leadership

He wasn’t, of course, really a doctor. In fact he hadn’t even completed the eighth grade. But in the 25 years of his working life, Doc figured the only thing he hadn’t done for a living was being a doctor. He’d had a string of odd jobs as long as his arm. Over the years, he’d worked as a carnival barker, a roustabout, a farm hand, a railroad man, a day laborer, a crop duster, a rodeo clown. He never held a job for long. Sometimes he was asked to stay, but Doc liked to travel light.

None of that mattered much to him, because work wasn’t what Doc’s life was about. What it was about was running. Blessed with a strong, sleek body and a natural grace and speed, Doc had always loved the world of athletics. Though he’d missed his chance at Olympic glory, he’d built up a solid reputation as a semi-professional. Doc lived to compete. He loved the starting gun. He loved the finish line.

In fact, he had three problems. His first problem was that he had recently turned 40 years old. Suddenly, his body wasn’t the fine-tuned machine it was 20 years ago. He was starting to hear the ticking of the biological clock. He knew that his days as a competitive runner were coming to a close. And running had always been his life.

His second problem was that he was out of work and out of cash. In itself, that was no big deal. He’d been there before. But then there was his third problem.

A few months ago, on October 29, 1929, the stock market had catastrophically collapsed, plunging the world into the Great Depression. Suddenly, investors found the value of their portfolios slashed by 75% overnight. Millionaires were jumping out of office windows, banks started foreclosing on homes and farms, bread lines began forming, and one out of every four American workers[ii] found themselves out of work. And Doc Cole had a problem.

Doc found himself joining a crew of hoboes, migrant workers, ex-farmers, and others on a trek to California. He ended up in Los Angeles, hungry, broke, at the end of his rope, when suddenly he saw something that changed the rest of his life forever.

What he saw, on a scrap of newspaper, was an advertisement for a contest. Contests of all sorts were popular all across the country. They offered an escape from fear and boredom, a chance for some excitement and maybe even some money. There were dance marathons, winner-take-all wrestling matches, and more. But this contest was not just any contest. It was a race.

And not just any race. The terms were attractive: three square meals a day, plus a cash prize of ten thousand dollars – worth several million in today’s money – more money than Doc had ever seen in his life. And all a person had to do was to run.

Fifteen miles a day. Every day. Seven days a week. Week in, week out. All the way from Los Angeles to New York City.

“The world’s longest foot race,” the promoter, a hustler and flimflam artist named Flanagan, was calling it. But soon it was simply to be known, to the entire nation, simply as “Flanagan’s Run”.

Your experience as a leader may sometimes feel like the world’s longest foot race as well. You began your career on what felt like a bright, sunshiny day, surrounded by cheering crowds, full of the excitement of a new beginning. But as day turned into day, year into year, you eventually reached a point where you were alone in the desert. Friends, colleagues, and supporters are nowhere to be seen. The only others around you are mortal enemies, bent on cheating you of the rewards for which you have worked so long and so hard. You are tired, so very tired. And there seems no end to the race. The road stretches on before you, forever.

For the better part of a century, social psychologists have been attempting a scientific study of the phenomenon of leadership. Their goal was to identify the characteristics that make for effective leadership, so effective leaders can be spotted in advance. It was a logical idea, a relevant idea, even an exciting idea.

The search for the perfect leader appears more and more like chasing a moving target, or like running after a mirage. Just when you think you’ve found the ideal formula, the equation changes out from under you.

There are reasons for that, and we’ll get to them before we’re through today. But first, let’s take a brief look at three reasons why leadership is so important today.

It wasn’t that long ago that the big complaint of educators and others working with young people was that the rising generation had no interest in leadership. No one, it seemed, had any heroes. For instance, Allan Bloom, author of the best-seller The Closing of the American Mind, wrote this in 1987: “[O]ver a period of years… I began to ask students who their heroes are… There is usually silence, and most frequently nothing follows. Why should anyone have heroes? One should be oneself and not form oneself in an alien mold.” Every young person’s highest ideal, it seemed, was her or his own self[iii].

They weren’t famous people; they were firefighters, police officers, military reservists, ordinary men and women who had stepped out of nowhere to make a difference when the world fell apart. The age of the antihero was over.

William Strauss and Neil Howe, authors of one of the most influential books I’ve read in the past five years, titled The Fourth Turning: An American Prophecy, remind us that this sort of thing has happened before. Once every eighty years or so, America enters a time of darkness and crisis: the Great Depression, the Civil War, the Revolutionary crisis. All of us, if we live long enough, get to experience one of what Thomas Paine famously called “the times that try men’s souls”. And suddenly, out of a world that has had only disdain for leaders, comes a generation that can’t get enough of them.

But it isn’t only nations that experience this cycle. Corporations, civic associations, families, individual lives go through this same cycle of death and rebirth, summer and winter, crisis and awakening. You may be going through that right now. Your life has been going along smoothly, almost on autopilot. You thought that nothing would ever change or need to change. And then, out of the blue, comes your own personal 9-11. And suddenly your world needs, as it may never have before, the unique virtues of leadership.

At times of crisis – individual, organizational, national, or global – the primary need is that of leadership. That’s one reason why leadership is so important.

In his famous book The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, Stephen Covey complains that the long-standing “character ethic” has been replaced by the “cult of personality”. Suddenly leadership has been reduced to a set of “techniques”, whether it’s “winning through intimidation”, “thriving on chaos”, or simply knowing how to “make friends and influence people”. It’s the ultimate triumph of image over substance. Why bother learning how to be a leader when it’s so much easier and simpler merely to look like a leader? Learn how to dress, how to smile, how to use a Palm Pilot, toss in a little Botox, and presto… instant leadership! Except it’s not.[v]

Historian James Barber had this to say in his book The Presidential Character: “The future is not set, not inevitable either for good or ill. It is not to be mastered by some mechanical application of principles, but by imaginative experimentation. It will grow out of trends, possibilities, accidents, opportunities – and it can be helped along.” But it can only be helped by those who have learned, the long, slow, hard way, by enrolling in the school of hard knocks, what it really means to lead. There aren’t any short cuts to leadership, which means that the demand for leadership will always outstrip the supply.[vi]

The third reason is that it can be very difficult for followers to tell the difference between authentic leadership and dangerous substitutes. Leadership expert Bernard Bass has this to say about false leadership: “[Pseudo leaders] are contemptuous privately of those they are supposed to be serving [publicly]… [I]nstead of earning [respect] from their followers, [they] seek to become the idols, rather than the ideals, of their followers.” This is common[vii] in a world where fame is confused with competence, arrogance with stature, visibility with wisdom. The hunger for leadership is so great that people who can’t find the real thing will happily rush to the false.

In a world like that, what is needed, now more than ever, is authentic leadership.

Without boring you with technical details, let me offer you a quick history of the scientific study of leadership. There have been four “generations” of social psychologists who have studied leadership, each in a different way, over the better part of a century[viii].

The first generation were the “trait theorists”. The idea was that effective leaders must have certain personal qualities that set them apart from others. However, there are three problems with this idea. First, the list of desirable qualities quickly gets so long that it starts to include everything but the kitchen sink. It ends up as a wish list for everything even remotely desirable about the human condition. Second, the list includes pairs of exact opposites: effective leaders are organized, but flexible; they are independent, but collaborative; they are visionary, but practical; they are tough, but sensitive. Third, many effective leaders don’t seem to fit the mold. For instance, a man with such a conflicted marriage that his wife frequently threw him out of the house, who suffered from debilitating clinical depression for his entire life, whose resume featured a string of catastrophic business failures and financial reversals, who had no compunctions about taking the law into his own hands, and who at the peak of his career was openly regarded as a hypocrite and a hopeless compromiser wouldn’t seem like a good candidate for effective leadership. But that was precisely who Abraham Lincoln was[ix].

The second generation were the “behavior theorists”. Maybe, they thought, it isn’t who leaders are; it’s what they do. Trouble is, either what we do stems from who we are, or it doesn’t. If it does, behavior theory is just trait theory in a new disguise. But if it doesn’t, the cure is worse than the disease, because we all end up as nothing more than pigeons in a Skinner box. In that case, there are no true leaders at all, only conditions that produce leadership behavior; the leader is just a wood chip on the vast ocean of life.

The third generation were the “contingency theorists”. Their idea was that there may be more than one kind of effective leadership, and that different situations call for uniquely different types of leaders. You’ve probably heard some of their terms, like Fred Fiedler’s contrast between task leaders and relational leaders, or Hersey and Blanchard’s idea that there are four kinds of leaders – tellers, sellers, participators, and delegators. All of this was a step in the right direction, but didn’t really tell anyone what they could do, practically and personally, to become more of a leader than they already were. It’s one thing to think about leadership; it’s quite another to become a leader.

The fourth generation, the “positive psychology theorists” or the “transformational leadership theorists”, have been attempting, over the past two decades, to address those issues. What they’re starting to find is, at last, a prescription for effective leadership. They did that by recognizing that leadership is caught, not taught. Leaders become leaders by leading. But in the process, effective leaders focus on five skill sets that anyone can take practical “baby steps” to acquire or refine, beginning today. Let’s take a look at them.

By the end of the first day of Flanagan’s Run, 75% of the contestants had dropped out, exhausted. (Flanagan, who had anticipated this, was funding the race by pocketing the small but nonrefundable entry fees of the dropouts.) Within a week, only a small contingent of hard-core competitors remained, moving into the stark, barren stretches of the Sonora Desert.

As the ranks thinned, Doc Cole found his motivations for being in the race undergoing a surprising transformation. Initially, like everyone else, he was in it for the money, the fame, the media coverage, the prospect of celebrity endorsements. But as he slogged through the desert, he found that these things no longer seemed to matter. The finish line was 3000 miles away, but it might as well have been three million, it was so remote. Every day, it was just him and the desert, him and fifteen grueling miles, him and his life. He found that he was in the race for reasons that had nothing to do with the prospect of winning, everything to do with testing and developing his own character, his persistence, his fortitude, his determination.

The word “character”, like “leadership”, is making an astonishing comeback in the post-9/11 world. The Greek root of this word comes from the ancient engraving industry. An artisan would mark a completed piece as his own by pressing his own special mark onto that piece, in lieu of a signature. He was said to give it his “character”. Character, then, in Barber’s words, “is what life has marked into a person’s being… Character is the person’s stance as he confronts experience. And at the core of character, a person confronts himself.” Harry S Truman once said, “In reading the lives of great leaders, I found that the first victory they won was over themselves… Self-discipline with all of them came first… I could never admire a person whose only interest is himself.”[x]

Character is what leads the leader. Sometimes it can lead him or her to surprising places.

Nobuo Nagano was a Japanese railway worker who, as the twentieth century dawned, was just turning thirty. Though well regarded as a person of character by his fellow workers, he would probably have lived and died in obscurity except for a freak accident.

On this particular day, Nobuo was light of heart, for this was his last day of work before leaving to marry his childhood sweetheart. But still he forced himself to pay attention, for the passenger train on which he was working was scheduled to climb the treacherous Shiokari Pass through the mountains of northern Japan. The train ran along a narrow, curving track flanked on both sides by deep gorges.

As the engine neared the top of the pass, Nobuo sighed with relief, for the engine was barely adequate to pull the weight of the long string of cars behind it. Suddenly he heard an ominous sound. He turned and saw, to his horror, that the engine had become decoupled from the rest of the train. The passenger cars slowly ground to a halt and then ominously began moving backwards down the mountain.

Nobuo rushed to the rear of the car and turned the hand brake with all his might. The train slowed somewhat, and for a minute he thought the crisis was past. Then it slowly began gathering speed again. He tried again, but the brake was old and rusted and could not be turned any further.

Nobuo looked into the distance and saw a sharp curve ahead. He knew that if the engineless train reached that curve at full speed, it would surely derail, killing every person aboard. Suddenly he realized what he must do. With a last fleeting thought of his bride-to-be awaiting him at the station across the mountain, he leaped from the car onto the track, stopping the train with the weight of his now dead body[xi].

As a leader, you may never be called to make the ultimate sacrifice. But leadership, character, and sacrifice are always linked. To have character is to know the difference between “what really matters and what only seems to matter”[xii] – and to be willing to sacrifice the latter in the service of the former. The only poem I’ve ever memorized in its entirety, by Irish poet laureate William Butler Yeats, makes the same point in a different way:

Or (to put it more simply), in the words of a plaque hanging on my office door: “Lord, help me not to be so busy making a living that I forget to make a life. Amen.”

How do you develop character? By knowing what really matters, first of all. But if you know that and do nothing about it, your character remains the same. Character comes from putting feet to your values, by making choices every day that establish and maintain those priorities. What choices are you making today?

Doc Cole started the race as a fierce competitor. “The weak to the wall” and “the devil take the hindmost” had always been his watchwords. It was a dog-eat-dog world, and the last thing he wanted was to end his life inside the belly of some bigger, stronger dog.

But as he’d watched the string of dropouts leave the race in defeat and despair, his heart began to go out to them. He knew what they had sacrificed – in time, in money, in hope – to enter the race. They weren’t faceless entities any more; they were fellow strugglers. And again his mindset began to change.

Like every experienced runner, Doc had his bag of tricks. At first he was determined to keep them to himself, to safeguard the razor-thin lead he was beginning to accumulate as times were tallied at the end of each day. But as he sat around the desert campfires night after night, listening to the other competitors’ stories of luck or woe, something changed. One night, while he was engaged in one of his special tactics – sandpapering the soles of his feet until they were baby-smooth – the man sitting next to him asked him what he was up to. A month ago Doc would have lied about it. A week ago he would have made a joke or pretended not to hear. But, on this night, he decided to begin widening the circle. “Shaves five minutes off your time in a week,” he said, with a smile.

A fancier word for widening the circle is “inclusive collaboration”. It means believing in a universe of abundance, not a universe of scarcity. It means that solutions in which everybody gains are better in the long run than those that let you win by taking the food out of somebody else’s mouth.

On February 25, 1994, the world watched transfixed as sixteen-year-old Oksana Baiul, the orphan figure skater from the Ukraine, squeaked out a razor-thin Olympic victory over American favorite Nancy Kerrigan[xiv]. But half a world away, another event was occurring that day, as dark and tragic as the Olympics were bright and inspiring.

It was a quiet morning at the Tomb of the Patriarchs, a site holy to Jews, Christians, and Muslims alike. Inside the Mosque of Abraham, which tradition says was built over the gravesite of the Friend of God, a group of Palestinian Muslims were worshipping. Suddenly, out of the shadows crept Dr. Baruch Goldstein. Pulling an assault rifle out from underneath his cloak, he opened fire. In a heartbeat, 29 worshippers lay dead, and with them, the Oslo Peace Process so carefully brokered by President Clinton.[xv]

Among those horrified by this turn of events was a journalist and author, Bruce Feiler. He had been in the midst of doing background research for his new book, about the man, Abraham, whose story lay at the very heart of three very different faiths – Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Feiler became determined to do something to contribute to prospects for peace and interfaith understanding, and to do it in a way centered around the name of this man whose tomb was now associated the world over with terrorism and brutality. He decided to go home and bake some brownies.

But not just any brownies. Triple-chocolate brownies, with three kinds of intermixed chocolate pieces, one for each Abrahamic religion. This was Feiler’s symbolic way of saying that, even though each tradition remains distinct, and without giving up its claims for truth and universality, they can somehow find a way to live together. Feiler’s idea was to serve the brownies at a series of discussion events he planned to call Abraham Salons, where Jews, Christians, Muslims, and others could meet to discuss the story of Abraham using the holy texts of each faith as a reference point.

Feiler’s original goal was to see fifty Abraham Salons held at various locations around the United States. But when Time magazine caught wind of the idea and made Feiler’s work part of a cover story, suddenly there were over five thousand Salons going on worldwide. Abraham, Feiler realized, was an idea whose time had come. Especially an Abraham who came complete with brownies.[xvi]

Note that one of the reasons inclusion is difficult is because the others may not be interested in including you. Even if they don’t take out an assault rifle and shoot you, they may say bad things about you behind your back. In fact, if they don’t, maybe you’re not a leader at all; as a very wise man once said, “Woe to you when all people speak well of you.”[xvii] Effective leaders have always had to cultivate a thick skin when it comes to criticism. For instance, Truman was so poorly regarded for the mistakes he made early in his presidency that the joke around the country was “to err is Truman”. The leading political commentator of the day had this to say about Franklin Delano Roosevelt: “He is a pleasant man who, without any important qualifications for the office, would very much like to be president.”[xviii] A contemporary wrote about George Washington, “The firm tone of his mind… is beginning to relax; a listlessness of labor, a desire of tranquillity has crept on him, and a willingness to let others act, or even think, for him.”[xix] To take a non-political example, though after her death many revere Mother Teresa as a saint, in her lifetime her well-known nickname was “Miss Bossy Boots”[xx].

Another reason why inclusion is hard is that, try as you might, other people may simply be unable to understand you. Usually that’s because their life and experience is so different from yours. Tom Friedman tells the story of a train ride he took through Egypt: [xxi]

[T]he car [was] full of middle- and upper-class Egyptians. So many of them had cell phones that kept ringing with different piercing melodies during the two-hour trip that at one point I felt like getting up, taking out a baton, and conducting a cell-phone symphony… Yet, while all those phones were chirping inside the train, outside we were passing along the Nile, where barefoot Egyptian villagers were tilling their fields with the same tools and water buffalo that their ancestors used in Pharaoh’s day. I couldn’t imagine a wider… gap within one country. Inside the train it was A.D. 2000, outside it was 2000 B.C.

Friedman goes on to say that neither side could have understood the other because of what anthropologists call “systematic misunderstanding”, which means a gap so wide between your mental framework and that of the other person that, the more information you provide, the less understanding takes place. Gaps like that can’t be bridged by talking, but only by walking a mile in the other person’s shoes… or their bare feet.

Want to take some baby steps in the direction of inclusive collaboration? Think of the one person in your current work or life situation that you find the most difficult to respect, to like, or to get along with. (Hopefully he’s not standing behind the podium.) Now ask yourself, what one step can you take starting this week to build a bridge to that person -- in a way that helps him or her to meet their needs in a way that doesn’t deprive you of yours? 99% of the time, there’s a synergic or win-win solution that allows both of you to walk away better off than you were before. What’s the win-win in your life?

Doc Cole had always been something of a cynic. Of course, he’d given it other labels: realist, pragmatist, stoic, survivor. But he’d always been a little bit wary of “starry-eyed idealists”. What he had, he’d earned for himself the good old fashioned way, by the sweat of his brow.

But by the time the desert started giving way to the Rocky Mountains, Doc began to think that he’d been more out of balance than he cared to admit. He felt his spirits growing brighter every day. Maybe it was just that he was in better physical condition than he’d ever been in his life. Maybe it was the increasing beauty and majesty of the landscape. Maybe it was just that he was too tired to think dark thoughts. Maybe it was because he was beginning to cultivate some real friendships for the first time in his four decades of existence. But for the first time in a long time, Doc began to let himself think past today into tomorrow. Like a bird stretching unfamiliar, long-forgotten wings, Doc was beginning to hope.

Nelson Mandela, chained hand and foot, was roughly escorted from the prison van. The angry, racist shouts of white guards rang in his ears: “Dis die Eiland! Her julle gaan vrek!” (“This is The Island! Here you will die!) It wasn’t an idle threat. Mandela had been sentenced to a five-year prison term, and few political prisoners sentenced to The Island survived that long.

Conditions were brutal. Prisoners were fed nothing but corn porridge three times a day. Twelve-hour work days, crushing rocks in the hot sun, were mandatory. Insults and threats were commonplace. Yet Mandela remained optimistic that his political vision for a free South Africa had not been imprisoned with him. At his trial, he had stated calmly and simply, “During my lifetime… I have fought against white domination, and I have fought against black domination. I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities.” No one believed it possible at the time. Yet thirty-two years later, Mandela, after nearly three decades as a prisoner, was awarded the Nobel Peace Price and saw his dream of a free South Africa come true under his leadership.[xxiii]

Challenges to your own attitude of optimism are unlikely to be quite that extreme. (If they are, you might consider changing employers.) But the accumulated little challenges of life in a pressure-cooker work world can make serious inroads into your mindset, no matter how positive a person you are. Here are three quick things you can do about that.

One way is to make sure you’re having some fun at work! Even though careers are serious business in contemporary America, work should be fun. (In fact, social psychologist and creativity expert Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi [xxiv] argues that work and play should, ideally, be indistinguishable. In my view, the only difference should be that work comes with direct deposit.) How much fun have you had at work over the past month? If you can’t say that you love what you do at least 70% of the time, seek professional help immediately.

Second, surround yourself with nourishing people. Counselors like to say that there are two kinds of people in the world: nourishing people, who build you up, and toxic people, who… don’t. There’s no shortage of the latter, but sometimes you have to work at it a bit to find the former. A good rule of thumb is that for every hour you spend with a toxic person, you should be spending one hour with a nourishing one.

Third, diversify your sources of identity. In our career-focused culture, it’s easy to make work your whole life. But if you are what you do, then (as one author puts it)[xxv] when you’re not doing it, you must be nobody. That’s not anyone’s idea of a good time, or of a balanced life. The antidote is to make sure you don’t put all your identity eggs in one basket. Find meaningful work, yes, but also invest in your family, friends, community, hobbies, values, and more.

By the time he was crossing the Mississippi River from Iowa into Illinois, Doc Cole was struck by a brilliant idea. It was so blindingly simple that he wondered why he had never thought of it before. He wondered if anyone else would understand or relate to what he had in mind. But as he turned the idea over again and again in his head, he knew he just had to give it a try. A vision like this was simply too good to pass up.

Creativity is important because it is the foundation of growth and development. As social analyst Richard Florida puts it, “Enduring social change occurs not during economic boom times… but in periods of crisis and questioning.”[xxvi] People who respond to difficulties by thinking outside the box are the new millennium’s natural leaders. And I have good news for you: it’s an exponentially increasing trend. Florida estimates that 30% of the nation’s workforce qualify as members of the “creative class”. One out of three of these individuals comprise what he calls the “super-creative core”. Are you one of them?

Part of creative visioning is the recognition that there is always more than one way to look at any situation. Career counselor Tom Jackson[xxvii] calls this the contrast between the “CVS” (the “Current View of the Situation”) and the “BVS” (meaning a “Better View of the Situation”). You’ll never find the BVS if your vision is blocked by the CVS, either because you’re afraid of change or because you’ve fallen in love with your own existing ideas. A good antidote for that problem is to cultivate what Edward de Bono calls the “habit of twin hypotheses”[xxviii] – that is, while looking for evidence to support your pet theory or favorite idea, also keep your eyes peeled for evidence that supports a completely different point of view. Or as cartoonist Charles Schulz liked to put it, “If I were only going to write one book, the title would have to be Have You Ever Considered The Possibility That You Are Completely Wrong?”[xxix]

Workplace expert Harvey Mackay tells the story of a night when, late and frazzled, he hopped into a taxi in New York City. New York cabs are usually dirty and smelly, and so are the drivers. But this vehicle was squeaky clean and the driver was immaculately dressed. In a basket alongside the back seat was a selection of fresh fruit, a carafe of piping hot coffee, and current issues of a number of news magazines, all clearly paid for out of the cabbie’s own pocket. “Help yourself,” the driver said. “And by the way, what kind of music would you like me to play? Classical? Jazz? Country? I’ve got ‘em all. Or if you just want some conversation, pick the topic.”

“Okay, then,” the driver said. “If you want, you can pass the time reading my mission statement.” He handed his passenger a professionally typeset and laminated document. Now Mackay was really impressed. Half of the CEO’s he worked with as a consultant didn’t have a personal mission statement, and here was a cab driver with one. For the first time in his life, Mackay found himself actually enjoying a taxi ride.

At the end of the trip, Mackay offered the driver a generous tip, four or five times what he would usually give. On a whim, he asked the driver, “Do you mind if I ask you what your earnings are in tips in a year?”

One good, tried-and-true way to develop a personal mission statement, if you don’t already have one, is to complete a “best-case eulogy”. Imagine yourself as a guest at your own funeral – exactly how you manage that is up to you – and that, unobserved, you have the privilege of listening to friends and acquaintances characterize the person you were and what your life was all about. What would you like them to be able to honestly say about you? And what does that tell you about the kinds of choices you have to keep making (or start making) – beginning today – to maximize the probability that your life really will turn out that way?

Another is to use humor, which is an important part of creativity because it enables you to reframe, or to put situations in new contexts. For instance, here’s what the world’s self-styled quirkest man, comic “Strange de Jim” has to say about life:

“Life is tough. It takes all your time, all your weekends, and what do you get at the end of it? Death, a great reward. I think the life cycle is all backwards. You should die first, get it out of the way, then live in an old age home for twenty years until you finally get kicked out for being too young. You get a gold watch, and you go to work. You work for forty years until you’re young enough to go to college. You party until you’re ready for high school, then you work your way down to grade school. You become a little kid, you play, you have no responsibilities, you become a little baby, you go back into the womb, you spend your last nine months floating, and you finish off as a gleam in someone’s eye.”[xxxi]

Still another is to support the struggling paper industry by wearing what De Bono calls the Green Hat[xxxii] -- which means learning the three surprising secrets to becoming the most creative person you can possibly be. Here they are:

First, learn lots of irrelevant information, because you never know “what goes with what”. What you learn in one domain of life can spark an insight in a completely unrelated domain. Imagine that you are training to become the world’s best trivia contestant. I’m proud to say that I’m good at that; as my wife often tells me, “Marlowe, if it can’t possibly matter, you know it.”

Second, be willing to make a fool of yourself on a routine basis. De Bono is famous for noting that, often, the only possible mental stepping stone between an unsolved problem and a brilliant solution is a blindingly stupid idea. Most people miss the solution because they’re afraid of feeling or looking stupid. Learn to kill the voice in your head that says things like “that’ll never work” or “we ain’t never done it that way before”.

Third, take advantage of the unexpected, or what psychologist John Krumboltz[xxxiii] calls “planned happenstance”. Unexpected life events are a gift that can lead to new and positive ventures, if a person is insightful enough to be aware of them and to know how to take advantage of them. Don’t be like the person whose ship finally came in while he was waiting at the airport.

All the way through Ohio and Pennsylvania and into New York state, Doc began to share his vision, at first haltingly, then with increasing enthusiasm. To his surprise, every one of the twenty remaining fellow runners responded with excitement and agreement. He hadn’t been sure they would. But apparently the long trek through the heartland of America had had the same effect on the others that it had on him. None of them had the remotest idea how the prize committee would react. They might be playing the world’s cruelest joke on themselves. Or maybe, just maybe, they were about to make the smartest decision of their lives. But either way, this ragtag band of men and women, young and old, white and black, had found out something even more valuable. They had discovered the power of a shared story.

Professional storyteller Doug Lipman has this to say about the art of telling a good story. “A person piloting a sailboat takes into account both where they are heading and the prevailing winds and currents. A storyteller must do the same thing. You may have a very clear idea of what you want to convey. But like a sailor who set the rudder to a predetermined angle, if you do the same thing each time out, you'll end up at a different place each time.”[xxxiv] Leaders, too, are storytellers. They create a sense of shared vision by imparting their vision to others and giving others ownership over their piece of the story. Leadership theorists call this “idealized influence”[xxxv], but in essence, it is the art of organizational storytelling.

Many years ago, a boy named Saccath was captured by marauders on his sixteenth birthday and sold into slavery. For six long years, half a world away from his familiar home, he served in bondage to a pirate and cattle rustler named Miliucc. Saccath was lonely and terrified, for Miliucc was known to practice the art of human sacrifice. If a slave grew lax in his duties, his master might decide he was worth more dead than alive and offer him to his gods in return for the promise of more power and prosperity.

Finally, the day came when Saccath saw a chance to escape. The night before, he had a vivid dream in which an angel appeared to him with the message, “Your hungers are rewarded: you are going home. Look, your ship is ready.” On the strength of this message Saccath set out on a two-hundred mile trek through unknown country until he reached the sea. Sure enough, a ship was waiting, and to his surprise, the sailors are happy to take him on board.

Arriving home, Saccath is welcomed by his astonished family but can no longer settle back into the life he once knew. One night in his parents’ house, he has another dream. The same heavenly figure appears to him holding a scroll. “We who once enslaved you now beg you,” the figure reads from the scroll, “to come and walk among us once more.” Saccath wakes up but cannot put the vision out of his mind.

Eventually he returns and spends the rest of his life sharing the story of his life and his vision and what it has come to mean to him. By the end of his life, according to historian Thomas Cahill, he has saved all of Western civilization, for his followers become the single island of learning and culture in the middle of the European Dark Ages, the slender thread linking the world of antiquity to the world of modern history. As a result of his contributions, Saccath is given a new name meaning “the noble one” – in Latin, Patricius. We know him today as St. Patrick, the patron saint of the Irish people.[xxxvi]

What is the story you have to share with others? Your story not only shapes your life, but that of everyone else with whom you come into contact – if you tell it.

As the runners entered New York City and neared the finish line, Doc Cole saw the streets lined with cheering, excited crowds. Two hundred yards from the finish line, Doc had a clear lead of more than a hundred yards and was certain to be the winner. Deliberately, with a last fond farewell to the ten thousand dollar prize, he slowed to a walk, turned his back on the finish line, and raised his arms as if in victory. The runner behind him caught up to him, also slowed, turned, and raised his hands, linking them with Doc’s. Soon a third joined them, then a fourth, then a fifth. The twentieth and last runner reached them just as the line of men and women reached the tape, and then they turned, crossed it in unison, and shouted.

Bibliography/References

All words not in quotation marks are my own, but I am indebted to the following sources of the stories and ideas I retell here.

[i] The story of Doc Cole is based (with some creative liberties, though the story is generally a factually accurate account) on McNab, Tom. Flanagan’s Run. New York: Morrow, 1982.

[ii] Facts about the Great Depression are drawn in part from Gilbert, Martin. A History of the Twentieth Century: Volume 1 (1900-1933). New York: Avon Books, 1997.

[iii] Bloom, Allan. The Closing of the American Mind. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987.

[iv] Strauss, William, and Howe, Neil. The Fourth Turning: An American Prophecy. New York: Broadway Books, 1997.

[v] Covey, Stephen. The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People: Restoring the Character Ethic. New York: Fireside Books, 1990.

[vi] Barber, James D. The Presidential Character: Predicting Performance in the White House. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall Inc., 1972.

[vii] Bass, Bernard. The Ethics of Transformational Leadership. New York: Academy of Leadership Press, 1997.

[viii] Doyle, Michele E. and Smith, Mark K. “Classical Leadership.” The Encyclopedia Of Informal Education, 2001. (http://www.infed.org/leadership/traditional_leadership.htm)

[ix] Based in part on Zinn, Howard. A People’s History of the United States: 1492-Present. New York: Harper Collins, 1995.

[x] Barber, op. cit.

[xi] Based on Miura, Ayako. Shiokari Pass. London: OMF Books, 1974. (Translated by Bill and Sheila Fearnehough)

[xii] As quoted in the movie Places in the Heart, from an obscure novel whose name I haven’t been able to trace, unfortunately.

[xiii] Yeats, William Butler. Collected Works (Vol. 1). New York: Scribner, 1996.

[xiv] For additional details in Oksana’s own words, see her official Web site at www.oksanastyle.com

[xv] Composited from the following sources: Price, Randall, Fast Facts on the Middle East Conflict (Eugene, OR: Harvest House Publishers, 2003); Drosnin, Michael, The Bible Code (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997); and http://en.wikipedia.org

[xvi] Feiler, Bruce. Abraham: A Journey to the Heart of Three Faiths. New York: Harper Collins, 2004.

[xvii] The words of Jesus as recorded in Luke 6:26.

[xviii] Barber, op. cit.

[xix] Ellis, Joseph J. Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation. New York: Random House, 2000.

[xx] Aikman, David. Great Souls: Six Who Changed the Century. Nashville: Word Publishing, 1998.

[xxi] Friedman, Thomas L. The Lexus and the Olive Tree: Understanding Globalization. New York: Anchor Books, 2000.

[xxii] Brown, Roger. Social Psychology. New York: Free Press, 1986.

[xxiii] Aikman, op. cit.

[xxiv] Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly. Finding Flow: The Psychology Of Engagement With Everyday Life. New York : Basic Books, 1997.

[xxv] Unattributed quotes are a bad thing, but I simply can’t remember who originally said this, and my attempts to find out have failed. It was somebody brilliant but obscure. Let’s give her or him mental credit even if none of us know who s/he is.

[xxvi] Florida, Richard. The Rise of the Creative Class. New York: Basic Books, 2002.

[xxvii] Jackson, Tom. Not Just Another Job. New York: Times Books, 1992.

[xxviii] De Bono, Edward. Six Action Shoes. New York: Harper Business, 1991.

[xxix] As told in Johnson, Rheta G. Good Grief: The Story of Charles M. Schulz. Kansas City : Andrews and McMeel, 1995.

[xxx] Adapted from Mackay, Harvey. Sharkproof. New York: Harper Business, 1993.

[xxxi] Van Oech, Roger. A Kick in the Seat of the Pants. New York: Harper and Row, 1986.

[xxxii] De Bono, op. cit.

[xxxiii] Krumboltz, John D., and Levin, Al S. Planned Happenstance: Making the Most of Chance Events in Your Life and Your Career. Atascadero, CA : Impact Publishers, 2002.

[xxxiv] Morrow, Glen. Finding the Heart of the Story: An Interview with Doug Lipman, 2002. (http://www.hasidicstories.com)

[xxxv] Bass, op. cit.

[xxxvi] Composited from Ogg, Oscar, The 26 Letters (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1961), and Cahill, Thomas, How The Irish Saved Civilization (New York: Anchor Books, 1995).

Revitalizing the Leader in You:

Five Steps to Effective Leadership