October 4, 2021
Good October morning! Welcome to our new grandson, Simon Gregory, born September 29, and now enjoying his 6th day. We have a relatively small yard, yet it’s nearly a three-mile hike to mow the lawn… gotta be a metaphor in there somewhere. On one of the hikes last week I was almost giddy to see the parking lot at the local community college filled to near capacity. That vast bituminous acreage has been eerily empty the last 18 months. So good to see students frantically searching for a place to park at the outer perimeter of the lot three minutes before the start of class.
- How do you know?
- Short answer is, you don’t.
- More and more younger clients ask me this question, “how do you know?”
- You don’t know — unless you have a vision, then you will start to know whether you’re headed in the right direction.
- How do you know? is the working title of a book I’m trying to write — in an attempt to somewhat answer that question.
- The Smithsonian magazine rarely, if ever, disappoints.
- There have been countless different angles taken on the events of September 11, 2001
- The Smithsonian’s poignant and riveting introspection is perhaps unparalleled as a twenty years later collection of vignettes evoking profound sadness and hope.
- Highly suggest you take a read.
- We in the United States are somewhat isolated and immune (no pun intended) to the world of plagues, diseases, and pandemics.
- We forget polio, we forget smallpox, we forget tetanus, we forget whooping cough, we forget mumps, we forget measles, we forget chicken pox.
- And, we have largely escaped the terrible scourges of ebola and worse.
- We forget because these diseases have been all but eliminated from our daily lists of things to worry about.
- Consider diphtheria, an awful, awful torturous disease found especially in children.
- Even Noah Webster, that master of words, did not have a name for the terrible sickness.
- In May 1835, he wrote in A Brief History of Epidemic and Pestilential Diseases,
- “In a wet cold season, appeared at Kingston, an inland town in New Hampshire, situated in a low plain, a disease among children, commonly called the ‘throat distemper’, of a most malignant kind, and by far the most fatal ever known in this country.” (The Smithsonian, October 2021)
- Remember Balto, the famous sled dog who saved the children of Nome, Alaska in 1925 by delivering thousands of doses of diphtheria vaccine in the nick of time?
- Thus was born the Iditarod.
- Looking for a great book? Levine’s The Failed Promise (Norton).
- It provides remarkable insights into the post-Lincoln years and especially the presidency of Andrew Johnson juxtaposed against the rhetoric and wisdom of Frederick Douglass.
- What might be best about it is the irony it proposes that if Johnson was our worst-ever president, he might have had more permanent influence than any of the others on what manifests as our society and culture today.
Problem Solving as a Leader
- Problem solving… as leader/ CEO
- We’ve opined on this topic previously, it’s a favourite because it’s so important.
- You can make a solid case that a healthy curiosity is among the crucial characteristics of leadership — and especially of problem solving.
- Conn and McLean (2018) have written on this topic; here is a brief summary with annotations added:
- Be ever-curious
- Unrelenting, healthy curiosity can lead to so many good outcomes; don’t know if you can teach it.
- I’ve come to believe this might be among the more important characteristics of not only leadership, but of all people, IF partnered with discipline and focus.
- Tolerate ambiguity — and stay humble
- We need more than lip service — the world isn’t perfect, no one is perfect, life is not a perfectly straight path.
- Take a dragonfly-eye view
- A dragonfly has compound eyes with thousands of lenses and receptors.
- We don’t know how or why this animal is blessed with such a different way of seeing, but we should be able to tackle at least two different ways and then work our way up.
- Pursue occurrent behaviour (fancy word for watch what’s happening!)
- Don’t be delusional. Collect evidence, organize the evidence, avoid getting defensive about the evidence.
- Be careful to not follow red herrings — and be careful to take a 360 view.
- What do you see? What do you hear? What do you smell? Trust your senses… write it down.
- Tap into collective intelligence and the wisdom of the crowd (listen!)
- Guard against thinking you have all the answers — or that your team has all the answers, because you don’t, I don’t, and your team doesn’t.
- Put systems in place to guard against thinking the home team will always win… even Notre Dame lost on Saturday — at home.
- Show ‘n tell… almost always, a story is more powerful than facts… almost always.
- For every spreadsheet, for every deck, for every Power Point, for every bullet point, think of a story to communicate your ideas.
- Not sure we need it, but fair is fair.
- The other version has been around for 508 years and look where it has gotten us.
- Let’s hope this new version yields better long-lasting civility and honest government at all levels.
- Oh, the book: Machiavelli for Women, aka The Prince in its earlier version, 1513.
- “An empirical test is a dialogue with nature. You have to listen to see if nature confirms your ideas.” (Physicist Loeb)
