Earlier this week a local philanthropic organization gave millions of dollars to a university’s school of business. I saw in a sub-headline that one of the school’s officials speculated that with this money, it would be very soon when a group of college students studying business in Indiana could huddle around laptop computers and, with the latest in video-communication technology, interact with business executives half-way around the world.
The unwritten assumption was this: "and what a marvelous world it will then be."
I wrote a while ago about the tendency—a tendency so evident that it has to have its own name as “such-and-such’s Law”—of communication and information technology to run far ahead of our ability to use them in a meaningful way. The length or span between the forward edge of that change and the current state of our everyday usage, I argued, furnished us with the space for befuddlement, bewilderment, and bemoaning that defines the state of the public mind. Things always seem in shift in this length or span and thus our lives, we conclude, are in similar shift. Always.
Go back to the announcement that I summarized above. What exactly is gained when one group talks with another on a different side of the planet? The simple act of doing so really does and means very little. The simple act of being able to do so carries no greater impact. It’s what is said and done, thought and felt, that counts for the most. The content of ideas, facts, speculation, rumor, and much more is the heart of the value. The way in which it is carried or transmitted is interesting, to be sure, and there is lots of money to be made there, lots of jobs and careers to be pursued there. But we confuse the object of mild interest with an outcome of heavy substance.
The school of business ought to be thinking more about the content of things rather than the conveyance of things or, at least, the equalizing of their importance in education and personal development.
My upcoming Leadership Now Workshop on Peyton Manning, quarterback of the Indianapolis Colts will feature a very unusual look at history. This might intrigue you.
I’m not referring to either sports or the current/present status of the subject matter.
I’m planning on exploring history in three different forms. The first form will be the fresh history of the topic itself—the injury to Manning. The second form will be the longer history of Manning with the Colts. The third form will be the much broader history of Manning himself (or, as someone put it to me: when did Manning become Manning?).
I’ll be encouraging Workshop attendees to think about these three slices of history in their own lives, in their own organizations. It will be a fascinating and highly beneficial exercise for both personal and leadership development.
To register for this iteration of the Leadership Now Workshop on January 20th in Indianapolis, please call me at 317-407-3687.
We’ve all seen the horrors of the recent Penn State football scandal. I’d like to add a comment on leadership as it pertains to success. It’s a feature of the Penn State story and all too often a feature of success in coaching and other fields.
It seems every successful coach—and I’m talking major success here, multiple championships, scads of victories, year after year of publicity, and so forth—reaches a point where he or she becomes above the law. They don’t think the same rules, limitations, accountability, and guard rails that apply to us ought to apply to them. Whatever law they sense is of their own making, no one else’s. Penn State’s assistant coach suffers from some inner character and personality deformity, while the head coach, Joe Paterno, succumbed to the temptations of success.
Some time ago, I found myself at the same table as the mother of Butler University’s basketball coach Brad Stephens. I wanted to ask her to ask him something for me—how will you not end up like Paterno, above the law? How not?
Left untended, success is every bit as problematic as failure, maybe more so. Where failure discourages, success can encourage to a fault. Where failure sags, success swaggers. Where failure drives toward guilt and blame, success seeks applause and credit. The key is in the tending.
In my River analogy, treacherous waters flow from success as much as from failure.
Here is an exercise in leadership development for you. I got the idea from an officer’s memoir of the Civil War.
Take a brief block of time. Let’s say it’s the past week or two weeks. Write down in bullet format the major things that have happened—decisions, actions, communication, things done or not done, people met, and whatever else rises to the level of “major things.” It might even include items from outside your immediate surrounding; be sure that these outside things have a direct bearing on what’s happened. Limit yourself to perhaps six or seven bullet points. Then, try to write a story that weaves these individual points together in as coherent a story form as possible. As you’ll likely tell, this would be a rough, brief version of your memoir.
This is an excellent exercise in leadership development for you. By writing this short little snippet of a memoir, you’re thinking broadly about how different smaller things fit together into a meaningful bigger picture. That’s an aspect of vision and strategy. You’re also sorting and sifting, another way of saying prioritizing. You’re certainly engaging in an important expression of communication. Finally, you’re backtracking to see how and what’s been done and the effect it may have on where you thought you’d be at this point in time. That’s a type of accountability.
I'm already ruminating on additions to my recent entry into the Commonplace Book, entitled "The Second Shoe." This piece has earned a lot of attention since I distributed it at the start of the week. If you haven't read it or want to refresh your understanding of it, go to My Writings and click on The Commonplace Book. Look for Second Shoe.
A leadership lesson that I omitted was the importance of an energy source for your followers. Because the Second Shoe emerges from the second stage or wave of a major economic decline, it's very probably that followers will not have access to extra resources to do what needs to be done. In other words, they will lack an energy source--physical capital will be limited, human capital will be stretched, and financial capital will be tight. Followers will need energy and these three sources of it will not provide it freely.
As the leader, you will have to find energy elsewhere for your followers. That may be you, or more likely and more healthily, you in tandem with your followers. Inspiration, motivation, inner resilience, persistence, patience, non-material gratification, and many more will be the forms of energy that you and your followers must find and use.
Everything requires energy, and with the Second Shoe, you as the leader must be creative and resourceful in linking your followers to energy.
I'm reading a book right now that involves a leader who played an important role in two community tragedies, 29 years apart. In the first instance--we'll call that Event A--he has the potential to do the right thing and then turns away to do the wrong thing. In choosing the wrong path people died needlessly; a different choice on his part and there was a chance they or some of them would have lived. 29 years later is a second situation where people's lives are threatened--we'll call that Event C. This time, he wavers, does the right thing for a while, stops pursuing it in the face of opposition, picks the right thing back up again, stops again, and so on. Once more, people died, some of whom would have lived had he just done the right thing first, second, and all the way through.
Here's my question and point to you. What kind of event leaves a memory that affects a person 29 years later? What kind of person--or leader--ignores that memory? What kind of person/leader embraces it?
Google announced today a donation of $11.5 million to help combat slavery in the world. That's right, slavery. The announcement included the estimate of 27 million people around the world right now who live in some form of slavery.
Think our world is so much better than before? Think progress is so clear-cut from earlier generations to our own? Think you and I have cornered the market on wisdom, knowledge, and the rest?
Think again.
We're living in and with and through stuff that has all happened before and continues to happen over and over. That's not cause for despair or hopelessness. It's cause for sober reflection, for a stronger understanding of reality, and for an acceptance and embrace of blending between past, present, and future.
Your leadership must be rooted every day in the unwalled mix of was, is, and will. Your leadership will improve if you take stock of the power within all three forms of time.
You may recall that a week or so ago I wrote a post about the Hubble effect. I referred to the current European financial and economic crisis and the fact that we, as Americans, can use the situation to travel back to the 1780s and 1790s when the Constitutionally-based national union began. My point was to say that you can use current events to relive history, or to re-experience in the present something from history. Much like when the Hubble shows us in real-time the formation of stars and solar systems, though, in fact, they happened long ago.
Interestingly, just today, I've seen no less than three articles in three different publications that emphasize the prominence of Alexander Hamilton as a source of ideas and insights for many European and European Union leaders this week. Evidently, Hamilton is a popular reference for finding ways out of the current problem.
You might like to know a little more about a very revealing aspect of Lewis and Clark and their expedition of 1802-1806. It may be one of the most powerful connections between their history and your life.
After they finished their history-making journey, life took two very different turns for the pair of leaders. Meriwether Lewis lapsed into alcohol and drug use. He died just a few years following the expedition. The probablity is that he was murdered by one of his cronies in an ever-deepening underworld existence that Lewis had chosen to lead. Lewis also suffered from what we think was bipolarity. His decline may have been worsened by an emotional decline from which he never emerged.
Also, though, you need to know that Lewis spent much of his post-expedition time bickering, arguing, and complaining over translating the 1802-1806 experience into some form of profit. He wrote a book and fought off and on with publishers, merchants, and other gatekeeper in the world of popular media in the early 19th century. His emphasis on personal gain and prominence fueled his psychological and social troubles.
William Clark prospered. He succeeded in obtaining various political offices associated with the newly-traversed Louisiana Territory. He also had some success in operating businesses along the route westward through the Ohio and Mississippi River valleys. He did well.
Clark further avoided all the disputes that consumed so much of Lewis's time and energy. Clark didn't seem to care about generating public fame from his role in the journey. To be sure, Clark sought gain and advancement, but he didn't careen into the swirl of self-promoting celebrity that bedeviled Lewis.
Their Rivers after the river were very different. You may one day stand at the point where two different directions can be taken. Choose well. Maybe this is truly the most valuable learning that we can find in Lewis and Clark.
I sense that a lot of people are waiting for the next shoe to drop on the economy. They fear that some event will happen and drive the economy downward, or perhaps downward at a still faster rate. It's a form of pessimism that is uniquely its own.
I believe that such a shoe will come from one of two sources, both of which are east moving west. One will be in the Middle East, likely involving Iran. The other is what I'd like to address with a little more depth.
This second source is Europe. I know that's not a revelation, at least if you follows the news at all. European economies are teetering on the edge. This affects you because quite a few American banks are deeply involved with various European bonds and securities.
At the core of this European situation is a relationship that has historical roots back at least 150 years. I'm referring to France and Germany and their relations. They have been continental rivals since Germany formed as a nation-state in the mid-19th century. The story of their interaction is the story of how three major wars unfolded (Franco-Prussian of 1870-1871; World War I of 1914-1918; and World War II of 1939-1945). While it's true that they're not fighting today, they are still rivals in many ways and have simply traded bullets and barbed war for budgets and debt.
Behind the equally historically compelling story of European union, there lies the fundamental dynamic of French-German relations. They affect you.
