So it was with great interest that I watched Dr. Karl Moore‘s TEDxMcGill presentation on “Postmodern Leadership”. Gen Y employees are thoroughly postmodern, clashing with their modern bosses in everything from decision making to processes to their need for feedback and coaching.

Dr. Moore’s comments center around four very useful insights.

1. Talk less, listen more

Gen Ys need to be heard. This can take time, which can be frustrating. But the decisions made will ultimately be better because of the input and knowledge gained. Gen Y is happy to have their managers make decisions as long as they have a chance to participate and to sometimes win debates.

Dr. Marshall Goldsmith, one of our partners at Rypple, is a big proponent of this approach. In his best-seller What Got You Here Won’t Get You There he suggests you take a breath before you speak, giving yourself time to assess whether your input adds value to your would-be listeners. This ties in to a central tenant of postmodernism: the rejection of a one, true, capital-T Truth in favor of a small-t truth dependent on the community in which we participate. Managers who hold onto their own viewpoint as the only possible Truth risk the loss of valuable insights and the disengagement and eventual departure of their Gen Y employees.

2. Innovation comes from the “periphery”

Dr. Moore suggests that innovation comes from differences, not homogeneity. Ideas arrive from the edges rather than the center. It’s worth it to build a diverse team because the periphery is often where the best insights will come from.

3. Emotions are critical

The land of cold, hard business treats emotion as the elephant in the boardroom (or newsroom) that no one wants to acknowledge. This approach is the oldest of old school. It abstracts people into unfeeling business machines – or “content producers” – and ignores our human nature.

Postmodern leadership doesn’t work that way. Gen Y wants an environment that encourages personal growth as much as business goals. They want to be engaged in their work, fully immersed in the flow of what they’re doing and rewarded by that feeling as much as by their financial compensation. Mihály Csíkszentmihályi calls this ‘flow’, a psychology concept completely focused on motivation. He speaks of a single-minded immersion that represents harnessing emotions in the service of performing and learning.

4. Renewed sense of purpose

Boomers grew up in a period of economic growth and largely ended up sharing their parents’ goals: a house in the suburbs with matching BMWs in the driveway. That’s no longer the most important driver. The startup world understands this. Teams are as driven by the energy of being part of a startup that can change the (media) world as much as they are by the lure of equity.

Dan Pink covers this topic extensively in the forthcoming book, Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us. He gave a great talk at TEDGlobal2009, in July, about the need for mastery, autonomy, and purpose:

Try these ideas at your new media start-up. As you re-invent the model for journalism, give your team the autonomy to experiment and the freedom to fail. Failing early and often is part of the successful startup’s DNA and it’s critical not to crush people when it happens.

Daniel Debow is a co-CEO of Rypple, a web-based service that is the best way to give and get feedback and coaching at work. Previously, Daniel was a founder and the VP of Corporate Development and Marketing for Workbrain, an enterprise software company. He holds a JD and an MBA from the University of Toronto and an LLM in Law, Science & Technology from Stanford University. He’s a huge music fan, plays the bass, and spends far too much time online. He lives in Toronto with his wife.

Ian Kelly
Department Spokesman

Washington, DC

November 9, 2009

The U.S. government strongly deplores the assault on bloggers Yoani Sanchez, Orlando Luis Pardo, and Claudia Cadelo. On November 6, these three activists were forcibly detained by plain clothes security personnel and beaten while en route to a peaceful demonstration in Havana.

The President has proclaimed November 9 World Freedom Day. It is precisely this sort of repression and violence against the voices of freedom and reconciliation that World Freedom Day is meant to expose. We call on the Government of Cuba to ensure the full respect of the human rights and fundamental freedoms of all its citizens.

We have expressed to the Cuban government our deep concern with the assaults, and we are following up with inquiries to Yoani Sanchez, Orlando Luis Pardo, and Claudia Cadelo regarding their personal well-being and access to medical care.

Meanwhile, news of this statement and of the attack are predictably absent from the Cuban press. The websites of the Cuban News Agency, as well as those of official newspapers Granma and Juventud Rebelde, have no reports on Yoani Sánchez’s story.

Yoani Sánchez has resumed her activities. Her Twitter feed today reported she attended the meeting of the “Blogger Academy,” an independent center of teaching that gathers some 30 students. A post said she was recovering from her back injury, and that the Academy was “the best balm”:

We spoke to Yoani on Sunday night.

###

How are you, Yoani?

Well, I can’t say I’m fine, but I’m here.

I read the post where you narrate how you were kidnapped and beaten. Is there anything you want to add to it?

Well, a few hours ago I dictated a post through the phone — I imagine it’s already online. It’s a reflection on being a victim and the things that I didn’t say earlier.

One of the things that strikes me the most about this attack is that your blog is mainly about daily life in Cuba. You are not criticizing anybody in particular or making incendiary denouncements. Your posts are about simple things. It is shocking that the Cuban government can be afraid of that.

I don’t think they are afraid of me, because I’m just a little person that they can easily eliminate. What they are afraid of is the phenomenon of the alternative blogosphere, the phenomenon that more and more young people are projecting their voices: that is tremendously contagious. This is why they may be attempting to make a sort of ‘prevention,’ applying some sort of vaccine, so the blogger virus, the virus of opinions, does not spread. I don’t think their attack is against the person of Yoani Sánchez, but rather against the blogger phenomenon, a phenomenon of different opinions that is taking place in Cuba. They want to paralyze as many people as possible with a preventive strike.

“They don’t understand that these new phenomena can’t be fought with the old weapons of repression. They still haven’t understood the potential of the web.”

Has anything like this happened to you before? Were you followed or attacked?

In the two years I’ve been writing my blog, I’ve been living as if in one of those Saturday night films: people following me wherever I go. But until now they hadn’t interacted in a physical or violent way with me.

There was one precedent, however. During a rock concert, where some friends and I demanded the liberation of a musician, there was some sort of organized violence. But it was covered by the loud music and everything else going on at the concert. What happened [on Friday] was more direct, more aimed at the blogosphere. Those affected by this action were blogger Claudia Cadelo, blogger Orlando Luis Pardo and me. This shows that [those in the Government] are particularly stricken by the potential our words have through the Internet.

But that reasoning is flawed, too. Your work has received recognition outside of Cuba and it’s impossible to cut your access to the web. By attacking you, they might make you a greater figure than if they just ignored you.

Of course, but they are dunces. Their main problem is that they don’t understand that these new phenomena can’t be fought with the old weapons of repression. They still haven’t understood the potential of the web, and that these repressive measures do nothing but increase the number of hits on my blog. They haven’t understood very well what is it that the new technologies do, nor the different effects that repression causes when a blogger is attacked. So they are just employing the old methods of restraint, intimidation, and attempting to isolate you. But they actually produce the opposite effect.

In the post you wrote about the attack, you state that the actions of your kidnappers were motivated by the “the blustering terror of he who knows that his days are numbered.”

Yes, because when the arguments and the faith in a system are over, when the people stop believing in a certain political discourse, those who are in charge can only resort to violence and restraint. This is what we are seeing in Cuba now: the absence of any sort of argument, handling people through violence and fear. This is all we have left. There is no symbolical legacy, none the things that existed in the first years of the [revolutionary] process. Terror is the only thing that remains.

>>>NEXT: “I run towards the place where fear is born.”

Yoani Sanchez

An update today on her site includes a dramatic, descriptive report of what happened yesterday:

At one point I felt I would never leave that car. “This is as far as you’re going, Yoani,” “I’ve had enough of your antics,” said the one sitting beside the driver who was pulling my hair. In the back seat a rare spectacle was taking place: my legs were pointing up, my face reddened by the pressure and my aching body, on the other side Orlando brought down by a professional at beating people up. I just managed to grab, through his trousers, one’s testicles, in an act of desperation. I dug my nails in, thinking he was going to crush my chest until the last breath. “Kill me now,” I screamed, with the last inhalation I had left in me, and the one in front warned the younger one, “Let her breathe.”

She then laments about explaining the events to her son:

How am I going to tell him that we live in a country where this can happen, how will I look at him and tell him that his mother, for writing a blog and putting her opinions in kilobytes, has been beaten up on a public street.

It’s all highly graphic and emotional, but as CNN notes, “There was no immediate comment from the Cuban government on Sanchez’s claims, which CNN could not independently verify.”

You can read Sanchez’s whole account here.

(via CNN)