avatarDr Michael Heng

Summary

The text discusses the concept of Blue Leadership, emphasizing its inclusivity and adaptability in an era of uncertainty and change, driven by four core passions: Strategy, Service, People, and Performance.

Abstract

Blue Leadership is presented as an inclusive, non-elitist approach to modern leadership that is particularly suited to navigating the complexities of today's world. This leadership style is characterized by a blend of strategic foresight, a deep commitment to service, an understanding of the intrinsic value of people, and a relentless pursuit of performance excellence. The article delves into the essence of each of the four passions that define Blue Leadership, illustrating how they collectively foster a culture of continuous learning, adaptability, and sustainable success. The Blue Leader is portrayed as a visionary who not only imagines a better future but also actively engages in shaping it through responsible stewardship, innovative strategy, and the empowerment of individuals within the organization.

Opinions

  • Inclusivity in Leadership: The text conveys the opinion that everyone has the potential to be a leader, and Blue Leadership is accessible to all, rejecting the notion of leadership as an elite attribute.

  • Passion as a Driving Force: It is believed that love and passion are the life essence of leadership, providing the energy and motivation to drive creativity and achieve excellence.

  • Leadership as a Learning Journey: The article suggests that leadership skills are not innate but are learned through conscious, deliberate, and continuous experiential learning aimed at self-mastery.

  • Strategic Focus: Blue Leaders are seen as individuals who are preoccupied with strategic reflections and analytics, constantly adapting to change and aligning their organizations with a clear vision.

  • Service Orientation: There is an emphasis on the responsibility of organizations to serve society and use resources ethically, with Blue Leaders committed to creating opportunities for happiness and improving the quality of life.

  • People-Centric Approach: The text opines that employees are the strategic capital of an organization and should be treated as assets rather than expenses, with leadership focused on developing human potential.

  • Performance Excellence: The pursuit of business performance excellence is viewed as a system of values, planning, and responsibilities that drive strategic thinking and actions, ensuring an enduring competitive edge.

  • Cultural Transformation: The article posits that Blue Leaders transform organizational culture by embodying and expressing the core passions, thereby creating a shared sense of purpose and alignment within the organization.

  • Adaptation to Change: The text underscores the importance of adaptability and learning in leadership, particularly in an era characterized by uncertainty and permanent turbulent change.

Unpacking the Passions of Blue Leaders

Understanding What’s Driving Effective Modern Leadership

Illustration by Author

Everyone can be a leader. Blue Leadership is inclusive and non-elitist. Blue Leadership is best suited for this era of uncertainty and permanent turbulent change.

The Blue Leader is constructed from blending the research and writings on strategy, leadership, social responsibility, people management, sustainability, and business excellence.

Passions are feelings of love. Love is a combination of powerful emotions embodying boundless energy that creates and drives creativity and accelerates motivation often to and beyond the point of human endurance. Passion is the life essence of leadership. Leadership is essentially a particular passion to build better, lasting organisations through mobilizing and developing people followers to their best potential as validated by increasing levels of excellence in individual, group and community performance.

Love ignites like fire. The ecstatic love inherent in Blue Leaders energises and motivates others through the compelling influence of their visions of future possibilities. Blue Leaders imagine and visualize what their organisations can be. The passions in the pursuit of purposeful organizational goals or destination(s) provide the life energy driving their vision(s) as they lead and engage their people followers in navigating through respective terrains of opportunity. The passions of Blue leaders thus provide the basis for understanding the nature and purpose of the organizational goal, which is also the linchpin of effective Blue Strategy.

Blue Leadership is nurtured and cultivated by perfecting the skills necessary to materialize its essential 4 passions through conscious, deliberate, and continuous experiential learning towards the attainment of self-mastery. Blue Leaders are not genetically born since everyone is already a leader of sorts at birth. The leadership journey of Blue Leaders is one of learning rather than training and education. The essential skills of Blue Leadership are learned rather than taught.

The 4 Passions of Blue Leaders are Strategy, Service, People, and Performance. They are characterized by the values and orientations commonly associated respectively with each passion, as visualized in the following:

Illustration by Author

The Passion for Strategy

The basic purpose of strategy is to empower an organisation to create its own future, instead of just letting it happen. It is the responsibility of Blue Leaders to create, develop and maintain a motivational climate conducive to superior work performance and enhanced organisational effectiveness aligned to visionary purpose.

The core personal mission of Blue Leaders is to deal with strategy amidst change and to build adaptive change-responsive organisations. The turbulent dynamics in their respective terrains of opportunity define the urgency of their flexible adaptiveness, the goal(s) of their organisations, and the imperative for new sets of skills and attitudes for the impactful execution of strategy. The Blue Leader is constantly preoccupied with strategic reflections and analytics among his prime activities of experiential reality learning.

Successful companies led by Blue Leaders know how to keep moving and always stay ahead of other actors who are often self-anointed competitors. Like in any competition, advantages are also usually brief, dynamic, and constantly re-calibrating. Enduring sustainable advantages become the key to creating long-term exceptional returns on investments in capital, people, markets, and technology.

Leadership is not the manipulation of material objects, services and people. Exceptional leadership has never been merely the coordination of resources. In the execution of Blue Strategy, Blue Leaders provide exceptional leadership and compelling vision, foster team development, encourage innovations from competing ideas as well as generate a unique motivating sense of direction in purposeful action. Effective learning harvests the needs from the challenges and prospects of their terrain of opportunity in the operating environment to distill and define the specific competencies demanded of people, partners, and stakeholders for excellent holistic performance.

The Strategic Passion of Blue Leaders is described by keywords such as time, strategy, imagination, history, entrepreneurship, innovation, learning, planning, constant change, and empathy.

The Passion for Service

Blue Leaders recognize that they use resources belonging to society and other people such as funds, people, technologies, land, facilities, and services. They believe that organisations and businesses should therefore serve society and others in return for the use of its resources, albeit having paid for them to some extent. Blue Leaders are committed to serving society and its communities by appreciating its diversity, respecting the rights and needs of others, especially the vulnerable, powerless, and disadvantaged, and acting in a manner that does not harm the environment.

The Blue Leader is a corporate citizen, first and always. Blue Leaders eagerly reach out to embrace the privileged responsibility of a sustainable and wholesome global society by innovating products and services, supporting programs and efforts, improving the quality of life, and creating opportunities for happiness for the largest number in the world. To them, these are not regarded as charitable or philanthropic, or tax-deductible activities. Rather, they are the natural considerations in their exercise of Blue Leadership.

As an example; a Blue Leader responded to the inconvenient truth of impending global climatic implosion by creating his business organization from the vision of a brave new world with an abundant energy future where one and all would have access to the clean and limitless natural powers around us. His “Blue” Company supports unique value innovations to harness renewable natural energy, and deploy developing technologies to develop clean, cost-effective alternative energy methods. The Blue Leader embraces a natural partnership with the environment to bridge the nexus between sustainability and profitability to make them his twin business goals.

Decades earlier, another Blue Leader also created a socially responsible company, a global brand today, to function in accordance with his unique philosophy based on the Principles of Contribution to Society; Fairness and Honesty; Co-operation and Team Spirit; Untiring Efforts for Improvement; Courtesy and Humility; Adaptability; and Gratitude.

The Service Passion in Blue Leaders conceives leadership as service to others beyond themselves. Their Service Passion creates in them the natural desire and conscious aspiration to lead. The Service Passion also explains their readiness and willingness to engage and communicate with their stakeholders — employees, vendors, partners as well as customers and society — with respect, anticipation, consideration, courtesy, tact, and empathy.

The Service Passion of Blue Leaders is marked by keywords such as stewardship, responsibility, sharing, abundance mindset, voluntarism, globalism, consideration, and servanthood.

The Passion for People

Blue Leaders regard their employees to be the strategic capital resource which they truly are. Staffs are core corporate assets and expenditures on human capital development are investments in the conventional sense. They have also concluded that conventional accounting systems have wrongly treated people essentially as a cost and expense item on their financial balance sheet, and therefore the only logical leadership choices are to constantly reduce and eliminate the human share of the commercial profit pie reserved exclusively for investors and shareholders. Over decades, such thinking and orientations have damaged the trust relations between the leader and the led. Blue Leadership restores and re-calibrates these trusts into awesome relationships.

The People Passion of Blue Leaders understands that work experiences and management controls are important socialising influences. It is from their subjective orientation within the organisation that they perceive an understanding of their “worth” or value to the organisation.

The Way or Tao of Blue Leadership eliminates the specific organisational practices that interfere with the conscious efforts of its members to focus work so as to derive a greater sense of mission accomplishment. The resultant climate of partnership instills a collective commitment to excellence and encourages their people to develop self-discipline and self-mastery for the achievement of mission purpose to reach the ultimate destination of corporate vision.

People are the ultimate high technology. They are the main actors in strategy, creating the future of the company instead of just letting it happen. The fusion of People and Strategic Passions is blended by Blue Leaders as they navigate the trends of globalisation, glocal competition, and constantly shifting economic, social, and market psychometric and psychographic conditions in their terrains of opportunity. To Blue Leaders, people as human capital appear to be the only asset capable of producing the definitive and enduring sustainable edge to assure continuous survival.

The People Passion of Blue Leaders fosters and nurtures an organizational culture that materialises the beliefs, values, norms and behaviors of Blue Leadership. The Way or Tao of Blue Leadership provides the core character of “Blue” organisational culture. The cohesiveness of organisational culture is the extent to which its members have internalised the beliefs, attitudes, and values of Blue Leaders within the organisation, as manifested in individual and collective behaviors. It is thus important to understand that culture is what the organisation “is”, and not something that the organisation “has”.

Organisations led by Blue Leaders behave and act as a consequence of how they interpret the world according to their Strategic, Service, and other Passions. Sociologically, it is their enactment and interpretation process that constitutes the essential dynamics of organisational culture as the 4 Blue Passions, together, transmit and diffuse throughout the organization.

Organisational culture is not a static ‘thing’ but that which everyone is constantly creating, affirming, and expressing. As they perfect their skills in The Way or Tao of Blue Leadership, employees mutually socialize one another into alignment with the Passions and their Orientations. Blue Leaders transform their organizational culture through this “culture making” or “sense-making” process to build particularly profound meaning by using their passions and orientations to provide a consistent sense-making worldview to empower conscious reality-learning in their followers through “knowing what I think when I see what I say”.

The People Passion of Blue Leaders is marked by keywords such as diversity, respect, stakeholders, family, operations, trust, empowerment, teamwork, partnership, and decent work.

The Passion for Performance

Business performance excellence involves a system of corporate values, planning capabilities, and organisational responsibilities that drive strategic thinking and actions with operational decision-making at all levels and across functional lines of authority in the company. The totality nature of organisational strategic response to the dynamic business environment of the terrain of opportunity assures an enduring sustainable edge.

The Way or Tao of Blue Leadership is the action frame of a complete, patterned reaction or response to the management of business excellence as well as the socio-psychological stress, dissonance, and disequilibria engendered in an era of uncertainty and permanent turbulent change revealed by the emergent realities constructed by Blue Leaders.

Organisational performance under new social realities thus involves the successful management of change by projecting visionary Blue Leadership and instills confidence and a sense of direction out of the chaos created to bring about a new social order and equilibrium within the organisation. The Passion for Performance directs the thrust of change efforts to evolve a corporate performance culture where there is a prevalent sense of continuous learning and improvements, and where permanent change has become a way of life.

Blue Leaders nurture the performance culture with their Passion for Performance to personify the organisation. Eventually, the high-performance culture birthed by Blue Leaders “becomes” the organisation, rather than what it “has”. The high-performance culture led by Blue Leadership provides the solutions to motivation and control by specifying broad, tacitly understood rules — “the way we do things around here” — for appropriate action under unspecified contingencies.

The historically constructed culture of The Way or Tao of Blue Leadership is an adequately sufficient vehicle for reasoning, perception, feeling, and understanding in the midst of permanent and turbulent change, notwithstanding the reality of multiple perspectives within an organisation.

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Leadership
Motivation
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Personal Development
Self Improvement
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