Author: Sam

• Change can’t be seen to the enemy – instead it is the source of both personal growth and organizational salvation.
• 5 forces working on the world:
• Technology
• Global Interdependence
• Mergers and Acquisitions
• Deregulation and Regulation
• Demographics and Values
• The organization is – or should be – a social architect. This requires its executives to be social architects too. First, they must guarantee their organizations are honest and ethical institutions. Then they must redesign their organizations in order to redesign society along more humane and functional lines (lead not manage).
• Workers are unique assets NOT interchangeable liabilities. This type of attitude allows the organization to dismiss the potential contributions of all its members and prevents it from fully using its major resource in its effort to remake itself.
• Vision, like the world itself, is dynamic, not static, and must be renewed, adapted, adjusted. And when it becomes too dim, it must be abandoned and replaced.
• Just as no great painting has ever been created by a committee, no great vision has ever emerged from the herd.
• When visionary leadership is combined with sound _____ (IMG_0332, near end) practices, the results can be success that lasts.
• “We must be the change that we wish to see in the world”. -Ghandi
• Advice to young executives:
• Take advantage of every opportunity
• Aggressively search for meaning
• Know yourself
• Give young employees opportunities to lead.
• If you don’t make mistakes you aren’t trying hard enough.
• Risk taking must be encouraged.
• Mistakes must be seen as an integral part of the process, so they are regarded as normal, not abnormal.
• Corrective action rather than censure must follow.
• 2 kinds of people: those who are paralyzed by fear, and those who are afraid but go ahead anyways. Life isn’t about limitation, it’s about options. A healthy organizational culture encourages the belief in options.
• Organizations should serve as mentors for their people.
• The organization is only half itself; the other half is its expression.
• The new 3 R’s: retreat, renewal, return. Those moments when nothing is in the way. It’s in such moments that meaning begins to emerge, and understanding, and new questions and fresh challenges.
• Just as thought should precede action, reflection should follow it, on the organizational as well as the personal level.
• An organization by definition, should function organically, which means that its purposes should determine its structure, rather than the other way around and that it should function as a community rather than a hierarchy and offer autonomy to its members, along with tests, opportunities and rewards, because ultimately an organization is merely the means, not the end.
• Since the release and full use of the individual’s potential is the organization’s true task, all organizations must provide for the growth and development of their members and find ways of offering them opportunities for such growth and development.
• In a time of drastic change, it is the learners who inherit the future. The learned find themselves equipped to live in a world that no longer exists.
• “These are the hard times in which a genius would wish to live… Great necessities call not great virtues.” Abigail Adams
• Leaders are people who understand the prevailing culture, even though much of the culture is latent, existing only in peoples’ minds and dreams or unconsciousness. The leaders of the future will be those who take the next step – to change the culture.
• The philosopher, not the tycoon or mandarin (IMG_0334, near top) is king, because history proves that sooner or later ideas take root.
• The leader knows chaos is the beginning, not the end. Chaos is the source of energy and momentum.
• 10 characteristics for coping with change, forging a new future, and uniting organizations:
• Leaders manage the dream- all leaders have the capacity to create a compelling vision, one that takes people to a new place and then translates that vision into reality.
• Leaders embrace our (IMG_0334): failure is not the crime, aiming too low is!
• Leaders encourage reflective back talk. (Many leaders are still married to their first spouse, it’s important to have someone you can trust for honest feedback).
• Leaders encourage dissent.
• Leaders possess the Nobel factor: optimism, faith and hope.
• Leaders understand the Pygmalion effect in management. (Behavior is a function of how you are treated not just how you behave) Stretch, don’t strain.

[Mangers treatment and expectations of subordinates largely determine their performance and superior managers create high performance expectations that subordinates fulfill, poor managers do not. And subordinates, more often than not, appear to do what they believe they are expected to do.]

• Leaders have the “Gretzky Factor”, a certain touch (Don’t worry about where the puck is, but where it will be)( Know where the organization’s culture is going).
• Leaders are the long view.
• Leaders understand stakeholder symmetry. They know that they must balance the competing claims of all the groups at stake in the company.
• Leaders create strategic alliances and partnerships.
• Next generation of leaders will have certain things in common:
  • Broad education
  • Boundless curiosity
  • Boundless enthusiasm
  • Contagious opinion
  • Belief in people and teamwork
  • Willingness to take risks
  • Devotion to long-term growth rather than short-term profit
  • Commitment to excellence
  • Adaptive capacity
  • Empathy
  • Authenticity
  • Integrity
  • Vision

And as they express themselves, they will make new movies, new industries, and perhaps a new world.

If that sounds like an impossible dream to you, consider this: it’s much easier to express yourself than to deny yourself. And, much more rewarding too.

• “I think one of the biggest turn-ons is for people to know that their peers and particularly their bosses not only know they’re there but know pretty intimately what they’re doing and are involved with them on almost a daily basis, that it’s a partnership, that you’re really trying to run this thing well together, that if something goes wrong our goal is to fix it, not see who we can nail.”
• You can’t lead unless someone is willing to follow.
• Very difficult to make/force people to do things, they need to be inspired or confident in the leader and their vision.
• 4 leadership traits that build trust:
• Consistency: Whatever surprises leaders themselves may face they don’t create any for the group. Leaders are all of a piece; they stay the course.
• Congruity: Leaders walk then talk. In true leaders, there is no gap between theories they expose and the life they practice.
• Reliability: Leaders are there when it counts; they are ready to support their co-workers in the moments that matter.
• Integrity: Leaders honor their commitments and promises.
• Leading with your voice: taking charge without taking control; must inspire people, not order them around. The best people working for organizations are like volunteers since they could probably find good jobs in any number of groups, they choose to work somewhere for reasons less tangible than salary or position. They want a covenantal relationship, not a contractual one.
• Competence, vision and virtue must be in careful balance (can’t only have one or two of the three).
• The chief object of leadership is the creation of a human community held together by the work bond for a common purpose.
• Goals are not ends, but idea processes by which the future can be created.
• Lack of integrity (without a solid sense of ethics)
• You should preserve the ability to say, “Shove it” and go your own way. That really frees you.
• One of the hardest lessons any novice skier has to learn is to lean away from the hill and not into it. The natural inclination is to stay as close to the slope as possible, because it feels safer and more secure. But only when the skier leans out can they begin to move and gain control, rather than being controlled by the slope. The organizational novice does the same thing. Leans close to the organizational slope, submerging their own identity in that of the corporation. The leader stands tall and leans out, taking charge of their own course, with a clean view of where the course is going.

• What we do is a direct result of not only what and how we think, but what and how we feel as well. It’s how you feel about things that dictate how you behave. Most people don’t process their feelings, because thinking is hard work. And, abstract thinking doesn’t usually lead to a behavior change. It leads to a conflict about change.
• Most people only reflect when there is a big negative event in their lives. It’s important to make reflection a constant habit so it goes on when other things are going well also and things can be learned from both positive and negative experiences.
• Try to reflect on negative events AFTER you have gotten over it.
• Resolution:
• A course of action decided upon
• An explanation or solution
• The time to reflect is in tranquility- then it’s time to resolve.
• The point is not to be the victims of our feelings, jerked this way and that by unresolved emotions, not to be used by our experiences, but to use them and to use them creatively. “Any sorrow can be born (IMG_0326, near bottom) if we can put it in a story.”
• Too much intellectualizing tends to paralyze us. But true reflection inspires, informs, and ultimately demands resolution.
• The opposite of a great truth is another great truth.
• Once you have learned to reflect on your experiences until the resolution of your conflicts arises from within you, then you begin to develop your own perspective.
• If you know what you think and what you want, you have a very real advantage.
• Anyone who wants to express himself fully and truly MUST have a point of view. However, it can’t be borrowed or copied, it must be your own, original and authentic.
• How can you best express yourself? The first test is knowing what you want, knowing your abilities and capacities and recognizing the difference between the two. The second test is knowing what drives you, knowing what gives you satisfaction, and knowing the difference between the two. The third test is knowing what your values and priorities are, knowing what the values and priorities of your organization are and measuring the difference between the two. The fourth test: are you able and willing to overcome those differences?
• Being in sync with your organization is almost as important as being in sync with yourself.
• Whatever it is you want to do you shouldn’t let fear get in your way. Fear, for most leaders, is less a crippler than a motivator.
• The greatest opportunities for growth lies in overcoming things you’re afraid of.
• It is entirely possible to succeed and satisfy yourself simultaneously,  but only if you are wise enough and honest enough to admit what you want and recognize what you need.
• The difference between desire and drive is the difference between expressing yourself and proving yourself.
• If you hold your ground and make your convictions known, people will come around.
• You can’t make “being a leader” or “happiness” goals. They are the result, not the cause.
• First step of leadership is mastery of the task at hand!! Such mastery requires absolute concentration, the full deployment of oneself.
• There are some people who are so obviously “on” that they give us a lift just by walking into the room, they can demonstrate mastery just by the way they stand.
• They path of mastery is built on unrelenting practice, but it’s also a place of adventure… Those we call masters are shamelessly enthusiastic about their calling, the genius has the ability to give everything and hold nothing back.
• It’s important to have a desire to create something in spite of whether others agree, good ideas borne of personal vision are good regardless of others opinion.
• “It [the process of mastery] should be fun, the process ought to be exciting and fun. The person who’s not having any fun is doing something wrong. Either his environment is stultifying or he’s off base himself.”
• Thoughts teach something that can’t be broken down into smaller, repeatable steps that are always executed the same way. But with something art on leadership you reinvent the wheel every single time you apply the principle. Leaders aren’t technicians.
• First, you must know where you are going, what’s the goal. Second, make a map of highly probable paths, flush them out, elaborate them, revise them, make a kind of map of them, complete with possible pitfalls and traps as well as rewards. Third, examine the map as if you weren’t the creator, locate its soft spots and change or eliminate them. Finally, get into action.
• The basic difference between an ordinary man and a warrior is that a warrior takes everything as a challenge, while an ordinary man takes everything as a blessing or a curse.
• Unless you are willing to take risks, you will suffer paralyzing inhibition, and you will never do what you are capable of doing. Mistakes- missteps- are necessary for actualizing your vision, and necessary steps towards success.
• When young we lose track of ourselves due to all the stuff going on around us, as we age, this goes away allowing for more creativity.
• Leaders differ from others in their constant appetite for knowledge and experience and as their worlds widen and become more complex, so do their means of understanding.
• First you have to figure out how to organize your job, the management of time, what your responsibilities are. Second, you have to learn to lead, not contain. Third, you have to have a clear sense of who you are and a sense of mission, a clear sense of who you are and a sense of mission, a clear understanding of it, and you must be sure that your principles are congruent with the organization’s principles. Fourth, you have to demonstrate your behavior all the things you believe a leader and a follower should do. Fifth, you need a great sense of freedom and scope so that you can free the people who work with you to live up to their potential. If you believe in the team approach, you must believe in people and then potential. And you must demand a great deal of them but be consistent.
• Leading is about guiding and providing vision and inspiration rather than supervision.
• How you attract and motivate people determine how successful you’ll be as a leader.
• Leaders always have faith in themselves, their abilities, their co-workers and their mutual possibilities. But leaders also have sufficient doubt to question, challenge, probe, and thereby progress. In the same way his/her coworkers must believe in the leader, themselves, and their combined strength, but they must feel sufficiently confident to question, challenge, probe and test too.
• Vision, inspiration, empathy, trustworthiness are manifestations of a leader’s judgement and character.
• You’ve got to do your own growing, no matter how tall your grandfather is.
• Leaders consciously construct their own lives and the contexts in which they live and work. They are not just actors, but playwright, hammer and anvil and each in their own way is altering the larger context.
• Leadership is first being, then doing. Everything the leader does reflects what they are.
• If you want to truly understand something, try to change it. Leaders = innovators.
• Good judgement comes from experience, which comes from “getting kicked around a bit”.
• Experience is the best tracker.
• Learning to lead is learning to manage change. However, unless the leader continues to evolve, to adapt and adjust to external change, the organization will sooner or later stall.
• The world can only be grasped by action, not contemplation… The next powerful drive in the ascent of man is his pleasure in his own skill. He loves to do what he does well and having done it well, he loves to do it better.
• Leaders know the fundamental problems of life are insoluble but persists anyway and continues to learn.
• I think getting up in the morning is more exciting when you’re nervous. If you’re not nervous, you’re dead… It’s time to change your life or your work the moment you stop having butterflies in your stomach.
• Screwing up teaches you that mistakes aren’t the end of the world. Adversity has a great deal to do with the development of leaders. Either it knocks you out or you become a bigger and better person.
• Adversity instructs, successful executives ask endless questions, they surpass their less successful compatriots primarily because they learn more from their experiences, and that they learn early in their careers to be comfortable with ambiguity.
• Everywhere you trip is where the treasure lies. That’s learning from surprise, as well as adversity.
• The difference between a difficult boss and a bad boss is that a bad boss teaches you what not to do.
• Difficult bosses really test your beliefs and you learn all the things you don’t want to do or stand for.
• If we think more about failing at what we’re doing than about doing it, we will not succeed.
• Leaders transform experience into wisdom and in turn transform the cultures of their organizations. In this way society as a whole is transformed.
• There is magic in experience as well as wisdom. And more magic in stress, challenge and adversity and more wisdom. Crisis is so often the crucible in which leaders are formed.

• Don’t try to condense a complex problem to bumper sticker solutions.
• Seek simplicity, then distrust it.
• Example is the need to support the existing structure, BUT also the need to change it.
• A part of whole brain thinking includes learning to trust what Emerson calls the “blessed impulse”, the hunch, the vision that shows you in a flash the absolutely right thing to do. Everyone has these visions; leaders trust them.
• Entrepreneurs are the artists of the business world as they put things together that haven’t been so in the past.
• Have character so people will trust you.
• Find areas where you have good instincts.
• Find out what’s truest in yourself and stick to it. Machiavelli said fortune favors the bold. A prepared mind is the same as being bold.
• Once you have the ideas, you need to trust them even if they break some rules. Then it’s the confidence and courage to carry out the ideas once you’ve found them and once you’ve trusted them. Then you can’t be afraid to fail… Real leadership probably has more to do with recognizing your own uniqueness then it does of identifying your similarities with other leaders.
• Leaders need self-confidence, vision, virtue, plain guts, and relies on the blessed impulse.
• No leader sets out to be a leader. People set out to live their lives, expressing themselves fully. When that expression is of ozles (IMG_0326, pg 5.5), they become leaders.
• Strike hard, try everything, do everything, render (IMG_0326, pg 5.5) everything and become the person you are capable of being.
• The point is NOT to become a leader. The point is to become yourself, to use yourself completely- all your skills, gifts and energies- in order to make your vision manifest. You MUST withhold NOTHING. You must, in sum, become the person you started out to be, and enjoy the process of becoming.

Chapter 4

• The things that matter can’t be taught in a formal classroom setting.
• Many leaders aren’t technicians but visionaries that know what they want to do and where they wanted to take their companies/organizations.
• Since by definition leaders are unique, what they learn and how they use it to shape their future is unique too.
• Leaders are made at least as much by their experiences and understanding and application of their experiences as by any skills.
• Significant types of learning experiences: broad and continuing education, idiosyncratic families, extensive travel and/or exile, a rich private life, and key associations with mentors and groups.
• Human gap: the distance between growing complexity and our capacity to deal with it.
• 2 principal modes of conventional learning:
• Maintenance learning: getting of fixed outlooks, methods and rules for dealing with known and recurring situations. (Designed to maintain an existing system or established way of life)
• Shock learning: when events overwhelm people. Product of elitism, technocracy, and authoritarianism. Often follows a period of overconfidence in solutions created solely with expert knowledge on technical competence and perpetuated beyond the conditions for which they were appropriate. (i.e. US campworkers (IMG_0322, pg 3.5) used to maintain learning for decades until shock learning of Japanese invasion showed it was wrong)
• Anyone relying on maintenance/shock learning will be more reactor than actor in this life.
• Innovative learning must replace maintenance/shock learning.
• Components of innovative learning:
• Anticipation: being active and imaginative rather than passive and habitual.
• Learning by listening to others.
• Participation: Shaping events, rather than being shaped by them.
• Innovative learning requires that you trust yourself, that you be self-directed NOT other directed) in both your life and your work. (unconscious adaptation      conscious participation)
• A fantasy life is the real key to problem solving at every level.
• Creative problem solving is a form of innovative learning.
• In innovative learning, one must not only recognize existing contexts, but be capable of imagining future contexts.
• Innovative learning is a way of realizing vision (like planning a group trip/vacation). It requires a combination of historical perspective, vision and institutional appreciation- what its texture is, what its possibilities are. (First figure out where you are going!!)
• Innovative learning is the primary means of exercising our autonomy, a means of understanding and working with in the prevailing context in a positive way. It is a dialogue that begins with curiosity and is fueled by knowledge, leading to understanding. It is inclusive, unlimited and unending, knowing and dynamic. It allows us to change the way things are.
• By explaining and understanding the past, we can move into the future unencumbered by it. We become free to express ourselves, rather than trying to prove ourselves. We no longer follow along, but rather lead our own lives. We do not accept things as they are, but rather anticipate things as they can be. We participate in making things happen. We shape life rather than being shaped by it.
• (T.H. Harley) “Sit down before fact as a little child, be prepared to give up every preconceived notion, follow humbly wherever and to whatever abyss nature leads, or you shall learn nothing.”
• Study philosophy history and literature- the experiences of all humankind, not specific technologies.
• What problems can technology solve, unless the users of that technology have first grappled the primary questions?
• Ambition is the death of though.
• Charles Handy- The primary lesson he learned at Sloan Management School was that he didn’t need to go to school.
• The way to be successful is to be straight, you don’t have to play at the edge of morals/ethics to be successful.
• Straight A students never seem to get over it.
• Travel is another kind of learning. It does broaden, it is revelatory, it changes your perspective immediately, because it requires new and different responses from you.
• Thoreau wrote that, “one sees the world more clearly if one looks at it from an angle.” In a foreign land one sees everything from an angle.
• As leaders have traditionally been travelers, they’ve also traditionally had rich private lives. (i.e. Sunday painters, poets, chefs) and always made time to reflect.
• Spend an hour alone, away from everything, daily to recharge/incubate ideas and reflect on your experiences so you can understand them.
• Have a mentor.
• (Cleese) “If we can’t take the risk of saying or doing something wrong, our creativity goes out the window. The essence of creativity is not the possession of some special talent, it is much more the ability to play.”
• Mistakes ≈ growth & progress
• Even if you’re an analytical person, you need to make a decision at some point. Get 80-85% of the info and take a shot. You’ll blow it now and then, BUT you also develop a momentum and a pace that gets to be exciting.
• (Pollock) The only mistake is trying not to make a mistake, because it will create tension and emotion will tie you up every time. There is an enormous lunidity (IMG_0324, pg 4.5, bottom) about trusting the impulse. Must be capable of making a really big fool out of himself, otherwise original work gets done.
• It is important to encourage dissent and embrace enor (IMG_0325, pg 5).
• If you haven’t failed, you haven’t tried hard enough.
• There are lessons in everything, and if you are fully deployed, you will learn most of them. Experiences aren’t truly yours until you think about them, analyze them, examine them, question them, reflect on them and finally understand them. The point, once again, is to use your experiences rather than being used by them, to be the designer, not the design, so that experiences empower rather than imprison.
• Summary:
• Look back at childhood and adolescent experiences to understand how they shape you so you can shape your future.
• Consciously seek experiences in the present that will improve and enlarge you.
• Take risks as a matter of course, with the knowledge that failure is as vital as it is inevitable.
• See the future as an opportunity NOT a test.
• How do you seize the opportunity? First, you must use your instincts to sense it, and then follow the blessed impulse that arises.