Laurie O’Donnell

I was interviewed for the April edition of Futurelab’s Vision e-zine by the roving educational technology journalist and commentator Merlin John.

The article is published under the heading ‘You ain’t seen nothing yet … Scotland’s ICT Renaissance‘.

I was asked to speak to a group of LTS staff this week on the subject of leadership and identify some ‘top tips’ for aspiring leaders. Here is a adaptation of what I came up with as a starter for discussion:

1. Be a lifelong learner – as soon as you think you know all the answers you can be sure you don’t. Read as much as you can and widely as you can (not just ‘how to’ stuff but also the classics of literature because they are timeless and deeply rooted in the human condition).
2. Know what you stand for – what do you believe, what are the values that underpin your work and why are you doing the job in the first place?
3. Recruit well – never employ someone if you are not sure about them. The best employees don’t need to be motivated, your job as a leader/manager is to make sure you don’t demotivate them (Jim Collins in ‘Good to Great’ talks about getting the right people on the bus and in the right seats on the bus).
4. Embrace complexity, ambiguity and change – that’s the way the world is so you might as well get used to it, deal with it and where possible manage, control and direct it.
5. Be as strategic as you possibly can – try to see the big picture, look to the long-term and try to take people with you (taking time to win hearts and minds pays dividends in the long run).
6. Know your role and what counts as success in your role – if you are leader then you can’t spend all of your time on management tasks. Any more than a shop assistant can spend all the time stocking the shelves and sweeping the floor. They need to serve customers you need to provide leadership.
7. Learn how to prioritise – everything you do is important because you are spending your valuable time doing it (and unless you are self employed somebody else’s money, eg the taxpayer). You need to be able to quickly identify exactly where you need to spend your time and try to deal with tasks before they become urgent, ie be proactive rather than reactive (Stephen Covey of the 7 Habits writes well on this). You need to develop a light touch. Land on the task that needs your attention give it exactly the right amount of attention and then move on without carrying any baggage to the next task.
8. Try to make your work serious fun but don’t take yourself too seriously – listen a lot and try to smile (even laugh) more.
9. [Late addition LO'D] Be as optimistic as you can be given the context you find yourself in – back to Jim Collins and what he calls the Stockdale Paradox, never lose the belief that you will in the end be successful but make sure you also confront the ‘brutal facts’ of your current situation and deal with them. Martin Selegman’s ‘Learned Optimism’ is also important here, blind optimism is not a rational position you sometimes need to be more pessimistic.

How do these look? What have I missed? Are they tips about leadership or something else?

[Further late addition: Interesting link on John Connell's blog to a pdf of the Little Book of Leadership.]

Got selected for jury duty today at Dundee Sheriff Court. This is not much of a surprise as I have been called four times and never selected so it was just a matter of time. The real surprise is that my colleague Derek Robertson not only had a citation for the same day but was selected for the same jury. I was picked out 2nd and Derek was 4th out of the 15.

The one good thing about jury duty (apart from the important civic duty that it represents) is that I have a very good reason for not driving to Glasgow on Friday. It’s one thing to have a rail strike but quite another to have no trains north of Stirling.

A good week over and sitting at my kitchen table with a glass of beer listening to Van Morrison and trying to stay out of the way of the teenagers on a sleepover.

Covered a few miles this week but it’s always great to get out and about even if that means not being able to service the demands of my inbox. The long trip to Torquay was really worthwhile. It gave me a (brief) chance to catch-up with developments in England. Listen to a seminar on OFSTED’s findings about ICT. Find out how our progress with Glow compares. Not to mention catch-up on my reading.

On the subject of reading I am really enjoying Chris Anderson’s The Long Tail (good summary in Wikipedia and well worth a read). Helped me to understand why it took us so long to close the Scottish Virtual Teacher Centre down. The sub-title ‘how endless choice is creating unlimited demand’ in our business means that we need to make sure that we continue to cater for minority interests, niche markets, specialisms etc and not just the big hits.

Norman Drummond sent me a really inspirational book ‘Tuesdays with Morrie’. Another one I would recommend.

January seems to have flashed past. Xmas and New Year are always busy, followed by most of a week in London at BETT, then my great friend and colleague John Connell left for a new post with CISCO, followed by the recently retired Stuart Robertson returning on short-term contract to help organise the Learning Festival … Meanwhile the end of the financial year approaches and we need to complete tasks, meet deadlines, chase invoices, deliver programmes and of course re-engineer our business processes . All fantastic stuff and I get paid to do this too
My football team, Hibs, have lost another captain to Celtic (third captain in three years – Ian Murray (Rangers), Gary Caldwell (Celtic) and Kevin Thompson (Celtic edit LO’D: oops meant Rangers, thanks Derek)) and still manged to progress in both cups and do reasonably well in the league. Just shows that investing in young players who want to play great football is the right thing to do! My hopes for John Collins as our new manager have already been exceeded.
Glow is getting closer to launch, almost there but not quite. We will come under much closer scrutiny as the dream becomes a reality and starts to feature higher on the agenda for the Scottish Executive, the local authorities and our other key stakeholders. Like every other ICT programme its success will lie in the hands of people. I am confident that our technology partner, the recently renamed RM Education, will deliver a working solution. The trick that we will need to pull off is to make sure that we develop the educational front-end and focus on realising benefits for learners and teachers. We have taken a balanced approach to Glow and been careful not to oversell it. We will see over the next period if this strategy has worked. A key strategic risk for Glow has always been managing expectations. Too high and many will be disappointed at the launch and difficult to win back. Too low and Glow will not even be on their radar.

Must dash but am going to be working with our computer games and learning Tsar Derek Robertson in the morning and hope he is going to advise me on how to develop my blog and screen out the stream of spam that has started to appear in my comments.

Yesterday afternoon I was doing some work in the house and listening to the football on Radio Scotland. The featured match was Hibs v Inverness Caley Thistle and as usual at this time of year a two minute silence was observed before kick-off. I always think about my paternal grandfather during these times.

I wear a silver ring on my left hand that my grandfather made out of a South African coin at the end of the so-called Great War. It has ‘11.11.18′ engraved on it beside his initials ‘M J O’D’. His experience of that war can only be described as horrific as he watched many of his friends die in trenches or be killed trying to cross the ‘no mans land’ between the trenches. He was wounded and I remember seeing the marks on his body caused by the shrapnel, some of which was still in his body.

His view was that World War 1 was entirely avoidable and caused by greed. He did not think very highly of Earl Haig and his strategy/tactic of ‘attrition’ which can be summed up as it doesn’t matter how many of our soldiers die as long as the enemy loses more.

He returned home after the war as a radical and, like many other Scots, commited to doing everything he could to make sure that ordinary men and women would never have to take up arms against each other again. Little did he know that just over 20 years later he would see his son join the army to take part in a war he supported, the war against facism.