Leaders execute, they don’t seek recognition
October 26, 2007 | Leave a Comment
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I was watching a biography of Nelson Mandela. When he started to be active in the African National Congress, which he joined in 1944, he never ran for any office. He never cared whether he was elected for any position. In fact, when he was elected youth leader, he was not present.
Nelson Mandela was too busy. He was out and about organizing the youth, never asking to be their leader. He showed leadership not by running an election campaign. He showed leadership by acting like a leader who actually got things done.
Leaders listen
October 25, 2007 | Leave a Comment
Every time I hear or read about leadership, the dominant sense that is invoked is that of vision. Leaders have vision and others, who do not yet see, follow them. The first sense to hone for a leader is that of the ear. Leaders listen and listen well.
There are three levels of listening that leaders need to engage in.
- Leaders listen to the world around them. They have their ear on the rails and listen to what is coming.
- Leaders listen to their team mates. They listen not simply to hear the concerns of their team. Leaders work with people they recognize as contributors to a common solution. Good team members bring solutions to the leader, who will do well to let them talk.
- Leaders listen to themselves. That voice inside themselves, a voice cultivated over the years which you learn to trust. That voice will tell you what new direction to take. To be able to listen, you have to know yourself. Once you know yourself really well, you cannot but listen to that voice. That is why leadership doesn’t take courage. It takes listening to yourself.
Technorati Tags: leadership, vision, listening, ears
Information at our fingertips. Master leadership
October 18, 2007 | Leave a Comment
Information has changed. This video shows how information has changed so well and is a call to action. We need to change with the information. Of course, so many people already have, and the young in particular wouldn’t know what a cardfile looks like. When I was a college professor, sending students to the library was considered cruel and unusual punishment. Most had never seen an article in a journal that was not online. Many journals are fully online already and so many more will follow. (Publishers don’t yet understand what that means. They still charge by subscription and make it hard to buy an article.)
Seth Godin talks today about the role of finding information in education. Spending insane amounts of time finding information before you can evaluate it, is no longer the most important skill—in fact it never was. It was always the hurdle, the rite of passage. Most important is the skill to evaluate information and with so much information being thrown at you these days, that skill is more and more important.
Leaders can sift through information quickly and see what is relevant, because they start from a core understanding of the world that drives them. If you don’t have such a core understanding, you will be lead by the nose.
What is the metaphorical lesson for leaders? You are not in control in the way that leaders thought they were. Leadership is not about control over anything or anybody but yourself. There is too much going on in too many different directions. The more you want to control, the less you will succeed. This is a flat world. Get used to it. A leader in this world leads from the front and by example. People follow mostly because they haven’t yet figured out their own direction. Once they do, they will become leaders themselves and then they are not behind you but with you.
Technorati Tags: internet, flat, leadership, godin, wikipedia
Love someone to love yourself, pray for someone else.
October 16, 2007 | Leave a Comment
I received an email this morning. The United Church of Christ is telling everybody for a month that it is good to give and to give liberally. I love these readings. This morning I read again the following advice, well worn in some ways and true as ever.
Without loving ourselves we cannot love others. “Love your neighbor as you love yourself.” (Luke 10:27b) Which of us doesn’t know that it’s hard to care well about others when we’re weak or down on ourselves? What makes us selfish is doubt about our own value and strength: we seek rather than share love and assurance.
But I wonder sometimes. There are those days when it is very hard to love yourself. You know those days. You get up in the morning and the feeling just isn’t there.
What to do? Try this. Love someone else. As my pastor reminds us, love is a do word. That means that you cannot love someone without doing something about it. I mean, you can, but that defeats the purpose. Love isn’t all about feeling inside, it is about action as well.
Love someone and the action of loving someone will end up making you feel better about yourself. It is true, you have to try it to know it. Praying for someone else brings you closer to God, and it is therefore as if you are praying for yourself. It is a similar process. So if you are alone and not likely to meet someone in the day, someone you can love on, pray for someone. You can learn to love yourself, by praying for someone else.
Al Gore: From Failure to Leadership
October 15, 2007 | Leave a Comment
Al Gore’s deserves the honor of winning the Nobel Price. He has shown incredible leadership in his life and has truly focused our attention on the environment. Nobody can ignore his message today. And we crave a leader like him in the White House. The New York Times columnists write about it. Both Thomas Friedman and Bob Herbert are clearly pained by the comparison between Gore and Bush.
What happened to this man who was defeated by the Supreme Court in 2000? Well, much has been said about the reason he lost the election (not the popular vote, mind you) and much of it reflects his leadership at the time. My impression of him then: He made becoming president too personal, a reflection of him, rather than about a cause that he could champion. He was so desperate to become president that he did anything at all, and the most important thing he did was he lost himself. The warm, funny, smart, brilliant Al Gore that we know today, was invisible in the election campaign, where he was a wooden robot so high on caffeine that he induced motion sickness by watching him.
What changed was what gave him his brilliance. Gore could have become seriously depressed and told the world to you know what. But he didn’t. What he did do, was to return to himself and return to what he was about. He is all about the environment, has always been about the environment and continues to be about the environment. Some have argued that his leadership now has to do with greater self-confidence. I think that that is insufficient. He is a leader now, because he is himself and all about what he is about. He returned to himself.
Leaders know themselves. Leaders know what their life is about. That is the first requirement of leadership.
Technorati Tags: leadership, environment, Gore, Nobel, President
Environmental leadership
October 15, 2007 | Leave a Comment
There are two environmental movements in this country that don’t come together very well. The distinction is one of class. Basically this is the difference. One group of people consume too much and threaten the environment. They have a decent life and can painlessly decrease their impact on the environment by becoming smarter consumers. That is the gist of Leo Babauta’s post on 50 quick painless ways you can help the environment today.
And then there is a class of people who suffer because the waist gets dumped where they live. They don’t have the money too make consumer choice and they don’t have the political power to force clean up of garbage dumps, toxic waste in their backyards and other health threats. And as this is the US, class shows its face in race. That is the warning of this important article about Eco-Apartheid. If the title scares you, the article does have a positive point to make:
More importantly, they could begin a complete realignment of American politics. The idea of “social uplift environmentalism” could serve as the cornerstone for an unprecedented “Green Growth Alliance.” Imagine a coalition that unites the best of labor, business, racial justice activists, environmentalists, intellectuals, students and more. That combination would rival the last century’s New Deal and New Right coalitions.
The point about eco-apartheid was terrificly made by Majora Carter at the TED conference. I love TED and the ideas that come from it, but I am struck and horrified by the extremely white color of all the faces that are on the stage. Majora Carter is an exception, highlighting my point about race and class. Watch this talk. She address Al Gore and shows that he didn’t get what she was offering him: a movement that joins his consumer based version of environmentalism with her social justice, anti-racism based activism for a better environment.
Is takes leadership to develop a vision beyond yourself. Majora Carter, winner of a MacArthur genius grant, showed more of it that Al Gore, who stuck with what he knew. The environmental movement is getting to cosy and self congratulatory already. Ignoring racism will get the movement stuck. That is what it means to live in the US. Get used to it.
Technorati Tags: leadership, environment, class, race, racism, eco-apartheid, consumption
leadership
Leadership delusion?
October 11, 2007 | 2 Comments
Johnie Moore likes to throw up interesting ideas that make you think. Yesterday, he suggested that we may overrate Leadership as an important reason for strong organizational functioning.
I might even ask whether the label of “leadership” really is anything other than a fancy way of giving approval? I’m interested in what Gabriele Lakomski says here, summarising her book Managing without Leadership.
“Our everyday experience tells us that organisational life is messy and complex and that those in positions of leadership are neither omniscient nor infallible. Why, then, do we quite readily believe that there is a causal link between organisational functioning and leadership? Why do we not believe our own experience that how things work in organisations is much more complicated?
Gabriele Lakomski explains that she wants to look at organizational practice with a different theoretical perspective:
I propose that we consider the phenomenon of leadership in like manner, and conceive of it as part and parcel of organisational practice. In a naturalistic redescription of the phenomenon, we might view it as an emergent, self-organising property of complex systems. There would then be no need for engaging in more leadership studies: instead, we could redirect our attention to the study of the fine-grained properties of contextualised organisational practice.
This view shows an old fashioned notion of leadership. This portrays an organization as a hierarchy where only the people at the top have to be leaders.
But what if we think of leadership as a personal attitude about life and work? What if everybody in an organization saw themselves as leader?
- Everybody would be looking pro-actively to make their work better, to increase their impact on the organization.
- Nobody would blame the circumstances. Instead they will look for ways in which they can make a difference.
- All team members would raise the bar, instead of complaining when the one in charge asks to improve and innovate.
- Everybody would focus on results, not tasks.
- Everybody would approach their work as a freelancer doing projects that their livelihoods depend on, rather than workers doing a job.
- People would hold themselves accountable for mistakes, and share successes gladly with others.
- Leaders are vulnerable all the time, because they put themselves on the line for something they think is terrifically important.
Now, that is leadership. That would make a great organization. We need a lot of leaders, not just a few. A strong organization cultivates more leadership, rather than less.
Ten ways to a better night sleep
October 10, 2007 | Leave a Comment
Sleeping is crucial and I love it. But regularly I get excited and I wake up in the middle of the night. Pure enthusiasm, but I have to pay the next day. Here are ten tips for a better night sleep.
For me to wake up, I have grown to love the Zen Clock. It wakes you up with a gentle chime that repeats itself at pi-related intervals. I have never woken up better. If you like, you can order one and if you use this code, they will send you a little gift: registration number: 11111. Check it out at their website.
Blog action day
October 10, 2007 | Leave a Comment
This blog will participate in the Blog Action Day for the environment. Focused attention on one topic that day will hopefully shift people’s attention. What would make a day like this successful? Fundraising for sure and you can go to their website to make a donation to a number of important environmental activist groups. Blog action day is on October 15. Check back in then.
Technorati Tags: blog, action, environment, leadership, health, life
Be healthy, Get strong
October 10, 2007 | Leave a Comment
To feel powerful it is important to be strong. It is hard to feel that you can make an impact if a walk up the stairs is a chore and if you cannot lift your own carry-on luggage in the compartment above your seat. You know what I mean.
More than that, it is so well known these days that muscle reigns. Muscle is important for good health and having more muscle increases the amount of fat you’re burning. When you burn fat, you can eat that good food and eating well is important too. More on eating another time.
I am a voracious reader of fitness literature and I can honestly tell you that most of it is nonsense, rehashed advice that the writer didn’t verify and the fit models did not follow to look as good as they do.
There are exceptions and one of them is the trainer Pavel Tsatsouline. He is born in the former Soviet Union, trained special forces, and brings real world knowledge to the fitness world. I think is one of the best and has always worked for me.
He has several fitness routines, and the one that I really like revolves around kettlebells. A kettlebell is a round ball of iron with a handle. The bell is a effective as it looks simple. Really, to get started, you need only one bell, 35 pounds for a man, 18 pounds for a woman. Those weights don’t sound like much but believe me, they will have you sweating and swearing before long. Kettlebells give a hard and effective workout that will make you strong and give you better endurance. Yes, that’s right. Kettlebell training gives you both advantages and you don’t have to split between cardio and weight training in the gym. One bell at home and you are in. I love the double benefit from kettlebells, because, frankly, I hate running.
I do want to caution you to watch the video and read the book carefully. It is very important that you follow the instructions, especially in the beginning. Kettlebell training is effective and taxes your system. Use the tool wisely.
You can read more about kettlebells on the publisher’s website.
Disclaimer, when you go to the website you will see a lot of language about “being a man” and stuff like that. I don’t care for it frankly. “Kettlebells for ladies” yada yada yada. But don’t be dissuaded. They take fitness very seriously and they know what they are talking about. The practice what they preach. One thing about testing fitness with the military. Their lives depend on it. It does literally and I have tremendous respect for their knowledge and experience.
Technorati Tags: health, fitness, strength, kettlebells, dragondoor
