Tag: business leadership

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Leaders, Boost Your Creativity in 2012: Five Suggestions for the New Year

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 19th 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! 

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The Soul of Principled Leadership: The Road to Success and Significance

I spent a day earlier this week reading and providing feedback to a colleague on a book manuscript dealing with leadership and spirituality issues. In the academic world, that’s what professors do for one another. It’s always a plus when we learn something important from the collegial support.

The book basically asks readers to think about the inner growth needed to drive principled, high-impact leadership. I’m not doing justice to the complexity of the work because it triggered a number of profound questions that have stayed with me all week.

What are the leadership contributions that I hope to make over the course of my lifetime – the things that I want to accomplish so as to have made a real difference by the time destiny comes calling? How do my hopes fit my true leadership gifts? What do I need to do to stay focused and balanced as I steer through these uncharted waters?

These are not simple questions, and we can never answer them fully. But grappling with the larger life issues implicit in them gives us the best shot at designing and managing a career that we can be proud of and that is both successful and significant.

We live at a time that predisposes us to gloss over the need for this kind of deep reflection. There is growing research on the long-term decline in happiness in increasingly affluent and democratic societies where people are misled by a materialist culture to put money and possessions at the center of our lives. They equate success with big paychecks and ignore the growing evidence that those who focus their lives on tangible goods grow demonstrably more miserable over time than those who set out to make other, deeper contributions – and profit from the success of their energizing efforts.

If you have ever felt the golden handcuffs of a well-paying job that drained a little bit of your soul everyday – made going to work as exciting as pushing heavy rocks uphill – you know exactly what I am talking about.

Striving to make a difference feeds the soul, and nothing is more energizing. Successful business leaders confirm that inner growth matters.[1]

So, what are the contributions you want to be remembered for? What are your gifts and talents – the things you do well and really enjoy? How can you fashion your life and work to stayed focused on all that?

Answer those questions, and you are well on the road to a career of success and significance.

[1] See Andre Delbecq, Nourishing the Soul of the Leader: Inner Growth Matters, in J. Gallos (2008). Business Leadership. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

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Raise your Joy Quotient (JQ): Step I – Find your Passions, True Talents, and Contributions

It’s time to add another form of intelligence to the list.  We have IQ to measure cognitive intelligence, EQ for emotional intelligence, CQ for cultural intelligence.  Why do we not encourage people to enhance their JQ – their capacity to find and express joy through their work? We’d advance their quality of life and their leadership acumen and stamina if we did.

There’s nothing simple about raising your JQ. In the same way you can’t boost your IQ by reading one book, enhancing JQ takes time and effort. Three steps can set the process in motion.  (I’ll tackle one today, the others  in subsequent posts.)

STEP I: Find your passions, true talents, and contributions.  A high JQ isn’t hedonism.  Nor is it hakuna matata or a don’t worry-be happy philosophy – although an easy going spirit and the ability to wear life loosely are good life traits to possess.

We raise our JQ as the result of self-reflection and thoughtful experimentation over time that enable us to (a) identify our true talents and passions and (b) find ways to express those.  True is the operative word.

We are all good at many things, but our true talents coincide with our deep interests and passions. They energize us with use. Engaging in activities that use them makes time fly.  What are your true talents?  How can you identify them for yourself? 

In their chapter “The Traces of Talent” in my edited book Business Leadership (Jossey-Bass, pp. 79-86), Marcus Buckingham and Donald O. Clifton suggest monitoring four areas:

1. spontaneous reactions – the ways you naturally respond to similar situations over time. Rising successfully to the challenges of project organizer in every crisis, for example, tells you something about your organizational and executive talents. 

2. yearnings – things that have fascinated you from an early age. Architect Frank Gehry remembers building avant guard wooden structures at age 4 from wood scrapes on the floor of his father’s hardware store. At 10, Matt Damon and Ben Affleck were meeting regularly at school to plan their  creative projects. Picasso was in adult art school by age 13 and loving it.

3. rapid learnings – things that come quickly and powerfully. Matisse was a sickly law clerk when his mother gave him a box of paints to pass the time. A new world opened for him, and he never looked back. He filled his days with paining and drawing from then on and was accepted into Paris’s most prestigious art school four years later.

4. deep satisfaction – consistent good feelings from an action.  In neurobiological language, this is a physiological response to the use of your strongest synaptic connections. Gregg Breinberg, music director of the PS 22 Chorus, and Gustavo Dudamel of the LA Phil (discussed in previous posts) are good examples of this.

We alone know our true talents.  We need time and a process to find them — and the confidence to believe in what we discover.  

Sometimes advice from others is helpful: it can give us an outside perspective on ourselves.  But be forewarned: not always.  It may encourage us to short-cut self-discovery or be unduly influenced by the contributions important others want us to make.  “You can’t make money with an art degree, so major in business.” “Be a teacher. You’ll have summers off with your children.” “You’re good at math. Take a job on Wall Street where bonuses are still big despite the economy.” 

A joyless life is one spent convincing ourselves that we should like what others value in us more than who we really are.

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Enhancing Global Leadership: Studying China I

All interested in contemporary business leadership need to study of China, not just stay abreast of current events on the front page of the newspaper.  The business landscape is rapidly changing, China is at the center of the changes, and we had best recognize that and be prepared.     

Yesterday was our first global leadership class, and the course is off to a good start.  China is our living case study this semester (and we will travel there together in spring) for building cultural intelligence; expanding international business acumen; and learning about shifting global powers, economies, and marketplaces.  Some observations over my next few posts from our discussions.

China’s complexity:  China is a complex country, with a complex history and culture that infuse its current political, economic, and policy choices in ways a casual observer might miss.

Recognizing what it means, for example, to have been one of the most advanced and innovative nations on the planet – gunpowder, the compass, moveable type, paper making, silk production, nutrition studies, veterinary studies, metallurgy technologies, rice cultivation, pasta, paper money, pharmacology, and more trace their origins to ancient China – gives us clues to the urgency in China’s national aching to be a strong and dominant world player again.  It also enables us to appreciate why and to reconcile the seeming dichotomies in China’s mix of communism and capitalism – its “Socialism with Chinese character.”   

Read about the history of the Opium Wars, the relationship between mainland China and Taiwan, and China’s loss of territories and land over the ages by invasion or as a result of internationally-supported fiat using a cultural lens of face-saving.  You learn something important about the power of trust in foreign relations – and why transparency in China’s contemporary global diplomacy might not come easy.  

Look at the behavioral and philosophical foundations of Legalism in China and of how that can help account for the authoritarian and brutal aspects of the Cultural Revolution or for incidents labeled in the West as human rights violations. 

Combine Confucianism, Daoism, Communism, and Capitalism for a feel of the complexity and variety of personal ideologies and ethical frameworks in China today.   The list could go on. 

I’m not a history buff, so I always appreciate the reminder of how much nations are like people. 

Research — and any good psychiatrist — will tell you that we all come by our behaviors and worldviews  honestly as a result of a combination of early life experiences and what nature has given us.  Thinking deeply about China’s history and its given natural givens – including an isolating physical terrain with huge mountains on three sides and an ocean on the fourth – puts the country’s actions today in a new perspective.   

We can’t know China today without understanding its past.    We can’t know business leadership without knowing both.     

The magnitude of the task:  For those new to the task of studying China — of learning to see China, past and present, through Eastern and Western eyes — it is a big task. 

It will take time, effort, and patience to fully wrap minds around the complexity of a nation that can traces its history hundreds of thousands of years.  The speed of the transitions occurring in China today only magnify the challenge of sorting all this out for business and for policy.    

Where to start:   Read and talk. 

For readings, begin with Peter Hessler’s Oracle Bones.  Hessler is a journalist and a beautiful writer.  He seamlessly weaves contemporary stories of a variety of compelling characters in China today with gripping vignettes and snippets of history.  How everything connects is mastery, and every word or fact is essential to Hessler’s narrative.  High praise for the book’s artistry, and it is still a hard read for many.  But the reasons why are exactly why you need to read it.  The mix of history, unknown places, names we can’t easily remember or that require us to sound out every syllable, characters that challenge stereotypes, mini-language lessons, and the backs-and-forths between stories of now and then create a visceral feel for readers that mirrors the experience of China today.   

And talk to everyone.  African cab drivers in Washington, D.C. have given me insights into China’s investments and strategies better than any journalist or researcher. Ex-patriots who have successfully lived and worked in China can identify cultural elements like few else.  Look around. You’ll be surprised how many people you know have links, experiences, and connections to China. 

We’ll bring in diverse speakers over the semester – economists, lawyers, entrepreneurs, Midwestern governs, scholars, citizens interested in cultural relations, consultants, artists, Chinese students studying at our university – to share their take on the complexity.  We’ll get very different perspectives from the different vantage points and as a result of the unique experiences of different professionals.  And we’ll learn from sorting through the differences and inevitable contradictions.  Simply speaking, China today – and yesterday – is just not simple.