High Performance Leadership

An unintentional ethical lapse, uncorrected, leads to intentional ethical lapses. -- doug smith

Leaders must first understand ethical behavior, then operate ethically, in order to promote ethical behavior. People will believe what they see and feel.  -- doug smith 

After lurking casually for a few weeks (my training schedule always conflicted with the live discussions) I was finally able to attend one of the twice weekly zoom calls that Stephen Downes facilitates as part of Ethics, Analytics and the Duty of Care .  It was time well-spent. Since I've been "invisible" for most of the course, I mostly listened. There were numerous insights that sparked and endless trail of considerations.  One main point: our AI will be as ethical as we and society are (Downes). But what if the AI gets ahead of us? What if artificial intelligence moves from mimicking our own ethics (as varied as they are) into creating its own?  As the AI evolves (as Sherida pointed out) who claims the discussion? Who manages the management? We may well find ourselves governed by an ethic with didn't choose. I kept thinking of the article from Wired , The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete ,  which shows how ethics is influenced by...

  Should we be concerned with the ethics of artificial intelligence? Are the robots coming to get us? When I saw this meme on social media my reaction to "And so it begins..." was an instant "It's well under way." As my son Juan has often said, whenever robotics and AI intersect in the news, "haven't they seen any of the movies? This doesn't turn out well for humans..." The challenge to worrying about machine intelligence ethics is, what ethics do we think machines will select AND, will that choice be favorable to us? At the heart of the problem is our own feeble fumbling with ethics. In an ethical world how could we tolerate patience who lack the money for healthcare? How could we tolerate treating MOST people as an underclass? How can we reconcile human "ethics" that allow elected officials to prevent citizens from voting? And so it begins? It's not the machines we should fear, it's what we are feeding them. -- doug smith No...

  Ethical leadership requires diligence. Expect your integrity to be tested every single day. -- doug smith Read more on this here .

What goes into developing leadership character? Values - how you choose to live your life. Ethics -- how you operate. Morales -- how you respect other individuals.  It's also willingness to learn, willingness to hear feedback, willingness to listen. Add more to that (what do you think?) and the list of qualified leaders with positive character gets small. And yet, we need leaders with character. We need leaders who will do the right thing. We need leaders who consider the needs of the whole team, organization, and (yes) planet when making decisions.  Leadership character matters no matter what you lead. -- doug smith

When I worked at GE we were trained that integrity was our most important value, and that it meant following the spirit and letter of the law. No cutting corners. No fudging on the details. Compliance means following the spirit -- the intention -- of the value as well as the written detail. Real leaders never settle for anything that is technically not illegal. The next time you hear someone say "it's not technically illegal" what you might consider is: yes, it is. -- doug smith

Building your team's size requires that you also build your team's character. How do you build your team's character? By insisting on following your organization's values. By recruiting team members who have track records of operating with clarity, courage, compassion, and creativity. By living the integrity that you can then insist on, and by always telling the truth. Any corruption or bad habits in your team multiple as your team gets larger. Start where you are, and keep quality in your integrity. No cheating. No cutting corners. Total and complete integrity. When I worked for GE we were charged with working with integrity and that was defined as following the spirit and letter of the law. If it's not "technically" wrong, it is wrong. You can always figure out the spirit of a regulation -- what it is designed to support or to prevent. Go with that. If you can't figure it out, find someone who can. Building your team's character starts w...

Have you ever really read the complete terms of agreement on any device, any contract? If so, when was the last time that you did it? We skim over those things. We click "agree" as fast as we can scroll to it and move on with whatever it was that we wanted to do. That's high risk. You know that, I know that, and yet we do that anyway. It's hard to stop. But here's what I would like you (and me) to stop, to desist from, to resist. Stop doing that to others. Just don't do it. Be gentle. Be kind. Be honest. Be real. And (when you can) be brief. Overwhelming people;le with long, extensive, even convoluted terms of agreement is a low form of coercion and manipulation. Here's why: it's not an agreement, it's a weapon agreements that are unjust and unfair are NOT agreements it's not clever or smart to trick someone (say, your customer) into signing away rights -- it's evil and it's theft the ability to take advantage of someon...