Don Quixote – 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!

What are you reading this summer? The question is important for your leadership development. I suggest fiction. It’s a powerful and enjoyable pedagogy.

When we read fiction, author Annie Dillard reminds us, we slow life down: study it and our reactions to it.

Good fiction lets us view events from multiple perspectives – our own, the writer’s, and the various characters in the story – increasing our understanding of human diversity; the impact of time, culture, and experience; and the frames of reference we use to make sense of all that.

It offers a behind-the-scenes look into the complexities of organizational life. In today’s world, educators and authors do a disservice when they convey the illusion of simplicity or control with models and theories that portray the workplace as linear, rational, neat, and tidy. Human nature is complicated, and social processes like leadership and management are steeped in ambiguity, confusion, and choice. Good literature acknowledges that and plays out human nature in its fullness.

Internal struggles, confusion, ambiguity, and doubts of the soul are all par for the course. Leadership looks more like the gritty and human process that it is – and less glamorous and heroic – when seen through the difficult choices of compelling characters.

The health sciences have known this for a long time. They have a strong tradition of encouraging the use of literature – the reading and writing of it – for growth: the medical humanities are a well-established curricular tradition in medical education. Leadership education could borrow a page from their play book.

Harvard Professor of Medical Humanities and Psychiatry emeritus Robert Coles sees it like this: fiction and storytelling deepen the inner life of those who work at life’s harsh boundaries, offering insights into the role of learning and growth from disappointment and suffering, providing historical perspectives on the meaning of care and service, and more.

Reading fiction nurtures skills in observation, analysis, diagnosis, empathy, and self-reflection – capacities essential for good healthcare givers and for good leaders in any field.

Where to start? Anything that appeals to you – contemporary or classic. It’s the process of reflecting on the story, its characters, their struggles, and your reactions that matter.

Dip a toe in the water with business ethicist Joseph Badaracco’s Questions of Character: Illuminating the Heart of Leadership Through Literature. The book uses nine pieces of literature to examine challenges that test a leader’s soul. Read and think about a suggested work, and then use Badaracco’s chapter on it to stretch your own thinking. The book offers its own self-study course, modeled on Badaracco’s long-term Harvard Business School course.

Or do something similar using On Leadership that captures lectures by organizational theorist James G. March from his famous Stanford course on learning about leadership through the classics using works like Shakespeare’s Othello, Shaw’s Saint Joan, Tolstoy’s War and Peace, and Cervantes’s Don Quixote.

“Literature is an extension of life not only horizontally, bringing the reader into contact with events or locations or persons or problems he or she has not otherwise met,” reminds philosopher Martha Nussbaum, “but also vertically, giving the reader experience that is deeper, sharper, and more precise than much of what takes place in life.”[1]

[1] Nussbaum, M. (1990). Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature. New York: Oxford University Press, p. 48.