Genius Leadership

“Genius…means little more than the faculty of perceiving in an unhabitual way!” William James

The challenges that today’s business leaders face is quite similar, regardless of the industry or profession in which they operate. These challenges include delivering services and products of highest quality, creating and preserving values of multiple stakeholders, building & maintaining sustainable relationships, caring for the environment and its’ surrounding communities. All these challenges are in the midst of sustaining productive futures for the generation who will follow. In short, our obligation as business leaders is to ‘leave it better than we found it’. Recently, we have witnessed many corporate responsibility initiatives in recent years, aimed at regaining the public trust that has been undermined in the discovery of scandals. All are important; whether they focus on Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), governance, supply chain integrity or sustainability. However, none of these will succeed if they are not embedded within the conceptual and practical foundation of responsible leadership that integrates the people, planet, profit and principles it governs. Corporate responsibility is first and foremost a challenge of responsible leadership.

Ever since Enron, WorldCom and other high profile cases of management failure and leadership misconduct, there has been a growing awareness that one of the core challenges, if not the challenge in business, is leading responsibly and with integrity. It is fair to say then, that the responsibility leadership is one of the most pressing issues in the business world. Or is it misunderstood? I give three examples of this misunderstanding… One, there seems to be an implicit assumption that people who take on a leadership position have a heightened sense of responsibility once they are in a leadership position. Therefore, no explicit guidance is needed and not much thought must be given to the issue of leading with integrity. Two, leadership is far too often mistaken for good management, a leader being someone who motivates people to get things done efficiently. But that is management, not leadership. Leadership is the drive behind the force of motivation. Leadership is the vision and more importantly, it is connection between management and those managed. For at best, leadership and management complement each other. At worst, we find only management but no leadership. Three, there is what Rost (1991) called the industrial paradigm in leadership research, imposing on researchers a leadership effectiveness focus and a denial that leadership is a normative phenomenon.
Maak, T. (2006). Responsible Leadership

The business in society perspective is at the core of responsible leadership. It requires a relational and transitional perspective, capturing the complexity leadership in both a moral and a practical sense, and living by sort of a rhythm that encourages at a high level of indefinite past, through the present moment, to the indefinite future. Insight and foresight, empathy and listening skills, self-knowledge and a sense of community, moral imagination and a morally sound values base are all among the hallmarks of a responsible leader. Responsible leadership involves complex, dynamic relationships based on values, emotions and mutual recognition.

I believe that while leaders need certain capabilities and should have good moral character in order to become responsible leaders, none are born that way. Nor is responsible leadership limited to an individual trait. It is rather instead, a balance of leaders’ character, the leader’s relationship with people and followers, the roles and tasks he or she fulfills. Responsible leadership depends not only on principled individuals along with their education and training, but also on a holding environmental context where responsible leaders can flourish. Whatever it is, responsible leadership has to be authentic. I pose the question to you how do you perceive your leadership capabilities? Is responsible? Is it moral? It is self serving?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kunl3F-0_A4

American Economic Truths

"In my early days in Hollywood I tried to be economical. I designed my own clothes, much to my mother's distress." Gene Tierney

An overwhelming amount of Americans in today’s society have never grown food, caught game, raised meat, ground grain into flour, or even fashioned flour into bread. If faced with the challenge of having to (literally) cloth themselves; meaning getting clothe material from live animals to make the clothes and then onto tailoring the clothes for themselves or building their own houses, these Americans would be hopelessly untrained and unprepared. Even to make minor repairs to machines, which surround them, these particular Americans must call on other members of their community (whose business it is) to fix their cars, repair plumbing, or whatever the minor repair may be. Paradoxically, perhaps, the richer the nation, the more apparent is this inability of its average inhabitants to survive unaided and alone. Short of a catastrophic war, it is highly unlikely that many Americans will know the full meaning to struggle for nothing but pure existence. Nonetheless, even in our prosperous and secure society, remains unnoticed, an aspect of life’s precariousness; which lies as a reminder of the underlying problem of our economical survival. This unfortunately, is our helplessness as American economic individuals.

It has always been a curious fact to me how Americans can feel security against some of the most impoverished people of the world. Impoverished countries where a human being with his too few calories of energy scratches out for himself a bare subsistence, we however, in America find the economic insecurity of the individual many times multiplied. In many countries, the basic expectation of human continuity is far from assured. In the vast continents of Asia and Africa, in the Near East, even in some countries of South America, brute survival is the problem which stares humanity in the face; everyday. Millions of human beings in other impoverished countries have died of starvation or malnutrition in our present era. Whole nations are acutely aware of what it means to face hunger as a condition of ordinary life. For example, it has been said that an Egyptian man, from the day he is born to the day he dies, never knows what it is to have a full stomach. In many of the so-called underdeveloped nations, the life span of the average person is less than half of an American. Not many years ago, an Indian demographer made the chilling calculation that of one hundred Asian and one hundred American infants, more Americans would be alive at sixty-five than Indians at five! The statistics, not of life, but of premature death throughout most of the world are overwhelming and crushing.
Heilbroner, R. (1962). The Making of Economic Society. The Basic Elements of Economic Thought in the Context of History.


I believe the United States has survived as a rich nation only because an army of others on whom we can call for help to do the tasks we cannot do ourselves for us. If we cannot grow food, we can buy it for another country; if we cannot provide for our needs ourselves, we can hire individuals in other countries for the needed service and in most cases, at a cheaper price. This enormous division of labor enhances our capacity a thousand fold, for it enables us to benefit from other men’s skills as well as, our own. Along with the abundance of material existence as we know it duwells a hidden vulnerability that our abundance is assured only as the organized cooperation of huge armies of people is to be counted upon. Indeed, our continuing existence as a rich nation hinges on the tacit precondition that the mechanism of social organization will continue to function effectively. We are rich, not as individuals, but as members of a rich society; and therefore, our easy assumption of material sufficiency is actually only as reliable as, the bonds which forge us into a social whole.


The problem of how societies forge and maintain the bonds; which guarantee their material survival is the basic problem of economics and more importantly, what our nation is currently facing in today’s need of a economic recovery. My conclusion of this economic chaos is that man and not nature, is the source of most of our economic problems. The economic problem itself as the need to struggle for existence derives ultimately from the scarcity of nature. If there were no scarcity, goods would be as free as air, and economics, at least in one sense of the word, would cease to exist as a social preoccupation. For scarcity, as a felt condition isn’t solely the fault of nature. If Americans in today’s society were content to live at the level of Mexican peasants, all our material wants could be fully satisfied with but an hour or two of daily labor. We would experience little or no scarcity and our economic problems would virtually disappear. Instead in America, we find as the ability to increase natures yield has risen, so has the reach of human wants. In fact, in a society like America, where relative social status is importantly connected with the possession of material goods, we often find that scarcity as a psychological experience and goal becomes more pronounced, as we grow wealthier. Meaning, our desires to possess the fruits of nature race out ahead of our mounting ability to produce goods. Scarcity is therefore, not attributable to nature alone but to human nature as well, and for the purpose of rebuilding the American economy; man’s nature.

Economics is ultimately concerned not merely with the stinginess of the physical environment, but equally with the appetite of the human temperament of our wants and desires. Therefore, I pose the question to you, how do you base your economic success? Is it by your possessions? Look inside yourself and your lifestyle, it may be the very reason why there is an economical struggle.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hxrGJGK8apM