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This is an edited transcript of the Forum held by CEU Business School.

MISSING LINK DISCOVERED:

Planting Csíkszentmihályi’s Flow Theory

into

Management and Leadership Practice held on Monday, November 9, 2015

CEU AUDITORIUM, Budapest V, Nádor u. 9

Welcome remarks by Mel Horwitch, Dean, CEU Business School

Paul Marer Prof. of Business, CEU Business School, co-author

Zoltan Buzády Prof. of Management, CEU Business School, co-author Zad Vecsey CEO of ALEAS Simulations, Budapest and Los Angeles., co-author Mihály Csíkszentmihályi Distinguished Prof. of Psychology & Management, Claremont Graduate University, California, contributor

One of world’s most distinguished social science scholars is Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, whose renown rests especially on his Theory of Flow:

“A mental state in which a person performing an activity is fully immersed in a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and enjoyment”.

Until recently, insufficient attention has been paid to the many ways in which Flow Theory ideas can be used and leveraged by managers and leaders to enhance successful practice. Filling this gap, a panel of CEU Business School professors and invited experts in the field discussed how the Theory of Flow can be innovatively mastered by leaders, managers, entrepreneurs, students, and just about anyone, as a way of simultaneously improving individual satisfaction, organizational effectiveness and societal well-being.

The Forum introduced a just-published book on this topic.

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Prof. Paul Marer (see bio at end):

This event is labeled not as a series of lectures, not as a conference, not as a workshop, but as a forum. A forum means, first, that each of the four panelists will offer ideas and personal stories – not lectures – that we hope you will find interesting and perhaps useful in some ways. The stories will focus on the following topics:

Slide:

The concept and application of Flow

Leadership and Flow

Teaching innovations related to Leadership and Flow

New research vistas and plans on Leadership and Flow

I’ll introduce these topics briefly; my colleagues will elaborate them.

The second reason this is a forum is that about 1/3rd of the two-hour program is reserved for your participation: comments, suggestions, questions.

I must start with an apology: The organizers received written requests for participation from more than twice as many persons as expected. Even this Auditorium – the largest space at CEU – cannot accommodate everyone. Therefore, we are streaming the proceedings into two large rooms upstairs as well as to outside the Auditorium. We welcome the other half of the audience upstairs and outside. You can hear us and see us but will not be able to ask Qs or make comments, live. We apologize to you for the unavoidable “discrimination”. Thank you for understanding.

To alleviate the problem that some in the audience will not be able to contribute live, we opened a messaging wall on the Facebook event page of this Forum. You’ll find the hyperlink to the messaging wall. https://goo.gl/PJy1DW

We also welcome persons around the world who are viewing us live, via ustream broadcast.

THE CONCEPT AND APPLICATIONS OF “FLOW”

The three of us on the podium are most pleased to be on the same panel with one of world’s leading social scientists of Hungarian origin: Prof. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. It is difficult for non-Hungarians to pronounce his name, so his colleagues and students call him Prof. Cheek; his friends address him by his first name, Mihaly.

Prof. Cheek is one of the founding fathers of positive psychology: that branch of the discipline that focuses not on treating mental illness but on a scientific understanding of what it means, and how to achieve, a good and happy life that is also socially productive.

Prof. Cheek has done decades of path-breaking research to understand the thinking, the feeling, and the motivations of ordinary people, like you and I. An example of his pioneering research decades ago: his team gave beepers to well over 100 high-school students in

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FLOW AND MANAGEMENT/LEADERSHIP PRACTICES

The concept of Flow has found research and practical applications in many fields, including:

Slide:

Psychology

Self-improvement

Religion

Sports

Music

Education

Architecture

Leadership/Management

At CEU Bus School, our focus of course has been on the implications of Flow for management and leadership.

* * *

There is a raging debate in the literature on whether managers and leaders are the same or different species. Many experts say that they are different. Their frequently cited mantra is that “managers do things right; leaders do the right things.”

Slide: the above quote

The three authors on the panel agree with one of the best known professors of management who says that the distinction between leaders and managers is artificial and unnecessary:

Slide: “Leadership involves plumbing as well as poetry. Instead of distinguishing leaders from managers, we should encourage all managers to be leaders. And we should define leadership as management practiced well.”

Thus, to us, management and leadership are interchangeable terms.

* * *

How Flow and leadership got linked is an interesting story. In the 1990s, Prof. Cheek was chair of the Psychology Dept of the U of Chicago. Prof. Peter Drucker, arguably the most influential management guru of the 20th century and a prof at Claremont Grad U in California at the time, was able to convince Prof. Cheek and his wife, Isabella to exchange cold and windy Chicago for the blue skies and sunshine of California. In2000 the Csikszentmihalyis moved to Claremont. Mihaly became Chair Prof of Psychology & Management (a chair he occupies still). Befitting a prof also of management, in 2003 Prof. Cheek published:

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8 | P a g e

Oh yes, the fourth theme of this Forum is our ambitious plan to build, together with Prof. Cheek’s Quality of Life Research Center at Claremont, and others, a global Leadership and Flow research program and network that is also being launched today.

It is my pleasure to turn over the microphone to my colleague, Zoltan Buzady, whose presentation will elaborate on the themes I introduced.

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Prof. Zoltan Buzady (see bio at the end).

I will make a few remarks on four of the topics. Specifically:

Slide:

Leadership & leadership skills

Flow-based leadership skills

Teaching leadership

The “Leadership & Flow” Research Program So what is leadership? - I quote from Mihaly’s essay in our new book.

Slide “Good management is not perfectly definable and not precisely measurable.”

Indeed so. Yet, effective managers are supposed to possess a pretty well-defined set of skills – a set, on which there is by and large a consensus among academics as well as practitioners. Here is an example of a standard set of leadership skills:

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10 | P

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11 | P

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12 | P a g e

TEACHING LEADERSHIP SKILLS

Let me now turn to teaching leadership skills.

I used to teach it in what might be called the conventional way: assigning readings and case studies, several of which I wrote myself, then discussing them in the classroom. The approach was OK. But something was not fully satisfactory, something was missing.

For example, academic writings on the topic are too scholarly, too abstract, focusing only or general principles, with applicable illustrations that were often hard to implement in other situations that are not really identical to the textbook illustrations.

Many case studies, while helpful, tend to mirror insufficiently the real dilemmas leader routinely face. In real life they have to make choices almost continuously, not just one big strategy decision, like “yes or no”, or choose between the few simplified options that so many cases studies offer.

For these reasons, years ago already I was drawn to leadership-content simulations games, such as those developed by this Gentleman on the podium (-> Zad). I found them to be more realistic ways to teach students what it is like to be a manager then either textbooks or case studies. A good leadership simulation teaches that a leader has to be guided by key objectives as well as by certain basic principles. Even after strategic directions have been agreed upon, there is no easy formula on how to apply them in practice, day-to-day, on the many decisions a manager has to make continuously on team and organization issues. Therefore, instead of some magic formula, the workable approach is to be guided by the agreed upon key objectives and to act according to basic principles of FLOW.

This brings me to the award-winning game produced by Zad and his team, about which our book is partly about. The story, in a nutshell:

You, the individual player, have just become the new GM of a mid-size winery in California. Your predecessor was one of those bosses who excelled in dividing his team, pitting one against the other, thus doing a good job in destroying the morale. This has started to adversely impact profitability, too.

To make a long story short: you, the new GM, have to make about 150 decisions during the virtual span of 6 months. The game takes you 6 to 10 hours to complete; you can stop and start any time. All your decisions are “saved” in the cloud, on the basis of which the player’s leadership skills -- not only the 4 mentioned - but also each of the other 25 in the skillset -- are measured and appropriately benchmarked.

You in the audience (and the reader) might wonder how can one use in a course a game that takes 10 hours to complete. The answer is a recent teaching innovation, called the flipped classroom!

Slide: Fli

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13 | P

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15 | P

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16 | P

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When I heard about Flow and read Prof Csikszentmihalyi’s book, Good Business: Leadership, Flow, and the Making of Meaning, I said, Flow is a great topic for my next serious simulation videogame. I did not know Prof Cs, but I contacted and visited him in California - to try to persuade him to cooperate with me/us in designing an interactive videogame simulation to help popularize and teach the relevance of his Flow theory for management/leadership.

I realized that both of us had a big challenge: my was to convince a traditional professor who wrote academic bestsellers to agree to work with me to find a new way to deliver and implant his obviously insightful advice to managers and leaders to help them to create for their co-workers a Flow-supporting work environment.

Frankly, initially, Prof. Cs. was not too motivated to help. In 2007 serious gaming business (and the gamification trend) had just started, and the first results did not seem too relevant for science. So first Prof. CS. was rather skeptical, but things turned for the better. At our initial meeting I showed him one of our earlier products (actually a project management simulation of a Himalaya expedition, and it turned out, that Prof. Cs. was a serious young mountaineer.

Slide: Prof. Csikszentmihalyi as a mountaineer (shown)

I think that, fortuitously, it helped to make him more cooperative, so our deal for Flow was finally done. Gradually he became an ever more supportive and involved partner, as he himself states in his contribution to our book being published today.

FLIGBY was the most challenging projects in my life. Not only from a technical point of view, but also developing the content required innovative approaches. A new way was needed because even though Csikszentmihalyi’s Good Business, published a dozen years ago, had persuasive reasoning and many good suggestions, a gap remained on how to transplant, effectively, his ideas into the minds of current and future managers/leaders. The tool for this, I thought, was through serious gaming, hence FLIGBY.

Why CEU Business School? Personal contacts with local professors (to whom we have made our products free for a decade, including FLIGBY, gratis) helped us in several ways:

Their classroom experiences and intellects helped lift the Game to a higher level;

FLIGBY has been played by close to 10,000 players, yielding millions of skill-linked observations. This growing data bank is able -- and we are willing to support -- excellent opportunities to better understand managers/leaders’ behaviors and the kinds of skills they need to be effective managers/leaders by following practices that are in accordance with the principles and values of Flow.

We have a symbiotic relationship, as increasingly found in the real world: academia (MCs – corporation (ALEAS) – academia (CEU).

The most recent product of this symbiotic relationship is the book being published today.

* * *

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Summarizing the experiences I learned through this project: three major lessons:

Lesson 1: Working with scientists is a real challenge but it also offers a magic source for inspiration and learning. Entrepreneurs are suspect to scientists and academics, but they should not be; if the cooperation is good, it can be a win-win situation.

Lesson 2: Flow is a complex thing. Flow seems to be an easy theory and not too difficult to practice, but in reality, it is far more complex than anything in the world of “5 minutes management” -- books and advice -- that proliferate to entice gullible managers.

Lesson 3: Pioneering innovations happen in teams. The FLIGBY ecosystem is a complex network of teams (Support providers, Researchers, Clients, Players) and Interesting characters (MCS, Paul, Zoli, MC).

END.

TheAuthors:ZadVecsey,MihalyCsikszentmihalyi,PaulMarer,ZoltanBuzady

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Briefbiosofthemainpanelists,Nov9,2015ForumonMissingLinkDiscoveredPaulMarer,Ph.D.(marerp@business.ceu.edu) ProfessorofInternationalBusiness,Economics,Finance,andManagement CEUBusinessSchool,Budapest Member,BoardofDirectors,“Leadership&Flow”GlobalResearchProgram

BorninHungary;emigratedtotheUSAin1956;aUScitizensince1961;andadualUS/Hungariancitizensince2000. His M.A. and Ph.D. degrees are from University of Pennsylvania (Wharton School), concentrating oneconomicsandbusiness.Paulhada25‐yearcareerasprofessorofbusinessattheKelleySchoolofBusiness,IndianaUniversity,Bloomimgton.

During1987‐89,atGeorgeSoros’request,hewasinvolvedinestablishingthefirstbusinessschoolinCentralandEasternEurope,theInternationalManagementCenter(IMC),thatlaterbecameCEUBusinessSchool.Paulmoved to Hungary in 2000 to teach at CEU Business School, where he is full time facultymember, havingservedthreetermsasAcademicDean.Paulistheauthororeditorof24booksand150articlesandchapters,mainlyonthechangingeconomicandbusinesssituationinHungaryandintheothercountriesofCEE.HehasanhonorarydoctoratefromtheBudapestUniversityofEconomicSciences(1999). ZoltanBuzady,Ph.D.(buzadyz@business.ceu.edu) AssociateProfessorofManagementandOrganizations,CEUBusinessSchool Director,“Leadership&Flow”GlobalResearchProgram

Guidedbythemottoof"Learning,Leading,Leapfrogging",Zoltanhas25yearsofexperiencewithinnovationattheinterfaceofSelf‐development,Leadership,Cross‐culturalManagementandStrategy.HeholdsaPh.D.inStrategicManagement,anMBAfromCASSBusinessSchool(UK),andaLawdegreefromtheLondonSchoolofEconomics.Theauthorofseveralglobalaward‐winningteachingcasestudies,Zoltanhasextensivepracticalexperienceasateamandexecutivecoach.Hisresearchandteachingspecialtiesinclude:LeadershipandFlow,Self‐development and Change, Design Thinking and Organizational Development, Transactional AnalysisCoaching,andWorldClassLeadershipDevelopment. ZadVecsey,MBA(zad@aleasgroup.com) Co‐founderandCEO ALEASSimulations,Inc.

Zad received amaster degree in organizational sociology from Corvinus University and anMBA from theLondonBusinessSchool.HebeganhiscareerinthelegalandconsultingunitofCoopers&Lybrand.ThenhebecamemanagingdirectorofIQConsulting,Ltd,introducingandrepresentinginHungarysuchinternationalbrandsasLEGO®SERIOUSPLAYaswellastheCDPon‐linesurveyofEuropeancompetitiveness]

Zad’s enthusiastic mission as founder and CEO of ALEAS Simulations is to find innovative ways to teachleadershipdevelopmentviacreative,“blendedlearning”videogames.InthisfieldhehadearnedthetopprizeinHungaryandlater,intheEU,evenbeforeheembarkedoncreatingFLIGBY,whichhadgarneredtheglobe’stopawardinitscategory.ZadistheauthorofOntheBrinkofChaos.

MihalyCsikszentmihalyiDistinguishedProfofPsychologyandManagementClaremontGraduateUniversity,Claremont,CaliforniaChairman,BoardofDirectors,“LeadershipandFlowGlobalResearchProgram”

Born in Fiume, Italy (now Rijeka, Croatia) beforeWorldWar II, to a Hungarian family. His Father was aHungariandiplomatinItalybefore,during,andaftertheWar.HisDadfirstranintoserioustroubleduringtheWar,whenHungarybecamefascist,becauseasconsul,heissuedfalsepassports(orvisas)toJewstomakeitpossibleforthemtoescapeNazipersecution.AftertheWarhewasnamedHungary’sambassadortoItaly.Butwhen in 1948 the Communists, backed by the Red Army, took control of the country, the elderCsikszentmihalyiandhisfamilyremainedinItalyasrefugees.ThisishowMihalygrewupinFiume,Florence,andRome,fluentinHungarian,Italian,andGerman.

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Wanting to study psychology at the university level ‐‐ a field that in Europe was taught only in medicalschools‐‐heimmigratedtotheUSatage22.HewasacceptedbytheprestigiousUniversityofChicago,whereheearnedhisBAin1959,marriedwriterIsabellaSelagain1960,andwasawardedaPh.D.inpsychologyin1965.

Afterabrief climbof theacademic ladderatLakeForestCollegeat theoutskirtsofChicago,he joined thepsychologyfacultyofhisalmamater,eventuallybecomingdepartmenthead.AtChicagohehadachancetopursue the kinds of large‐scale, survey‐based, multi‐year projects needed (the “Experience SamplingMethod”)totesthispath‐breakingresearchhypotheses.

Best‐known for his theory of Flow, described in his seminal 1990 book, Flow: The Psychology ofOptimalExperience.Quotingfromit:

People are happy when they are in a state of Flow, a type of intrinsic motivation that involves being fully focused and being ‘fully present’ in a situation or task. Flow is being completely involved in an activity for its own sake. The ego falls away. Time flies. Every action, movement, and thought follows inevitably from the previous one, like playing jazz. Your whole being is involved, and you're using your skills to the utmost.

Csikszentmihalyi’s two dozen books and well over 100 articles have explored interconnections between(amongothers)Flow,creativity,themeaningoflife,individualhappiness,societalwell‐being,leadershipandsocial responsibility, peak performance in sports, organizational efficiency, early childhood education, andhowtomaintainorregainFlowinoldage.

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