On Leading with Greatness

Slide 321 of the most exhausting PowerPoint I ever sat through taught me almost nothing about advising students—but it accidentally taught me much about leadership. So did a brilliant, infuriating Korean student who could humiliate me with grammar rules but couldn't write a single clean sentence. Both stories point to the same lesson: you can know everything and still not know how to do anything.

Why do we impose thoughtless, unnecessary, even harmful rules on ourselves and our organizations? Tradition, inertia, inherited habits, the hidebound predecessor whose practices nobody questioned. Over time these ad hoc rules harden into identity—"this is just who we are"—and can even manifest as what I call bureaucratic compulsive disorder.

They're garbage rules that squander time, energy, and opportunity while we pretend they're values or identity.

This week I draw on Bob Newhart, Viktor Frankl, Bob Dylan, and a hoary tale about a beef roast to make the case for a leadership practice as clean and resolute as the problem demands. The answer is simpler than you think—and harder than it sounds.

Great leaders don't ask "what else can we do?" They have a better question ready.

The leadership gurus I call the nabobs of negativity insist leaders need to learn to say "no" more often. But is the big problem in leadership truly leaders who don't say "no" enough, as the nabobs would have it, or leaders who say "no" too often?

Doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result isn't insanity, not when it benefits the bosses.

Abraham Lincoln is often cited as an exemplary president for leaders to emulate. While that's true, his leadership is far more nuanced and complicated than most people realize, and therefore he's a more useful model of leadership. Honest Age is an honest model of leadership.

Just because it’s infinitely difficult to contemplate the infinitesimal doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t learn all you can about Quantum Bossing—QBossing. It’s a great way to use everyone’s (even your own) profound ignorance of science to justify just about anything. And if you can convince everyone of an absurdity, such as you’re in two places at once, they’ll eventually give up, give in, and pledge themselves to you like, say, a quark to maybe a gluon.

Want to hear about my dream? Sure you do.

The exasperation, anger, disgust, frustration, and helplessness the dream evoked recalled my anguish working at some pretty screwy universities. In fact, I could point to particulars in my lived experience that directly paralleled my dream.

Systems thinking is a handy skill for a leader to have, and I suspect a lot of leaders are systems thinkers even if they never thought of themselves as such.

So, let me hit you with systems axiom 1: There is a correlation between systems thinking and successful leadership—keeping in mind that correlation is not causation.

What do you call someone who sits back in the face of wrongdoing?

Complicit.

Leadership is just another type of human relationship.

Leadership is not much different from friendship, animosity, acquaintanceship, or even romance. It harbors no mysteries that any of these or other human relationships hold.