Seven Things To Do Before You Die

This Spring marks our sixth year offering The Leadership Challenge Workshops in Sonoma, California. A lot has changed over time. I'm not sure I would be able to envision the wealth of participants and expertise we have had the fortune to attend our training here in the beautiful Sonoma Valley. Looking back gives me a good perspective to look forward.

This issue of The Leader’s Almanac is about future thinking, forecasting and vision. As I turned this topic over in my mind, I couldn’t help but think about my future, my legacy. What will my legacy be? What will your legacy be? There is no right or wrong answer as Jim Kouzes and Barry Posner point out in their wonderful book A Leader’s Legacy. Asking the question, they say, opens us up to the notion that all of us, during life’s journey, are going to be struggling with choosing how to make a difference and how to do things that matter. After all, as Jim and Barry point out, the legacy you leave is the life you lead.

This question of making a difference and doing things that matter became crystal clear to me last week. I lost a friend who had truly made a difference and had done something that mattered. She was an extraordinary leader in our local art community here in Sonoma. She had brought her big-city credentials and talent to our little town and given selflessly to the academic community and to the Sonoma Valley Museum of Art. When I visited her in hospice, she was working diligently on a triptych, a magnificent tile piece. She had that trademark twinkle in her eyes as she showed me the drawings, described the medium being used, and explained the meaning of the images. Two weeks later, after champagne toasts with friends at her side, my dear friend closed her eyes and died peacefully, the last work of her life having already been handed off to her Israeli collaborator who would complete it for installation at the Harvard Divinity School.

My friend’s focused drive to complete her work woke me up to the importance of having a life’s work and the parallel need to have a purpose in life. I’m obviously not the only one to be pondering how to spend the days on this earth. There is an abundance of before-you-die (BYD) books, starting with Patricia Schultz’s run-away bestseller, “1,000 Places to See Before You Die.”. When you search Amazon.com before you die, you’ll find 3,553 titles including, “101 Things to Do in Florida Before you Up and Die, “Stroke a Martian and 99 Other Things to Do Before you Die,” and my personal favorite “1001 Wines You Must Taste Before You Die.”

Maybe this BYD and Bucket List obsession is a trend driven by Baby Boomers like me. Maybe taking stock is something as inevitable as rain in Seattle. If so, in the same vein, I’d like to propose a way of looking at the future--my Seven Things to do as A Leader Before you Die (or retire).

Mentor someone. It doesn’t have to be a formal process, just pick someone you like that has less experience than you do and offer to help.

Write. Join a writer’s group, journal, contribute to a newsletter, a column for your local newspaper or a white paper. Getting your point of view and your observations down on paper is therapeutic and clarifying.

Offer up your leadership skills pro bono. There is a dire need for leaders in every capacity of life. For me, it was becoming a docent for the Ecology Center, leading hikes for adults and fourth-graders on a wilderness trail right in town. I find it fun to lead in an entirely different setting than business.

Make at least one change in your daily life that will reduce your footprint on the planet--whether it’s recycling, reducing paper usage, or simply changing a light bulb from iridescent to an energy saver type.

Get feedback. If you haven’t gone through a formal feedback process—do it. Nothing like hearing how your actions impact others. Could be as simple as saying “How am I doing?”

Immersion. Try something completely different--a foreign language, a musical instrument, hot yoga. Open up your world to a new perspective and have fun with it.

I hope you enjoy this issue of The Leader's Almanac, hopefully it will provoke you to think about your future, and maybe even make a list of things to do before you.... retire. 

Seven Things to do as a Leader Before you Die,
Jeni Nichols,
Editor

Where Data and Dreams Collide

Where Data and Dreams Collide, by Ron Crossland
Factoid Junkie and Poet

In 1967, when the network cancelled the original Star Trek television series, I protested mightily by hauling out an old Remington Rand typewriter--my father was a typewriter repairman--and pounding out a poorly-constructed, emotionally-stinging barb to the Amarillo Daily in Texas. The letter, which excoriated the producers for their lack of foresight, was actually published, thereby documenting my prescience at a mere 15 years of age. I felt like Thomas Paine, though my arguments were a bit less developed than those in ol’ Tom’s Common Sense.

This adolescent memory illustrates a point concerning the distinction between strategy and vision—two ideas that are understood to be different, yet are often casually substituted for each other. I use here another Trekkie-related anecdote to exemplify the distinction. Not long ago, I’d placed an order for the Kindle, the new eBook reader by Amazon. Even though eBook readers are not new--the idea of an electronic book is at least as old as Star Trek and likely very much older--the idea of a world in which all information can be accessed by anyone, anywhere is very much like vision, an imagining of a rich world far different than our own. Strategy then is the fun, difficult, exhilarating, and tortuous path to arrive at this vision. Kindle is simply the newest step in this journey from the visionary ideas of Star Trek to the commonplace gadgets of today.

Since imagining the future is considered so much easier than actually figuring out exactly how to get there, we have spent a great deal of effort in developing strategic-thinking skills. In the May 2006 issue of Harvard Business Review, Grosberg, McLean, and Nohria showcased their analysis on strategic skills, which they claim are the most transportable among today’s peripatetic executives who leap from one business venture to another. This is likely because these skills are so valued and because we work so danged hard at coming up with them

As far back as the early 1980s, the venerable strategy theorist Kenchii Ohmae had written in his Mind of the Strategist:

“In what I call the mind of the strategist, insight and a consequent drive for achievement, often amounting to a sense of mission, fuel a thought process which is basically creative and intuitive rather than rational. Strategists do not reject analysis. Indeed they can hardly do without it. But they use it only to stimulate the creative process, to test the ideas that emerge, to work out their strategic implications, or to ensure successful execution of high-potential ‘wild’ ideas that might otherwise never be implemented properly. Great strategies, like great works of art or great scientific discoveries, call for technical mastery in the working out but originate in insights that are beyond the reach of conscious analysis."

What stimulates me about this passage is that Ohmae holds that intuitive, creative, and analogical processes guide the mind of the strategist. While data analysis aids the strategist, it cannot substitute for the more intuitive process. Some might see Ohmae’s mind of the strategist as being more like the mind of a visionary.

In his insightful Educating Intuition, Robin Hogarth, who teaches at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra, in Bilboa, Spain, sees computers as being far better with number crunching than they are with analogical, intuitive reasoning processes. Computers, for all their muscle, still cannot discern which data to pursue nor can they imagine new worlds. Our increasingly wonderful algorithms are helping computers to sort data, slice it and dice it and synthesize information in new and powerful ways. What’s needed is the link, those intuitive interfaces for our gadgets. Even though my new Kindle supposedly has one, an intuitive interface, computers as a whole are far from possessing even the most rudimentary intuitive capabilities of humans. Hogarth points out that “Analogies aid the reasoning process; they help us make sense of the world. The power of analogical thinking lies in the fact that it is inherently intuitive."

All of which leads us to the power of story, metaphor and analogy. Reasoning from analogies or stories about the future is an intuitive process in the mind of the strategist. We can imagine a world that data cannot prove. If we couldn’t, how could we conceive goals, outcomes or dreams that lift us out of what John W. Gardner termed the “petty preoccupations” of our daily life? I’m suggesting that the key lies with intuition, a process that facilitates the fluid movement between vision and strategy. This is the place where data and dreams collide to help us imagine new worlds and new paths to reach them.

Since we have done so well at developing strategic skills, we should now begin the harder and messier task of developing greater intuition. The strategic thinking community agrees. In a speech delivered at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Business in March, 2005, John Sterman, an M.I.T. professor of strategic thinking, advised business students to augment their strategic thinking acumen by acquiring greater technical skills. But more important, he emphasized, was the need to focus on other valuable leadership assets such as dialogue, empathy, self-reflection and the ability to access greater reservoirs of analogous reasoning. The same reasoning, I might add, that I had at 15 and was future-tripping, star-gazing at Star Trek. Now that was real vision.

A Winning Ticket

A Winning Ticket, by Pat Schally
Certified Business and Leadership Coach

With our national political debates in full swing, I can’t resist referring to the obvious relevance of vision in leadership as it’s currently being played out between and articulated by our candidates. While attaining and sustaining a unifying vision is undoubtedly challenging and crucial for leaders in the private and public sectors, it is exponentially more critical to the effectiveness of a President or even a wanna-be whose electability clearly hinges upon it. To capture the hearts and minds and votes of the masses, any hopeful needs to offer the citizens a compelling vision for the country. As citizens, we’re hungry --even desparate-- to latch onto an inspiring vision, one that we can each relate to in our own way, one that shakes us up and points us to the promise of a better future.

Yet, people have long memories and most of us, justifiably, are rather suspicious of political promises served up in the heat of a steamy campaign. If a candidate gets the public stirred up and emotionally connected to a winning vision and then gradually abandons it once in office, then the victory is pretty hollow—like air slowly leaking out of a campaign balloon the morning after election day.

It’s the same in business. A new leader comes on board with vision statements in hand, all jazzed about the changes that will be made, all ready to give the lofty speeches, rallying all to the cause. And then, poof, business issues get tough, pressure mounts. Where is vision then? It is nowhere to be found.

And with it goes productivity and the promise of better things to come. Inevitably the mood in the organization goes from encouragement and enthusiasm to disappointment and finally to tacit acceptance of the status quo. There is grudging acceptance of what they knew all along--things will never change. The obvious result? A sigh of resignation indicating the deflated attitude of “Oh, well, it’s just business a usual."

Ask yourself, who is buying your vision as a leader. Will they continue to enthusiastically do business with you and be an inspired supporter of your vision, championing it as if it were their own? More importantly, do you include them in designing that vision? Effective leaders embrace the idea that having and sustaining a vision is a collaborative process and, consequently, they will move mountains to publicly place every decision they make up against that collaborative vision.

In the highly competitive Presidential race, all of us, whether we know it or not, are assessing the authenticity and inspiration levels of each of the candidates’ visions. Who is ahead on that score? Who is articulating clearly and forcefully, on every occasion possible, his or her vision? Who’s buying it? We’ll find out sometime after midnight on November 5th. Until then, watch the upcoming Presidential debates to see some superb examples of visions being articulated and, in the process, you can gauge how yours stacks up. What if you were on the slate of candidates, would you be elected?

Hope Paints a Picture

Hope Paints a Picture, by Beth High
Leadership Challenge Master Facilitator

In considering the topic of this newsletter, I found myself uncomfortable with the coupling of vision and forecasting and the fact that they fell right next to the topic leadership and the future. While I felt clear about the importance that vision plays for leaders looking toward the future, I felt shaky about that forecasting component. What role did that play?

An easy way out would have been to just write about the importance of vision for leaders and leave it at that. But l just couldn't bring myself to do that. That forecasting element just kept gnawing away at me. After many interesting conversations and much contemplation, I finally arrived at a connection between the two and how they could relate to leadership and the future. I invite you to try it out, see what you think.

Let’s start with some of the things that get forecasted. There’s the weather, the stock market, and future fashion trends. As with any forecast, we listen to the prediction then sit back and wait to see if it will come true. Will it really snow tomorrow? Will the stock market go even lower? Will skirts go even higher?

There's not much we can do about any of those things. By contrast, when it comes to a compelling vision of the future, we can play a part. In fact, we are driven to be part of this vision quest,whether it comes true or not. A forecast is a hypothesis of what will be due to forces beyond our control, beyond our individual ability to influence or change it. A vision is a hypothesis of what can be, totally dependent on our ability not only to influence it but also to drive it, fuel it, further it.

The main differentiator between the two then is action. With forecasts we take a reactive role: bring the umbrella, call the broker to buy or sell the stock, or buck the trend and wear last year’s perfectly good skirt that we love. With vision, we engage. We are compelled to take action, to impact, not just react to, the outcome. A colleague and dear friend of mine shared a message he had found inscribed on a 17th century church in England. It said:

“Action without vision is drudgery;
vision without action is merely a dream.
But vision with action is the hope of the world."

I believe this speaks volumes about the role and importance of vision for leaders contemplating the future. I don't think we'd ever say that forecasting holds the hope of the world. Forecasts are often wrong. Does this mean leaders will never forecast? No. However, when I think of leaders who do, the ones who come to mind are those who base their inspiration in fear, not in hope. They attempt to sell us on a dire forecast in order to get a reaction. I'm sure we can all think such of examples, and not all of them in the distant-past either.

Does forecasting the future have a role in leadership? Sure. It can serve as an interesting starting point for a vision. But without the excitement and sense of purpose that a great vision of the future holds, it's nothing more than a data point. It's the picture that leaders chose to paint with those data points that will tell the future.

Visual Moment

"John Ward created this drawing based on the ideas of Frank Cespedes of the Center for Executive Development, Boston."

Jeni Nichols, Editor; Lauren Parkhill, Managing Editor;
Sam Taylor, Publisher;
Linda Runyan, Copy Editor

 

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Sonoma Learning Systems
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