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• 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.

• People begin to become leaders at that moment when they decide for themselves how to be.
• Know thyslef, then, means separating who you are and who you want to be from what the world thinks you are and wants you to be.
• Self-knowledge/self-invention are lifetime processes.
• NO ONE can teach you how to become yourself, to take charge, to express yourself, EXECPT YOU!!!
• 4 Steps:

1. You are your own best teacher.
2. Accept responsibility. Blame NO ONE.
3. You can learn anything you want to learn.
4. True understanding comes from reflecting on your experience.

• Learning is experienced as a personal transformation. A person does not gather learnings as possessions but rather becomes a new person. To learn is NOT to have, but to be.
• Major stumbling blocks on the path to self-knowledge are denial and blame.
• Create your own university. Try lots of experiences, only by experiencing them will you know which ones are useful and which are dead ends.
• Full deployment is simply another way of defining learning.
• Learning is much more than the absorption of a body of knowledge or mastery of a discipline. It’s seeing the world simultaneously as it is AND as it can be, understanding what you see, and acting on your understanding. Don’t just study it, embrace it, absorb it, and thereby understand it.
• You can’t be afraid if failure to succeed at doing this .
• Reflecting on experience is a means of having a Socratic dialogue with yourself, asking the right questions at the right time, to discover the truth about yourself and your life. (What really happened? Why did it happen? What did it do to me? What did it mean to me?) Helps in the process of “become the hammer, not the anvil”.
• To begin to understand great literature is to understand that it’s a race against death. In a way, reflection is asking the questions that provoke self-awareness.
• Nothing is truly yours until you understand it. Not even yourself. Until we understand why we are happy/angry/anxious, the truth is useless to us.
• Understanding is the answer. When you understand, then you know what to do.
• In order to use self-knowledge in practice, it is necessary to understand the effect that childhood experiences, family and peers have had on the person you’ve become.
• Inner vs. Other- Directed people: Directed from inside or by peers/family/boss/etc.
• Leaders are self-directed but learning and understand are the keys to self-direction, and it is in our relationships with others that we learn about ourselves.
• Leaders learn from others, but they are not made by others. This is the distinguishing mark of leaders. The self and the other synthesize through self-invention.
• In order to respond to the challenges of each cycle of your life appropriately, you have to continually re-examine your defenses and assumptions and in the course of that re-examination, you iron out the way…”Feelings are memories of past behavior. When you sort the out and see what’s current and what’s left over, you can begin to use your thinking process to change your behavior.
• The unexamined life is NOT worth living (Socrates) (impossible to live successfully).
• Leaders use their experience rather than be used by it.
• Habits don’t just rule us, they inhibit us and make fools of us.
• True learning begins with unlearning.
• No one can teach you to be yourself/invent yourself. In fact, trying to do so usually accomplishes the opposite.
• Teaching homogenizes its subjects and objects. Learning liberates. The more we now about ourselves and the world, the freer we are to achieve everything we are capable of.
• [ (family + school + friends) / you = true you ] NOT    [family + school + friends = you]
• Self-awareness= self-knowledge= self-possession= self-control= self-expression.
• You make your life your own by understanding it.

Chapter 2

• Leadership traits:

1. Guiding vision-clear idea of professional and personal goals (in spite of setbacks/failures).
2. Passion-leader loves what they do and loves doing it (“Hopes are the dreams of the waking man” – Tolstoy).
3. Integrity= (self-knowledge)+(candor)+(maturity). When you know what you consist of and what you want to make of it, then you can invent yourself. (Trimming your principles or even ideas (to please others) is a sign of a lack of integrity). Maturity is important to a leader because leading is NOT simply showing the way or issuing orders. Every leader needs to have experienced and grown through following- learning to be dedicated, observant, capable of working with and learning from others, NEVER SERVILE, always truthful. Having bested these qualities in themselves, leaders can encourage them in others.
4. Integrity is the basis of trust (earned NOT acquired)(more a product of leadership than an ingredient).
5. Curiosity and Daring- Leaders wonder about everything, want to learn as much as they can, are willing to take risks, experiment, try new things, they do NOT worry about failure, but embrace errors, knowing they will learn from them. Learning from adversity.

• True leaders are NOT born, but made, and usually self-made.
• Developing character and vision is the way leaders invent themselves.
• As Presidents Johnson, Nixon and Carter were all more driven than driving and each seemed trapped in his own shadows. They were haunted men, shaped more by their early deprivations than by their later successes. They did NOT, then, invent themselves. They were made- and un-made- by their own histories.
• “[Presidents, Leaders] don’t do great things by dwelling on their limitations, but by focusing on their possibilities.”- Kissinger They leave the past behind and then turn toward the future.
• Good leaders engage the world; Bad leaders entrap it or try.
• Be an original, NOT a copy.
• Leaders master the context; managers surrender to the context.
• Managers focus on systems and structures. Leaders focus on people.
• Manager= short-term view, Leader= long-term view.
• Manager asks, “how” and “when”; Leader asks, “what” and “why”.
• Manager is a good soldier; Leader is his own person.
• Manager does things right; Leaders do the right thing.
• Managers wear square hats and learn from training. Leaders wear sombreros and opt for education.
• Leaders have nothing but themselves to work with. Good leaders rise to the top in spite of their weaknesses. Bad leaders rise because of their weaknesses. (Lincoln Hitler)
• “I don’t know what I think until I read what I said.” -Faulkner
• You learn what you think by codifying your thinking in some way.
• Codifying one’s thinking is an important step in inventing oneself. The most difficult way to do it is by thinking about thinking. It helps to speak or write your thoughts. Writing is the most profound way of codifying your thoughts, the best way of learning from yourself who you are and what you believe.
• Listen to everything critically. In the end, trust your gut reaction, value systems are important so you know where you stand, but the values must be yours, NOT someone else’s.
• People spot phonies quickly. (R.W.E.- “What you are speaks so loudly I cannot hear what you say”)
• Once/Twice born leaders:
  • Once: Easy transition as they age
  • Twice: Suffer while growing up, feel different, isolated, and thus develop an elaborate inner life (usually more dramatic)
• Invent yourself, don’t follow the notes you are given!!!
• To be authentic is literally to be your own author (actual Greek root), to discover your own native energies and desires, and then to find your own way of acting on them.
• Keep the covenant with your youthful dreams.
• Goal is NOT worth it without enjoying the journey (lots of little bows, NOT one big one).
• To become a leader, then, you must become yourself, become the maker of your own life. While there are no rules for doing this, there are some lessons.

For quite a while I’ve been meaning to post my notes from ‘On Becoming A Leader’ by Warren Bennis.  I read this years ago and found it to be very valuable because it was written by someone that had actually run a large organization as opposed to someone who studied leadership.  It also focused on the importance of finding your own path and not relying on others to tell you what to do.  Either way I’ll be posting these over the next several weeks or so.  Thanks to Adrienne (https://www.lifearrangedbyak.com) who did a great job on the typing.

Introduction

• Master the context
• Great leaders and followers are always engaged in creative collaboration.
• 4 competencies:

1. They are able to engage others by creating shared meaning (AKA have vision)
2. They have a distinctive voice (Emotional Intelligence)
3. Integrity (Able to tell a friend “NO”)
4. Adaptive Capacity (Compass vs. Map)

• Get good at finding mentors!!
• Discover and cultivate the authentic self.
• Leaders have in common: a passion for the promises of life and the ability to express themselves fully and freely.
• Leaders are made, NOT born.
• No leader sets out to be a leader but rather to express themselves fully and freely. They are interested in expressing themselves NOT proving themselves.
• Adult learning is a huge part of leadership.
• Learning is best achieved when the learner takes charge of the process. This is all part of becoming an integrated person.
• Learning is a process of remembering what is important.
• Fame and leadership aren’t the same thing, and skill at achieving one is no guarantee of skill at the other.

Chapter 1

• Leaders are important because:

1. They are responsible for the effectiveness of organizations.
2. Leaders provide much-needed anchors or guiding purposes.
3. They determine the integrity of institutions.

• Recognize the context for what it is- a breaker, NOT a maker; a trap, NOT a launching pad; an end, NOT a beginning- and declare your independence.
• Thank people AND give compliments.
• Be careful who you choose as a role model!!!
• At some point, vision and character become important.
• 5 Areas to look at:

1. Technical competence
2. People skills
3. Conceptual skills (imagination and creativity)
4. Judgement and taste
5. Character

• Overturn the rules and overcome the context.
• Steps to mastering the context:

1. Becoming self-expressive
2. Listening to the inner voice
3. Learning from the right mentors
4. Giving oneself over to a guiding vision.

• “When I’ve been most effective, I’ve listened to that inner voice.”
• “Find out what it is you’re about and be that. Be what you are and don’t lose it. It’s very hard to be who we are, because it doesn’t seem to be what anyone wants.”

“I have little tolerance for institutional restraints. Institutions should serve people, but unfortunately, it’s often the other way around. People give their allegiance to an institution, and they become prisoners of habits, practices, and rules that ultimately make them ineffectual.”

• First step toward change is to refuse to be deployed by others and to choose to be deployed by yourself.