The 21C Leadership Advisory Board is forming. Most advisors will be featured on video snips in the 21C Free Crowd.

We are continuing to refine the drivers of 21C Leadership, for this is the foundation upon which we’ll be building systems to change behavior. This is Jay’s shorthand, an attempt to generalize these 21 drivers:

I appreciate that even these are cryptic. Definitions are changing daily so it feels too early to post the paragraphs that go with each word in the table.

The 21C Leadership Project is creating an on-ramp for hands-on managers and professions to adopt the behaviors that will make them and their organizations successful in the 21st century workplace. We are developing written materials, shooting video, identifying supporting sources, and putting performance support tools on the web.

Everyone involved in conceptual worked is a leader. Our goal is to help leaders at all levels adopt and use these practices:

1. Shoulder responsibility. Take charge of yourself and for getting things done on the job. Bootstrap; lead yourself. Drucker said the next challenge was “managing yourself.” Make a commitment to your own personal development. Be all that you can be. Figure out your personal knowledge management strategy. Build an effective network. Agency. This is personal leadership.
2. Don’t hesitate. Do it now. Don’t mistake thinking for action. Close the knowing/doing gap. Always know the next step. Actions speak louder than words. Do what you can to make things happen. Excuses get you nowhere; action is required. Take charge of the situation. “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; courage to change the things I can; and wisdom to know the difference.” Change the things you can. Agency. Make the world and the workplace better.
3. Manage agilely. Use self-organizing groups to get things done; that involves daily meetings, rapid prototyping, iterative development, living by customer feedback, extreme flexibility, short deadlines, sprints to accomplishment, and multidisciplinary cooperation. Originally confined to software development, agile management is being adopted for more general projects.
4. Delight customers. This is the new goal for business generally. “Good enough” is no longer good enough. Delighting customers includes exceeding expectations, forming meaningful relationships, and destroying crap like pushy telemarketing and mass advertising. This is what The Cluetrain Manifesto called for and it’s the new field of competition. Zappos, JetBlue, Apple. The purpose of a business is to create and keep customers….
5. Focus on results. If it’s not part of the solution, it’s part of the problem. Make the mission explicit. Cut bureaucracy, busywork, redundancy, politics, unnecessary costs, and other obstacles. Protect your margins. Understand the organization’s goals and what it takes to accomplish. them. Know the organization’s history and culture. Live by the organization’s core values.
6. Make sound decisions. Make projections and assess probabilities. (Predict the future.) Systems thinking. Apply business acumen. Balance the pros and cons.  Leverage time. The large once ate the small; now the fast devour the slow. The pace of time has accelerated. Winners make things happen sooner. Time-to-accomplishment is the primary metric of performance. Opportunity cost is huge. Balance short and long term perspectives.
7. Make things better. Change or die. Innovation is now everyone’s job, not just something that’s stuck in R&D. It’s continuous process improvement. Ofttimes, it involves transplanting an idea or concept from one domain into an entirely new area. Encourage fresh thinking at all levels. Change is all there is. Welcome it, take advantage of it, don’t fight it. (You’ll lose.) Be open to possibility. Life is beta. Remain flexible. Probe, sense, respond. Perspective.
8. Generate enthusiasm. Instill passion. Instead of downer performance reviews, follow Dan Pink’s Drive formula. Optimism. Esprit de corps. Celebrations. Show linkage to greater purpose. Help people flourish. The positive psychology movement has moved on from happiness to a fuller concept that includes accomplishment and feeling meaningful as well as positive affect and cheerfulness.
9. Nurture serendipity. Be open, explore, be alert, try hard — and often an unexpected breakthrough results. Make time for reflection. Google’s 20% innovation time fits here. (or maybe the innovation driver gets folded into this one). Take your eye off the ball. All work and no play… Trust is the glue that brings people together. It occurs on several levels. There’s ethics — trusting someone to be sincere and do the right thing morally. And there’s competence — trusting that a worker knows how to get the job done. This is a two-way street: being deemed trustworthy by others as well as knowing others well enough to trust them. Letting someone know you trust them empowers them to act. Ties in to values of openness, authenticity, and narrating the work.
10. Coach courageously. Provide specific, constructive feedback. Conduct frequent one-to-ones, co-creating solutions. Inspire others to greatness. Challenge people with stretch assignments. Tell it like it is. Be open to bad news. Be transparent. Courageous conversation.
11. Commune & collaborate. Individuals don’t create value; groups of individuals do, and they do so by collaborating (co-labor), that is, working with one another. Think teams. Net-Work (work the net). Understand and exploit the power of connections. This is where we address social business, making connections, social network analysis, web 2.0 tools, and so forth. Get tech-savvy. Building and participating in communities of people with shared interests. Shifting responsibility and power from hierarchies to interest groups. Share what you know.
12. Learn voraciously. Learning enables work. Increasing your capabilities, your repertoire, enables you to tackle more a greater challenges, to play a higher game, to add more value, to lead a more fulfilling life. Bring in social, co-creation, informal. (This one, like most of the drivers, has an individual and a group component. The group aspect is nurturing an ecology for learning.) Encourage conversation. Ask questions.
13. De-stress. Chronic stress kills performance. Robert Sapolski (Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers) is the source on this. TED. Root out fear, have a solid network to turn to, etc. Lots of advice out there on this one. At the same time, be healthy: sleep, exercise, meditate, don’t overindulge. Manage crises to help others avoid stress.
14. Make mistakes. If you’re not making mistakes, you’re not daring enough. Change happens at the edges, out of your comfort zone. To make more progress, fail faster. Similarly, encourage others to push the envelope. Praise lessons learned and experimentation; don’t punish attempts that don’t work out. Eliminate fear. Reward risk-taking.
15. Tell great stories. Stories carry culture. Narrative is more powerful than any other prose. It’s a vital skill for influencing behavior. Communicate a compelling vision.
16. Conduct kick-ass meetings. Most meetings in organizations are a waste of time. They are demoralizing, over-long, set up wrong, etc. Group graphics practices belong here, too.

This list — and everything on this site — is beta. This is where we’re building the project. Please add your thoughts and comments.