[Below is my share from last Wednesday's Awakin Circle, slightly modified for clarity. Thank you to the invisible angels who transcribed this!]

The passage about the "power paradox" reminds me of a time when I was working for a well-known consulting and training company in Silicon Valley. One of the first places they sent me was to one of America's national laboratories -- responsible for developing nuclear weapons -- to work with the top management team. 

This was right after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War. In the optimistic euphoria of those days, it was starting to look like the need for nuclear weapons might become a thing of the past. The director of this lab, whom I'll call John, was asking a question of himself and his management team: in a world that no longer needs nuclear weapons, what could we do here to justify our existence? How could we redeploy our talent and technology to make things that are useful to humanity?

It was clear to John that making this change would require a big change in how the lab functioned. It would mean changing from the military style that everyone was used to, to a management style that was more flexible, open, creative, and entrepreneurial.

So John, who had worked within the old system for two decades, did the obvious thing: he ordered everyone to change.  But guess what? It didn't work!

That's when John called us in, to help him and his colleagues discover a different way to lead.

We came in and tried a few experiments.  One of them was that every executive and every manager had to have a "360 degree evaluation" -- i.e., where they were evaluated by their direct reports -- on their strengths and weaknesses as leaders. 

Then they called a meeting of the top management team, about 100 of them, to discuss what they had learned from this exercise. That was pretty revolutionary for this organization. For it's entire history, only managers had had the power to evaluate, and make career decisions about their direct reports, not the other way around.

John stood up and showed everyone his evaluation. It was not very impressive. There were lots of weakness, lots of problems. He had basically flunked. As he was revealing his scores the room was absolutely quiet.

Then he said, "I'm going to post this outside my office and I'm going to ask my direct reports to evaluate me again in three months. Then I'll post those results so we can all see how I'm doing."

During the next week all the executives in this nuclear lab followed John's example, and each posted their own results outside their doors for all to see. And all of them also committed to have themselves evaluated in another three months. So now they all had three months to earn the trust and respect of the people they were leading. It was amazing to witness. The power to lead was no longer about job titles. It was going to be about power that they earned, power that was given to them by the team.

Within a year they were making great strides in starting to build technologies in a number of areas such as monitoring climate change, designing energy efficient mass-transportation systems, and designing a new generation of medical devices. The shift in how they related to power on a human level was supporting a parallel shift in how they were using their scientific power -- from the power to destroy to the power for social good.