Oscar Leadership Lessons – Plus Your Weekend Reads

Welcome to GovLoop Insights Issue of the Week with Chris Dorobek where each week, our goal is to find an issue — a person — an idea — then helped define the past 7-days… and we work to find an issue that will also will have an impact on the days, weeks and months ahead. And, as always, we focus on six words: helping you do your job better.

This Week on the DorobekINSIDER:

• DorobekINSIDER Live – 4 Experts Weigh in on BYOD: A special edition of GovLoop’s DorobekINSIDER. We went LIVE! The hour long discussed the emergence of BYOD. Agencies are looking for ways to do more with less and BYOD could be a solution. But there are plenty of risks; privacy, security and data management just to name a few. So how do you successfully navigate? Our panel of experts EEOC’s Kimberly Hancher, the FAA’s Steve Cooper, IDC’s Shawn McCarthy and Digital Management’s David Yang gave us their insights.
• Peering into the BYOD Crystal Ball – Right now in government BYOD is all the buzz in government. But what’s the REAL future of BYOD? Is it really a big cost saver? Or is it a major security risk? And what lessons can we learn from agencies leading the BYOD charge? We talk to the leading experts in BYOD.
• Is your program/agency on GAO’s High Risk List: What is the high risk list? What makes a program high risk? How did you get off it? Insights from the Government Accountability Office.
• What’s Really In The Cybersecurity Executive Order? The President unveiled his long awaited Executive Order to improve the cybersecurity of critical infrastructure during the State of the Union. And the plan lays out specific requirements for certain agencies. We went through the order point by point with TechAmerica’s Trey Hodgkins.

But our issue of the week: Leadership Lessons from the Oscars.

The Oscars are coming up this Sunday. And while we will crowd around the TV to see what the stars are wearing there are also real leadership lessons we can learn from the Best Picture nominees. Specifically Lincoln.

“The movie Lincoln is a case study in leadership,” said Tom Fox. Fox is the Vice President for Leadership and Innovation at the Partnership for Public Service.

He told Chris Dorobek on the DorobekISIDER program that he seems leadership lessons in almost every movie.

“Some of the most compelling examples of leadership don’t come from the corner office. People who can lead with personality, passion and can influence others despite their positions are some of the greatest leaders. These leaders also very valuable because today you get things done through coalitions,” said Fox.

Other Great Leaders in History:

• Kenneth R. Feinberg, an attorney who has mediated some of the nation’s most highly charged disputes and author of What is Life Worth?, said, the late Senator Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts was his role model. “Senator Kennedy was my mentor, my friend and the guiding force of my career. He would bend over backwards to attend weddings and funerals with his fellow senators. Senator Kennedy was constantly bridging differences in an effort get a public policy result.”
• U.S. Department of Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood’s leadership role model is former Rep. Bob Michel of Illinois, who was the House minority leader when LaHood worked for him. “He developed in his office a real spirit of family. He hired good people and let them do their jobs. That’s the leadership style I learned from Bob Michel and it’s held me in good stead.”
• Kevin Cashman, leadership consultant coach and author of five leadership books, said his leadership role model is Nelson Mandela. “To me, he embodies the principle of being the change you wish to see. He maintained his dignity through horrific situations. He embodies the tenets of grace under fire and living your values. That combination of vision, compassion, and grace is pretty amazing.”

“80% of being a good leader is just showing up. You can see that leadership in people right around you,” said Fox.

Weekend reads

• When Google got flu wrong: We often talk about the power of big data, and some have even looked to that data for its predictive abilities. For example, FCW notes that many have followed Google data to track the severity of the flu season.
• But Nature writes those metrics may have been fooled this year: “When influenza hit early and hard in the United States this year, it quietly claimed an unacknowledged victim: one of the cutting-edge techniques being used to monitor the outbreak. A comparison with traditional surveillance data showed that Google Flu Trends, which estimates prevalence from flu-related Internet searches, had drastically overestimated peak flu levels. The glitch is no more than a temporary setback for a promising strategy, experts say, and Google is sure to refine its algorithms. But as flu-tracking techniques based on mining of web data and on social media proliferate, the episode is a reminder that they will complement, but not substitute for, traditional epidemiological surveillance networks.”
• Managing the Human Cloud: MIT Management Review notes that organizations have increasing opportunities to tap into a virtual, on-demand workforce. But the organizational challenges of this latest wave of outsourcing require new management models and skills.
• And the Oscars take place on Sunday. As you may know, I’m a big fan of Argo, which, as I said last year, is a wonderful portrayal of feds — even if the movie’s ‘facts’ aren’t totally factual. That being said, BBC Magazine talks to Tony Mendez, the real CIA spy in Argo.