Leadership is the serious meddling in the lives of others. To earn the right of that type of meddling, above all leadership is a position of servanthood, and integrity is the lynchpin of this leadership. Furthermore in a special way all the qualities of a good leader stem from an awareness of the human spirit.
Max Dupree, former CEO of Herman Miller Corporation
Different levels of accountability are like a currency we have in our organisations (see figure 19.1). There are some things we leave up to people’s private accountability. Sometimes peer accountability is enough. Often there is positional accountability, typically where a person or team reports to someone at a higher level in the organisation; and sometimes there is public accountability — accountability to the whole organisation or beyond.
The IBM BlueGene project, to create a supercomputer 1000 times faster than the fastest computer of the day (discussed in chapter 17), is a great example of creating public accountability, because the company announced its plans in a press conference. It made it much harder for it to give up when the going got tough.
Figure 19.1: accountability model
The thing about the different levels of accountability is that each currency is finite. There are only a few things that you can declare publicly or organisation-wide to make use of public accountability. If IBM ...
