Hasta La Gadget!

Those of us who are looking to improve our leadership skills can easily get overwhelmed by the sea of options when trying to decide what advice to follow. A search on Amazon.com for “leadership” will bring back 155,000+ results and even if you refine your search (“business leadership” for example), you will still be staring down the barrel of over 23,000 choices. Most of us must rely on a good recommendation or are drawn to a particular title, book cover or familiar author in order to further narrow our selection. This challenge is compounded once we settle on our final decision and it becomes time to actually consume the information.

The best advice in the world is useless if it’s not what I consider “practically actionable.” Meaning that if it’s too difficult or lengthy to remember and implement, regardless of how incredible it is, it will quickly become “some good points” that we do very little with. Trying to remember AND implement 10-45 laws of something or 100 best tips or rules of anything is impractical and often impossible.

Leadership needs a backbone to build off of before you consider layering on additional concepts and skills.

In his book David and Goliath, Malcolm Gladwell articulates a very simple truth: “When people in authority want the rest of us to behave, it matters – first and foremost – how they behave.” This shouldn’t be hastily tossed into the lead by example category. As Gladwell explains, “This is called the principle of legitimacy, and legitimacy is based on three things:

1. Voice – The people who are asked to obey authority have to feel like they have a voice – that if they speak up – they will be heard.
2. Fair – There has to be a reasonable expectation that the rules tomorrow are going to be roughly the same as the rules today.
3. Predictable – The authority has to be fair. It can’t treat one group differently from another.”

If your intention is to hone your leadership skills, I urge you to start from the ground up. First establish your core leadership values and work to engrain them in your DNA. This will give you the proper foundation for every leadership role you find yourself in. For me, it was deciding that all things leadership would be put to the “legitimacy” test. This is when my perspective completely changed. It was as if the grayness of my personal leadership philosophy had suddenly become black and white. I no longer found myself trying to decide if a particular situation was at “level 2 or 3” from a recent book or matched “rule #17.” Clarity and awareness are both incredibly powerful. I now had both.

Repetition is the mother of retention – and for me, the only way I will consistently practice a new behavior is to have it staring me in the face until it sticks. The words VOICE, PREDICTABLE, FAIR are boldly written on the top of the giant white board within eyeshot of my desk. For the last 9 months I have been running every perceivable leadership situation I find myself involved in through these 3 criteria; both proactively and after the fact. This not only goes for the sales team I am responsible for leading, but in the father role with my 7-year-old daughter along with leaders I witness interacting with others.

What has adopting this litmus test provided?

1. Incredible clarity for decision making in leadership situations
2. The ability to make significantly faster leadership decisions
3. The ability to quickly spot a great leader with certainty
4. A framework to coach others through poor leadership experiences
5. A true north to build the rest of my leadership journey on

The most powerful and successful concepts are simplistic at their core. I encourage you to give your own leadership a 30-day “legitimacy” test and review the outcome. Regardless of whether you ultimately adopt these or some other core values for yourself, you should build a proper foundation by getting clarion clear on your personal leadership’s true north.

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Twitter: @derekjlampert
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Email: derekjlampert@gmail.com

Artists from across Europe are the focus of a new show which opened last week at Oslo’s Astrup Fearnley Museet. Appropriately called Europe, Europe, the exhibition includes forty artists from eight European cities, celebrating the diversity of the close-knit continent. Curated by Hans-Ulrich Obrist, Thomas Boutoux and Gunnar B. Kvaran, the exhibition features artists under the age of 35 from Oslo, Berlin, Brussels, Paris, London, Zürich, Prague and Lisbon/Porto. In addition to a presence at the Astrup Fearnley Museet, the exhibition will have satellite spaces in collaboration with other museums and presenting institutions from the eight European cities, subsequently covering the continent by the end of the three-year project.

For the last decade, the privately owned Astrup Fearnley Museet has created an innovative artistic program that has included exhibitions highlighting various regions around the globe and giving the artists and art scenes in each country exposure in Norway. The newest exhibition focuses on Europe and gathers the expertise of three world-renowned curators to contemplate a changing Europe.  Despite the culturally rich continent packed with diverse nations speaking a multitude of languages, the unification of the European Union has served to blur these lines, enabling easier mobility by citizens, namely artists. With this access, artists may now establish themselves in new countries and new cities, absorbing new cultural influences without immigration red tape. This new polycentrism, coupled with the effects of the Bologna Agreement that reformed European art schools to concentrate on research-based education, the continent is producing artists with a wide range of international influences, as well as intellectual backgrounds.

Europe, Europe explores this mobility and fluidity of artists from country to country, honing in on artists who may not have artistic allegiance to their home countries or the structured rules that once dictated the art world. Along with choosing artists whose work satisfy these open-minded criteria, the curators have chosen to execute the exhibition with an “organic curatorial model,” allowing the exhibition to change over time, just as Europe has. After three years of research, the exhibition opened at Astrup Fearnley, before branching off into its alternative spaces including the New Theater in Berlin (opens September 25), Abilene in Belgium (opens October 9), A Certain Lack of Coherence in Porto (opens October 23), Arcadia Missa in London (opens November 6), 1857 Norway in Oslo (open November 20), Treize in Paris (opens December 4), ETC Gallery in Prague (opens January 8) and HA-CIE-ND-A in Zürich (opens January 22, 2015.)

Aside from creating a program that goes beyond the museum’s walls, the three curators have also used an innovative process for selecting artists. In addition to the artists that Obrist, Boutoux and Kvaran have chosen, the trio has appointed a local expert/correspondent from each of the eight cities as an advisor. These correspondents have in turn chosen two additional artists for the exhibition from their respective districts, as well as contributed personal insight to a publication on the exhibition put out by the museum. This well-rounded approach has allowed for elements from each featured city to infiltrate the main exhibition in Oslo.

Many of the artists selected by the curators blend old and new media to create a commentary on the past and present, and additionally to cross cultural influences. One such artist is Camille Henrot, from Paris. Working in video, sculpture, drawing and photographs, Henrot explores symbols and myths from history, reinterpreted and recontextualised into modernity with the presence of her images displayed on computer screens. For Europe, Europe, the curators have chosen two of Henrot’s works. Living Underwater features a 41-second video of a swimmer underwater in a pool, the screen hidden in an old fashioned easel, which references the tradition of painting coupled with the new media of video art. The Descendants of Pirogues explores Henrot’s anthropological and allegorical side, with a sculptural installation of a boat that seems to push through the middle of the gallery wall.

Exploring new media and video further is Ed Atkins‘ Warm, Warm, Warm Spring Mouths, a computer generated digital animation piece that confronts the new medium itself. In the video, Atkins’ protagonist is submerged in water at the bottom of the ocean. Atkins shows the character’s flaws by revealing the flaws in digital animation, which is often categorized by the rendering of hair. Atkins’ character fluctuates between perfection (which reads as eerily realistic) to flawed — giving away the unreal nature of the character.  The line between real and unreal allows the viewer to contemplate not only his narrative, but the nature of digital animation as an accepted art form itself.

Portuguese artist André Romão’s work also references myths and historical tales, often with an undercurrent of violence. His piece Europa draws on the ancient Greek myth of the powerful woman for which the continent was named. The piece shows Zeus, as a bull, tricking Europa into jumping on his back, before he abducts her and brings her to Crete. The tale ends with Europa falling in love with Zeus and becoming Queen of Crete. The curators use this piece as a parallel between Europa’s story and the displacement and migration of artists throughout Europe, who often begrudgingly leave their homes due to economic or creative reasons in order to pursue happiness and success in foreign places.

  

While Romão looks to the past, Simon Denny‘s New Management looks to the present issues surrounding business and bureaucracy.  The installation refers specifically to a meeting of Samsung executives and investors that took place in Frankfurt in 1993; preceding the company’s dominance in mobile and TV production in Korea and then into Europe. Denny pinpoints this board meeting as the catalyst that introduced the South Korean company to the western world. The installation acts as an homage and memorial to an unauthorized point in history that to Denny transformed the business model between South Korea and Europe.

Europe, Europe’s initial impact will resound as the satellite installations open with fresh new work across the continent. The exhibition at Astrup Fearnley Museet itself will continue to influence the audience in Oslo, with a Performance Weekend November 1-2, and a Film Weekend focusing on video artists on November 15 and 16.

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Get ready to see your favorite rapper repping products they might never have known about whilst amongst the living. Universal Music Group has announced that they’ll be teaming up with ad-placement group Mirriad and Havas Agency to modify music videos to include advertisements. This in-content generator of revenue is said to bypass “the Skip Generation” – aka those that skip … Continue reading

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