The Leader's Journey with Lee Thayer

The Leader as Artist

In the May Knowledge @ Wharton there is an interview with Dana Gioia. (subscription required for some content)

In the article, Gioia lays claim to being "the only person in history who went to business school to be a poet."  

Well, he's not the first poet who had a job in business. Those who knew his of poetic bent were therefore skeptical of his ability with numbers. But he had a stint as a VP of General Foods. While the whole article may interest you, he had two important things to say to the readers of this blog.

One is that managers and executives do not generally handle metaphors very well. They want to close things down, not open them up.

The other is that one way of describing the affinity between poetry and leadership (he uses entrepreneurs as the example) is that both are makers. The poet makes new worlds by how he says what he says. The leader makes new worlds by what she accomplishes.

It is a matter of transforming imagination into reality. Of creating something that would otherwise not exist. Both are creators.

We remember them to the extent that their creations enhance our lives.

Getting a Leader's Mind in Shape: Exercise #5

Cue the workout music ... in your head, of course (for the introductory explanation of this "Mental Aerobics Class" series, see #1).

From the section "Openers: Some Preliminary Stretching Exercises" in Leadership: Thinking, Being, Doing,

The difficulty of making a high-performance organization, of fulfilling any great and worthy cause, has never been over-estimated. It is mediocrity that is easy, not excellence.

High-performance: hard. Mediocrity: easy.

Think on that and share.

Getting a Leader's Mind in Shape: Exercise #4

Cue the workout music ... in your head, of course (for the introductory explanation of this "Mental Aerobics Class" series, see #1).

From the section "Openers: Some Preliminary Stretching Exercises" in Leadership: Thinking, Being, Doing,

In spite of how seductive the “13 Secrets” or the “49 Steps” or the “8 Habits” may be, there are no easy answers. Any real achievement requires great effort, sacrifice, pain, and utter, utter determination. If you can’t or won’t pay the price, you will fail.

What price are you willing to pay?

Think on that and share.

Getting a Leader's Mind in Shape: Exercise #3

Cue the workout music ... in your head, of course (for the introductory explanation of this "Mental Aerobics Class" series, see #1).

From the section "Openers: Some Preliminary Stretching Exercises" in Leadership: Thinking, Being, Doing,

... Many try, few succeed. How ought you to understand this? Why are there so few successes when there are so many who long for real achievement, at work or at home? You're going against the odds. Two-thirds to three-fourths of business organizations in the U.S. have tried some formula for becoming "excellent" (TQM, or reengineering, or ... fill in the latest panacea-of-the-month scheme for easy success). ... But of all who have tried, in less than 10% of those attempts was there any noticeable improvement. In the case of "reengineering," there were many organizations that ended up worse off.

If success formulas don't work, then ...? Think on that and share.

Getting a Leader's Mind in Shape: Exercise #2

Cue the workout music ... in your head, of course (for the introductory explanation of this "Mental Aerobics Class" series, see #1).

From the section "Openers: Some Preliminary Stretching Exercises" in Leadership: Thinking, Being, Doing, "Just for fun, here is another stretching exercise that can produce great benefits to your thinking, your being (who you are), and your doing (what you do and how you do it):"

Conventional wisdoms always and inevitably produce conventional results. This means that if you perceive some problem or opportunity in a conventional way (just because that's the way your mind works), you will come up with a conventional solution. But high performance, real achievement, is far from being the norm, far from being "conventional." So the implication is that if you want to achieve extraordinary results, results that are not more or less "average," then you have to produce those results out of some fairly unconventional wisdoms. ... [Often such] perspectives ... are counter-intuitive. That is, they run contrary to what most people already believe...

"... always and inevitably ..." Think on that and share.

Getting a Leader's Mind in Shape: Exercise #1

Readers of my book, Leadership: Thinking, Being, Doing, will recall it starts out with a section called "Openers: Some Preliminary Stretching Exercises" offering a series of

challenges to your thinking ... that will put you in the mental shape you need to be in to accomplish what you want to accomplish [as a leader].

As we near completion of the New and Revised Edition of Leadership (watch for an announcement here), I thought it might be useful to start a sort of Leaders' Mental Aerobics Class as a weekly feature here on the blog ... a place where we can "work out" together and help each other get into and stay in top mental shape. Just the ones in the beginning of the book will keep us busy for months. So here's the first Brain Stretching Exercise to ponder:

People can't figure out what they need to know. People can only figure out what they are personally capable of figuring out. So they seek "advice." And here a paradox rears its ugly face: If you know the difference between good advice and bad advice, you don't need advice.

Think on that and share.