Bernie Madoff – The Leadership Professor

It’s resolution time. I’ve made my list and share five suggestions for yours to boost creativity in 2012.

Times are tough, and every industry is rethinking how it does business. Creativity and the capacity to think deeply and flexibly can pull an organization ahead of the crowd. How can you enhance your capacities and help your organization claim its competitive advantage? Suggestions to boost your innovation brainpower:

1. Read more fiction. There are plenty of benefits. Build new neuronal circuits. Deepen your knowledge of the human condition – and learn about yourself as your reflect on your responses. Improve your vocabulary, beef up those communication skills. Expand your cultural intelligence. Leadership is all about influence, communication, relationships, and seeing the simplicity on the other side of complexity.

No time for major tomes? Try The Art of the Novella Series: short novels by some of literature’s greatest – Melville, James, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Twain, and more. The tiny classics tuck easily into a brief case, purse, or pocket – and their colorful contemporary covers are great conversation starters.

My first was a holiday gift – The Dialogue of the Dogs by Cervantes. Turns out the creator of Don Quixote also wrote the first talking-dog story. Ever wonder what your pet is really thinking, and what Fido can teach you about ethics and fairness? I loved it: a quick read and deep ideas. I was hooked on the novella.

The Duel by Heinrich von Kleist (a 19^th century German author I knew nothing about) was next. Read it, and let me know how your thinking about loyalty, everyday assumptions, and trust have changed.

I’m on The Lifted Veil by George Eliot now — her only work in the first person with eerie similarities to Eliot’s claiming her public identity as a woman author. Next in line The Lemoine Affair by Proust — and a look at why humans are so easily conned! Think shades of Bernie Madoff.

2. Discover the power and joy of quiet. We live in a world of 24/7 stimulation and news. We text, email, surf, and sit in front of screens (computer and TV) more and more (and Nicholas Carr in The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains paints a dire portrait of the neurological, intellectual, and cultural consequences). Creativity requires quiet – the time and space to think. Find ways to build that into your day. Mindfulness is not a luxury for strong leadership.

3. Break the work addiction. All work and no play makes for dull, burned-out people – and maybe even dead ones. The Chinese pictograph for “busy” is two characters: “heart” and “killing.” Loving your work isn’t the same as being a slave to it. You’ll work better and smarter when refreshed. Play is productive.

4. Think gray. It’s simple and counter-intuitive: train yourself to not make decisions quickly. You’ll fall into your regular thinking patterns easily: you need to push yourself to think slowly and carefully about what you’re not thinking about. That’s where you’ll navigate through the shades of gray to identify the best course of action. It’s hard to think gray: humans love binary, right-wrong, yes-no, black-white thinking. The concept comes from Steven Sample (the highly successful president emeritus of the University of Southern California) and is developed in his chapter in Business Leadership.

5. Embrace the novice role. Experience the world with new eyes. It’s good for mind and soul. A good way is to try something you’ve never done but have always wanted to or that you know you don’t do well. The process of learning slows life down, encourages mindfulness, and fine-tunes your skills as a reflective practitioner – a definite leadership plus. You might discover a new talent or passion in the process.

Onward to a creative 2012 for us all!

In his first prison interview, Bernie Madoff dropped a bomb. He was sure a number of banks and hedge funds were “complicit” in his fraud – “willfully blind” to the discrepancies in the information available to them and living a version of I’m not going to ask and please don’t tell. Madoff’s admission to the author of an upcoming book[1] on his 16 year long Ponzi scheme – the fancy shell game that cost investors $20 billion in cash and another $65 billion in lost paper wealth – is different from his earlier claims that no one knew of his illegal shenanigans.

It’s easy to look at the “complicit” and wag a judgmental finger. We’d all like to believe that, if we had been in the shoes of the “willfully blind,” we’d have blown the whistle. The $64,000 question is, what would we have done? What would you have done?

How many times have you had real questions about someone or some situation and let it ride? Decided not to get involved? Worried about being wrong? Passed the buck – figured that someone else would notice the problem if it really exists and take corrective action?

It’s easy to conclude that the complicit bankers and hedge fund executives just wanted money. But stop there, and you’ll miss an important leadership lesson.

Those bankers and financial managers feared loss – loss to their clients, companies, loved ones, and selves.

Loss of the ability to provide good returns to their clients which could lead to loss of those clients. Loss of their seats at the bountiful Madoff table that others in their business would gladly take and use to bring good returns to clients – maybe the very clients they had just lost.

Loss of clients could mean loss of a job, reputation, career trajectory. A job loss brings income loss and inability to sustain a current lifestyle. That might mean loss of a home, community, good schools for the kids, maybe even loss of a marriage under the strain. And the list goes on.

And as their fears mounted, those bankers and hedge fund managers faced the ultimate loss: their ability to make sound executive judgments and to see life beyond the fear of loss.

How are you going to prepare yourself for the next time you need to stand up for what’s right? Will you be ready?

[1] Diana Henriques (2011). The Wizard of Lies: Bernie Madoff and the Death of Trust. New York: Times Books.