Microtrends on Muslims
The first book I ever bought for my Kindle is “Microtrends” by Mark Penn. It is the perfect book for commuting because each of its chapters is a few pages long and is a self-contained microtrend about some aspect of American society. It makes for perfect information snacks but I must admit that I have almost missed my train stop a couple of times because I just wanted to sit down and read the next chapter.
What is fascinating is just how diverse this shows American society to be. “Cougars” and “Internet Marrieds”, “Stained Glass Ceiling Breakers” and “Pro-Semites”, “Southpaws Unbound” and “Hard of Hearers”, “Late-Breaking Gays” and “Dutiful Sons”, the book makes you want to “ask around or watch people on a busy street corner for a few minutes, and you will spot them soon enough”.
But for this post, I wanted to discuss the “Moderate Muslims” chapter. I read this at the time that Bush visited Bahrain and the other Gulf states. On the train, as I read my Kindle, I could see the front page of the “Express“, the local free daily, with photographs of (very cute) Israeli children waving Israeli and American flags. On page seven, however, was some masked gunman with a burning American flag. I am not sure what he was thinking (was he thinking?) but it was clear to me who I would prefer to discuss the Middle East peace process with. So it is no surprise that:
Almost half of Americans have a negative view of Islam. When asked to rate their views of all major religions, only Scientology ranks lower.
The book was written before Tom Cruise’s latest Scientology gem, so the Muslims may well have inched further ahead, but it is still a bad place to be. What is interesting, given the project I am currently working on, is that:
If one knows a Muslim personally, one’s views are moderated – but only a little more than one-third of Americans do know a Muslim personally.
Here is why knowing a Muslim makes a difference:
Nearly half (46 percent) of Americans believe that Islam encourages violence more than other religions – up from the 35 percent who felt that way six months after the 2001 attacks. More than half of Americans say Muslims are not respectful of wormen. Forty-four percent say Muslims are too extreme in their religious beliefs. Twenty-two percent say they wouldn’t want a Muslim living next door.
But if you look at an actual demographic portrait of Muslims in America, there’s quite a contrasting picture.
Americans think Muslims are violent? An overwhelming 81 percent of American Muslims support gun control, compared to barely half of Americans who do. Muslims are religiously extreme? Twenty-five percent of Muslims say they attend religious services on a weekly basis – virtually identical to the 26 percent of Americans overall who say they don’t.[...]
In fact, if I were to describe for you a cohort of Americans who got married at a rate of 70 percent, registered to vote at a rate of 82 percent, were college-educated at a rate of 59 percent, and were on average making more than $50,000 a year – what group would you guess they were?
Because that’s the average Muslim in America. Young, family-oriented, well educated, prosperous, and politically active.
What I want to do is to help ordinary Americans get to know these ordinary Muslims and their values.
The geek shall inherit the earth
Another character from “Justinian’s Flea” is Anthemius, one of the two architects who built the extraordinary Hagia Sophia. The building was one of the reasons for his wealth and thus in Constantinople he lived amongst notable neigbours like Zeno, a famous orator. Apparently the two quarreled over something, Zeno sued and won. Anthemius was a geek, however, and so “he took his revenge like a proper engineer, first simulating an earthquake with a steam line that he surreptitiously ran into Zeno’s apartment, then exploding noisemakers to mimic the sound of a thunderstorm”. What really made me laugh was his next trick:
[E]mploying a pivoting parabolic reflector to shine light at all hours into Zeno’s sleeping chamber. When Zeno asked Justinian to intervene, the emperor decline to punish his architect, writing that even he “cannot intervene against Zeus the Thunderer and Poseidon the Earth-Shaker”.
The world’s first Laffer Curve?
For my birthday this weekend my wife gave me a voucher for my Kindle. This gave me a blissful weekend reading “Justinian’s Flea: Plague, Empire, and the Birth of Europe“. It is full of charming anecdotes about characters from antiquity, including emperor Anastasius:
In what is almost certainly the first documented exercise of what would come to be called trickle-down economics, Anastasius abolished a wide range of taxes that fell heavily on the empire’s most productive classes, its craftsmen and merchants. The emperor had argued, it turns out correctly, that a prosperous merchant would pay even more in fees that the treasury lost in taxes. Thus, despite three major wars, and several revolts by subjects opposing the emperor’s Monophysitism, the treasury at Anastasius’s death was richer by 320,000 pounds of gold than it had been at his accession.
Do Great Leaders Make Good Managers?
A friend of mine sent me a link to what looks like a gold mine of papers. One of them is titled “Do Great Leaders Make Good Managers? Conversations in Organizational Studies ” and touches on a question that I have often wondered about in working with managers and leaders in different organizations. For leaders, “Bass specifies four basic components:”
- Charisma: developing a vision, engendering pride, respect, and trust
- Inspiration: motivating by creating high expectations, modeling appropriate behavior, and using symbols to focus others
- Individualized consideration: giving personal attention to followers, giving them respect, and responsibility
- Intellectual stimulation: continuing challenging followers with new ideas and approaches
By contrast:
Robert E. Quinn et al have proposed a “Managerial Competency Framework” that takes into consideration four key models of management: Rational, Internal Process, Human Relations, and Open Systems which are viewed as having mutually interdependent, but competing values.
The author hammers home the contrast:
while it is possible for a manager/leader to wear different hats and move back and forth along the above continuum, it is important to understand that great leaders cannot lead and manage (follow) at the same time. This is because of the highly complex nature of a leader’s “inner theatre.” It may however, be relatively easy for a good manager to also be a good follower. As a matter of fact, good managers often are deemed to be good followers. They are able to quite effectively carry out the roles of director, producer, monitor, and coordinator. What is not so clear is how effectively they can concurrently discharge the other roles, i.e. mentor, facilitator, innovator, visionary, motivator, and catalyst, which are so characteristic of great leaders.
I call this problem the “reverse Peter Principle”. The Peter Principle is a famous one stating that “In a hierarchy every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence”. The reverse Peter Principle (you read it here first, folks), or perhaps the Al-Ubaydli Axiom, is that it is hard to get a good leader if they have to show competence as a manager first. In hierarchies employees rise up by showing their competence at each level. But because managerial jobs precede leadership ones, and because it is hard to be both a good manager and a good leader, it is unlikely that those who make it to top management would be good leadership material.
The only exception, in my belief, is the start-up. Very few people who start companies are good leaders – most are actually frustrated technicians – but a start-up is the one arena in which good leaders get the chance to be leaders without having to go through the filter of management ranks.
The rest of the article is well worth reading. For a start it tackles the unfortunate and common undervaluing of management in favour of leadership.
When our firm conducts workshops with managers, their mental association of “followers” often softens and even becomes more flattering when they come to the realization that to be a good manager, is to be a good follower. The new associations around followership tend to coalesce around words such as “implementer”, “cooperative”, “team player”, “learner” etc.
Further reading:
- “Narcissistic Leaders: The Incredible Pros, the Inevitable Cons” by Michael Maccoby, The Harvard Business Review January-February, 2000.
- “Are Leaders Born Or Are They Made?: The Case of Alexander the Great” By Manfred F. R. Kets de Vries.
- “Resurrecting the Muse: Followership in Organizations” David N. Berg, Ph.D.
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