In 1995, a project manager at a San Francisco software company drove twelve miles into a Nevada dry lakebed because a man in a bed sheet holding a plastic flamingo told her to.
She never went back.
That woman was Marian Goodell. Nearly thirty years later, she is the first and only CEO of Burning Man Project.
An event that started on a beach in San Francisco with a few hundred people has evolved into the construction of a temporary city of 80,000 in the middle of the desert where nothing except ice is sold and which is then completely eradicated leaving no sign of having existed!
Marian arrived as a command-and-control project manager, learned to let it go, and built something genuinely collective.
Then her co-founder passed away. Then the pandemic came. Then the rain nearly broke the event. Then the tickets stopped selling.
Each challenge demanded something different, and each time, she had to decide whether to take the tiller herself or trust the community to sail the boat.
For a frame of reference watch this two minute video which is a trailer on the just released HBO documentary on Burning Man.
In the latest episode of Unbossing, Drew Ianni and I spoke with Marian.
She has many lessons to share from running Burning Man including how to you sometimes need to burn your former ways of working to transform into a way more relevant as the world changes.
The entire episode is a masterclass on leadership that everyone should listen to.
Here are some key takeaways for every one who wants to lead through tectonic times:
1) Leadership styles need to evolve as the situation evolves.
Great leaders adapt their style of leadership to the circumstances they face and the teams they lead. Some time one leads in a collaborative way and another in a command and control style.
In today’s tectonic times where the foundations of many businesses are shaking the one size fits all model explains the rapid turnover of many leaders.
Marian explains how collaborative decision making and collective decision making each have their uses but are very different.
2) Community and Culture are the keys to organizational health.
Every institution and organization succeeds and fails based on how well it understands and protects it’s culture while incorporating the input of its community.
It is a balancing act between “a way” and “ a people”.
The “way” of Burning man is that of decentralization, radical self-expression and participation.
The “people” of burning man come from all over the world, include starving artists and technology billionaires who look to be transformed by being challenged by the environment, who seek to connect and find themselves by fusing with art and theater.
Many reject top-down management.
To protect this culture and community Marion both decided not to hold a Burning Man in 2021 since Covid was still in the air, too many people were still suffering from trauma, not enough people had been vaccinated and there was not enough time to hold a safe and high quality event.
But Marian also attended the “Renegade Burn” where 12,000 people created their own Burning Man putting into practice the cultural DNA of decentralization, self-expression and participation.
Some things are never under one’s control and how one reacts to rebellion may determine the long term health and community of an organization.
Today many people have created their own versions of Burning Man all over the world without permission. There is no franchise model but just a way.
3) Burning Man provides lessons for the modern leader:
Zone of Influence vs Zone of Control: In a distributed world with knowledge available to everybody a management style of command and control is being replaced by one of influence. The ideas of radical self-expression, decentralization and self-reliance seems to be a pre-cursor of the future of corporate design and career management.
Importance of Generational Sensitivity: Today there is a huge rupture between the young and the old on issues from capitalism, the willingness to work in a corporation, risk taking and much more. Often people are speaking past each other. As the audience at Burning Man grew older the organization went out of its way to understand and welcome a new generation who in turn leveraged social media to promote the experience Instagram in particular). Listening has never been as critical.
The future is about combining story and spreadsheet: Successful leaders balance art, play and creativity with operational and financial discipline. One without the other leads to genetically deformed firms that cannot navigate the tides of change.
Take a listen and some of the lessons may have you burning some of your own beliefs:
One Single Thing:
The agents are using AI more than humans!
@Betsy Gaines Quammen
Successful leaders balance art, play and creativity with operational and financial discipline. This is so critical. And yet in my experience most leaders don't feel allowed art, play or creativity. They're all about operational and financial discipline. That's where the self permission comes in to meet this moment.