofitleaders”istheprimaryreasonrespondentsbecomeMembersofNTEN,followedcloselyby“generalprofessionaldevelopmentandtraining.”•Anewquestiononthisyear’ssurveyasksrespondentsabouttheirkeyprojectsandprioritiesoverthecomingtwelvemonths.Respondentsindicatedtheyweremostlikelytobe“Expandingexistingprogramorservices”inthecomingyear.•The“timeliness”ofNTENresourcesandinformationwasrankedhighestbyrespondentsintermsofNTENMembersatisfaction.•WecontinuetoseeExecutiveDirectors/CEOsasagrowingconstituencyamongtheCommunity,especiallyamongNon-members,andseemoreFundraising/DevelopmentprofessionalsparticipatingintheCommunityasMembersthisyear.•

funding”and“budget”—inotherwords,money—isakeyissueforrespondents.Likelastyear,weseethattheword“integration”appearsfrequently,especiallyamongresponsesbycurrentNTENMembers.ForNon-members,theword“management”showedupoften

struggling:“Wearestruggling;wehaveafailinginfrastructure,andourtechnologytimeandbudgetgenerallygotowardscreatingworkarounds,repairingoldequipment,andduplicatingtasks.”Functioning:“Wekeepthelightson;wehavebasicsystemsinplacetomeetimmediateneeds.Leadershipmakestechnologydecisionsbasedonefficiencies,withlittle-to-noinputfromstaff/consultant.”Operating:“Wekeepup;wehavestableinfrastructureandasetoftechnologypoliciesandpractices.Leadershipmakestechnologydecisionsbasedonstandardlevelsaccordingtoindustry/sectorinformationandgathersinputfromtechnologystaff/consultantbeforemakingfinaldecision.”Leading:“We’reinnovators;werecognizethattechnologyisaninvestmentinourmission,andleadershipintegratestechnologydecisionswithorganizationalstrategy.Technology-responsiblestaffareinvolvedinoverallstrategicplanning