This week, I am pleased to be a blogger in NYC for TEDxWomen on Thursday. TEDxWomen is a continuation of the conversation which began last December at TEDWomen about how women and girls shape the future.

I have also been organizing millennial women to get engaged in the TEDxWomen conversation by joining the online forum, blogging about the event, and creating local forums in your community to continue the conversation. See here for my most recent Huffington Post article entitled Gen Y women need to take the stage.

“Product building is a five-year task. Movement building, on the other hand, is a generation-long challenge that requires much bolder vision, patience, and ambition. What this moment of inflection demands is exactly such a movement – a movement that creates a fundamental mindset shift in how society mobilizes resources to address our social and environmental challenges..” –Judith Rodin, President of Rockefeller Foundation at Acumen Fund Investor Gathering

4 years ago, I had a dream. I was an investment banker at Lehman Brothers and I was also a first generation Indian-American activist and social change agent.  I wanted to bring these two worlds together somehow. I believed that I could be part of a bigger social movement despite my day job demands.

In January 2008, I pitched Acumen Fund on an idea for bankers, marketers, consultants, students, designers, entrepreneurs to volunteer their time to fundraise and educate people on Acumen Fund’s work in patient capital.

Acumen said “we like it.  Now Erica, go do it.”

1 volunteer meeting turned into many more, often stretching late into the night because everyone had busy full-time jobs.  We organized a panel on how young professionals could get engaged in social entrepreneurship work at NYU, we held an awareness event at SAKS 5^th Avenue and then with the help of Nuru Project, we organized a DIGNITY photo auction and fundraiser that raised $25,000 for Acumen Fund in one night. The seeds of New York for Acumen were born…

This was the start to a speech I gave four years later, last week at Acumen Fund’s 10 year Investor Gathering. Acumen Fund chapters are now in 10 cities with thousands of members from Vancouver to Dubai to London to Tokyo.

As I spoke on stage with other chapter leaders, I felt a movement start to take shape around the ideas of dignity, of patient capital and of moral leadership.  My dream came true and now this is a collective dream.

Most importantly, I recognized the power of the decentralized local chapter model to build a movement for patient capital. The volunteer chapter model is an important growth opportunity for nonprofits and helps organizations like Acumen Fund move from ‘product building’ to ‘movement building’ as Judith Rodin described. The Acumen Fund local chapters are teaching Acumen Fund how to collaborate across sectors, generations, and cities in ways that they haven’t seen before, infusing leadership trainings and activities at a more local level, and deepening conversation and action in communities.

The phenomenon of launching local hubs led by volunteers is becoming more and more common (i.e. TEDx, World Economic Forum Global Shapers). I believe this is the model for movement building in the future. Join the Acumen Fund chapter community here. Movement building is a generational task.

“I’ve always been fascinated by asking why things are the way they are. It’s about how you take a questioning mind into the world around you and go somewhere else with it, into something unknown.” –Michael Singer

Michael Singer, an artist in the public realm, has been instrumental in transforming public art, architecture, landscape, and planning projects into successful models for urban and ecological renewal.

I met with Michael recently and he reminded me of the value of keep one foot in the leadership change world and one foot in the art and dance world, knowing that these worlds inform each other and challenge one another. When I ask a big enough question, I need more than one discipline to solve it.

A major theme in Michael’s work is concept of questioning assumptions. On his website, you’ll see a variety of questions. He asks these questions not to find an answer, rather to offer a different way to see what’s around him. A scientist will ask ‘why’, an engineer will ask ‘how’, and Michael asks ‘what’.  The way he uses language is very much the way he communicates with the world.

His advice for artists, changemakers and policymakers is to go out and find a problem and get people together from different disciplines to solve it. With this approach, he believes groups can rethink infrastructures to create spaces that serve more than one purpose.

Next time you are working an idea to solve a problem, reflect on Michael Singer’s approach for questioning assumptions.

First, make a list of all the stakeholders related to your idea. Then explore a set of questions: Who is asking for it? Who’s paying for it? Who’s using it?  Who in community will agree and who in community will resist? Lastly, put your idea statement into a question that can engage each of your stakeholders. When it’s a question, we ask people to engage as stakeholders and this helps us to solve the problem and observe our own assumptions.

I’ve found questioning assumptions and cross-disciplinary collaboration to be so useful in my leadership change work. When I actually question my assumptions and use more than one discipline to solve a problem, I shift my own way of seeing the world.

As I read the eulogies for Steve Jobs over the past week, I’ve been particularly observing what my friends and colleagues praised about him. I was most puzzled by the word ‘leader’ that was used in so many articles lauding his contributions to the world this week.

I deeply admire Steve’s message and contribution to the world. He reminds me to follow my inner guidance and live each day to the fullest.

Many blogs and articles from my peers cited his uncanny vision, his Stanford 2005 speech to ‘stay hungry and foolish’ and his leadership and perseverance to ‘accomplish the unthinkable.’ I agree with all these sentiments. Jobs’s presence encourages Gen Yers to move forward and act on our desires, rather than be paralyzed by fear and anxiety.  He reminds us that we have nothing to lose, except the opportunity offered in the present moment.

At the same time, I wonder: How exactly is Generation Y defining leadership and praising Steve Jobs as a leader? When I talk to those who knew Steve and read old articles about him, I’ve heard another story.

“He was completely ruthless, hard-nosed, unwilling to listen to others, and was used to get what he wanted to get done” said one Apple employee. Others who have worked at Apple thought he was also extremely top-down and unfair. He was described as a brutal micromanager who didn’t source wisdom from his employees. Instead he used his inspirational force to guide people towards a vision he led.

On October 6, Mike Daisey wrote a NYTimes op-ed entitled Against Nostalgia which said “We can admire the design perfection and business acumen while acknowledging the truth: with Apple’s immense resources at his command he could have revolutionized the industry to make devices more humanely and more openly, and chose not to.”

To what extent is this top-down approach a healthy leadership model for Generation Y? To what extent is it not?

We tend the praise leaders who were ruthless about their creativity and vision and inspired a pack of followers. While I do believe Jobs was an inspirational genius, I am left wondering if we are also lauding a ‘leader’ who was in some ways a dictator who only listened to his own intuition. Most leadership books read that CEOs must listen to others as well as be creative and brilliant. Is Steve just an outlier to these rules?

I admire Jobs’ genius, yet I want to be wary of how we interpret this period of tributes. Being true to yourself as a leader doesn’t mean you have to be exactly like Steve Jobs. You can be an inspirational genius and you don’t have to be top-down, stop listening to others in your community, or ruthless.