Next Level Blog

Your Leadership Legacy in One Sentence

By now, pretty much everyone has heard of the elevator speech.  You know the drill, describe what you’re working on, why it matters and what the other person can do to help in 60 seconds or less.  I’ve read lately that the Tweet is the new elevator speech.  Can you describe what you’re working on and why it’s important in 140 characters or less?  It’s all about the idea behind the famous line from T.S. Eliot, “If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter.”  It takes time and effort to boil down the essence of what you’re trying to do to a short and memorable idea.

In her weekly Wall Street Journal column, Peggy Noonan built on this point by telling the story of what 20th century renaissance woman Clare Booth Luce once said to John F. Kennedy, “a great man is one sentence.”  As Noonan explains, “His leadership can be so well summed up in a single sentence that you don’t have to hear his name to know who’s being talked about.”  The first two pictures in this post are captioned with Noonan’s examples to give you additional insight into her point.

For the fun of it and to add some gender diversity to the examples, I've added a third picture of another leader with my own one sentence caption.  (What one sentence descriptions can you come up with for other well known leaders?)

Someone once said that strategy is as much about what you’re not going to do as what you’re going to do.  Great leaders know how to focus and to keep the group’s attention focused on the most important things. 

If you were to focus on crafting a short sentence that you hope would sum up the essence of your current work as a leader what would it be?  While you’re thinking about it, take a look at the following 30 second clip from the well known cowboy philosopher Curly for some inspiration:

Michael Jackson, Mark Sanford and the Human Condition

I’ve been thinking a lot about the light side and the dark side of the human condition this week.  A lot of this has been driven by the news and some of it has been driven by some reading I’m doing.  For so many leaders, the passion and energy that drives them to the top of their fields has a dark side in the form of an ego that is looking for additional validation in all of the wrong places.

Lessons from Tiger’s Terrible, Horrible, No-Good, Very Bad Weekend

Regular readers of this blog and anyone who’s heard me deliver a presentation lately  know that I am a huge fan of Tiger Woods.  His level of focus and commitment to continuous improvement are great examples for leaders.  So, I was mildly bummed when Tiger wasn’t able to overcome an 11 shot deficit and ended up finishing four shots behind the winner of the U.S. Open this past weekend.

You’re not tuning into this blog for a sports report, however, so it’s fair to ask, “What’s the point on leadership?”  Well, sometimes we can learn as much from less than perfect examples as we can from the perfect ones.  Tiger provided us with a couple of those at Bethpage Black last weekend.

Platform Agnostic Leadership

The protests over the elections in Iran present one of those rare instances when you know in the moment you’re watching history being made. The courage and dreams of the Iranians in the streets demanding democracy are inspiring.

As many have commented, one of the fascinating aspects of the protests is the use of social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook as organizing tools for the leaders of the movement.  What’s equally interesting to me is the debate that’s emerging over the use of the tools and what it means for the future. In an opinion piece in the Washington Post called, “Reading Twitter in Tehran,” the authors write:

“Twitter's own internal architecture puts limits on political activism. There are so many messages streaming through at any moment that any single entry is unlikely to break through the din, and the limit of 140 characters -- part of the service's charm and the secret of its success -- militates against sustained argument and nuance.”

This strikes me as a pretty good example of missing the point. No one has said that Twitter is a substitute for reasoned argument. In the case of Iran, it’s a tool (one of the few available) for disseminating raw news and for leaders who want to organize their followers. The people using the tools don’t care about the pros and cons of the platform, they just care that it works. They’re platform agnostic leaders.

This morning, I read on social media guru Chris Brogan’s blog about a new service in alpha testing called Babel With Me. This site connects with Twitter, Facebook or e-mail to allow users around the world to have real time conversation with simultaneous translation in 45 languages. That sound you just heard was one more example of how quickly the world is shrinking. 

The implications for leaders are astounding. The tools or platforms that leaders use to organize their followers are changing faster than most of us can process. The opportunity is to engage followers in a way that encourages their participation and their own capacity to lead themselves. The challenge for leaders will be to maintain strategic perspective and direction in a world where the masses can organize themselves so quickly and effectively.

Those are just two observations about the nature of leadership in a platform agnostic age. What are yours?

Questions for Conscious Leaders

My goal this Friday morning is to leave you with some food for thought over the next few days.  This has been a week when I’ve had the opportunity to coach leaders in a number of different situations and settings.  I’ve been impressed and humbled in each instance by the conscious nature of leadership that I’ve seen.  My main contribution has been to frame up some questions and create some space for the leaders to observe themselves and determine what their next moves should be.  I thought I’d share some of those questions with you today.