How Leaders Think

By Lee Thayer

How leaders think determines what leaders do and how they do it. This book explores in depth how the best leaders think.

The more you can think like the best leaders think, the more you can perform like the best leaders perform.

The twelve chapters in this intriguing yet practical book range from
Being Up to Something to
Knowing What you Need to Knowto
Imagination & Ingenuityto
Performing Leadershipand
People-Making.

Throughout, these are rich and rare perspectives. You will go back again and again to draw the insights offered in this book. Its the kind of book that can change your life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jul 19, 2010
• ISBN: 9781453530375

Lee Thayer

Lee Thayer is a scholar and writer known around the world for his many years of research and publications on the human condition. He has taught or lectured at many of the most prestigious universities in the U.S., Canada, Mexico, Europe, Scandinavia, Australia, and China. He has been a Fulbright professor in Finland, a Ford Foundation Fellow at Harvard, and was twice awarded a Danforth Foundation Teacher Award for excellence in his teaching. His background is in music (composing and arranging), the humanities, engineering, and social and clinical psychology. He was one of the founders of the field of communication as a university discipline, and is a Past President of what was at that time the largest association of human communication scholars in the world. He was also the founding editor of the influential journal Communication, which was devoted to pragmatic insights into the human condition by the top thinkers in the world. His early work consisted of 14 books of research on the connection between communication and the human condition. More recently, he has summarized his long life of research into all matters human and social in such books as Communication: A Radically New Approach to Lifes Most Perplexing Problem, two collections of essays, On Communication and Pieces: Toward a Revisioning of Communication/Life. The present Doing Life; A Pragmatist Manifesto is a summary of his innovative perspectives on this subject for past 60 years. There is also his proposed alternative to the reach of biological evolution into the social sciences, Explaining Things: Inventing Ourselves and our Worlds. He lives in Western North Carolina with his artist/wife Kate Thayer. He is also renowned for his current work as a CEO coach of choice.

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Copyright © 2010 by Lee Thayer.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This book was printed in the United States of America.

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CONTENTS

Introduction

A Note about Gender:

One

Being Up to Something

Two

Knowing One’s Role

Three

Knowing What You Need to Know

Four

Imagination & Ingenuity

Five

Pattern Vs. Perverse Thinking

Six

About Communication

Seven

Rationality, Truth, Etc.

Eight

Thinking Up and Down

Nine

Power Plays

Ten

Problems/Choices/Decisions

Eleven

Performing Leadership

Twelve

People-Making

Sources and Further Provocations

Acknowledgements

About the Author . . .

INTRODUCTION

Leaders think differently.

It doesn’t take long for those who are going to be successful in a leadership role to learn that conventional thinking won’t get you where you want to go.

And it doesn’t take much longer to realize that the current folklore, the fashionable recipes and buzzwords provided by the bestsellers, and the insidious pressures of the pop culture—all often run contrary to the kind of thinking required of successful leaders.

Successful leaders learn very quickly that thinking like everyone else will carry them off where it takes everyone else. Incompetent and gullible followers of the crowd do not make capable leaders.

Mediocrity is like an airborne virus. If it infects your thinking, you will become a victim and also a carrier. The pull of mediocrity is far stronger than the pull of excellence. Unless you consciously and tenaciously make yourself immune, you will be mediocre. This will guarantee that you will then have a mediocre life.

Mediocre people are proselytizers. They want others to be like them. They are good at this because there are armies of them. They dictate reality out of sheer numbers. If you don’t equip yourself to think differently, you will without realizing it end up thinking like everyone else does.

And if you think like everyone else does, you will be like everyone else. Leaders know that how they think determines who they are, and thus how they will do what they do.

If you can’t live without being approved of by the majority, you will never be successful as a leader.

In general, people practice a herd instinct. They do what others do, feel like others feel, know what others know, have what others have, and so on. People think alike, in the sense that they think like those they hang out with.

Communication is a form of intercourse. It involves the minds of the people involved. When people talk to one another, there are consequences. This is how people pass around—for the most part—the diseases of the mind.

If you are going to communicate with other people, you have to have a mind that works reasonably the same as theirs. Unless there is a great effort in another direction, minds converge.

If you disagree with one another, it is because you have agreed to disagree. Even that is a form of synchronization. People synchronize their minds like they synchronize their watches. Where no one is thinking differently, people repeatedly go over the cliff, like mythological lemmings.

Leaders know that just because people agree with each other, this does not make them right. They may claim to be right. But that doesn’t make them right. Just because a belief is widespread does not mean it will take them or you where you ought to be going. We have leaders to save us from thoughtlessness and indifference.

In a popular democracy such as we have in many western countries, we tend to choose as our leaders those who agree with us. But it is precisely those who don’t think like we do that we need as our leaders.

Shakespeare’s influence continues on not because he thought like, and wrote like, his contemporaries, but because he expressed himself differently. We see the world differently as a result. He was a leader.

Whether it is in art, technology, sports, politics, or business, it is those who think differently who emerge as our leaders.

Every human grouping—from tribe and clan to business organizations and nations—has its leaders, some influencing us from the past, others in the present. They are the ones who think or have thought differently. For this, they encounter great risks. But if they didn’t pay the price of thinking differently, they would never be a candidate for leadership.

Just Thinking Differently Is Not Sufficient

It is not just thinking differently that propels the few who become leaders, and all the rest to the waste-heap of mediocrity.

It is thinking in ways that fire and inspire the self-centered imaginations of other people who may be ambitious and maybe even competent, but who have no direction.

Most people change because the people they know are changing. But it had to start somewhere. And that is where leaders are forged. They may become leaders in spite of having no such intention. Or they may be pell-mell in love with their pursuit of their endeavors—physical or mental.

Followers provide the power to move ahead. When people are thus enchanted, what resists must be overcome.

No one can command their influence. Leaders typically do not conscript followers. What leaders do offer us is a way out of the petty concerns of our mundane, everyday lives.

Whether artists or politicians or athletes or bosses, leaders offer us a way out of the burdens of sameness on a different path—a different way of thinking and of being. If people like the vision offered for future ways of being and doing, we make them our leaders.

Soleri’s dilemma was not just that Mozart was the better musician. It was that Mozart thought in ways Soleri couldn’t.

Leaders do not compel. They impel. They do so by how they think and thus how they communicate with the rest of us. Our destinies change when our ways of thinking change. Potent leaders do not think like the rest of us do. They make it necessary for us to think like they do. Nelson’s victory at Trafalgar resulted not so much from superior fire-power but from a way of thinking that the enemy could not match.

The Challenges Leaders Face

It’s not enough to say that leaders are virtuoso thinkers. We would still have to understand what that means.

My purpose in this book is to explore and illuminate what it would mean to be a virtuoso thinker. Virtuoso thinkers in any field are disrupters. They change the future by their counter-intuitive thinking in the present.

Leaders are makers. They make a new direction. They change their world by refusing to think about it in conventional ways. It requires an unconventional thinker to change the direction of things.

Leaders change how people think, what they believe and value, and where they’re headed. If any of those is unsatisfactory to a person, she becomes a follower.

People are generally fascinated by leaders, but fear them and are suspicious of them. After all, it is their present circumstances—no matter how bad—that they need to preserve. Who they are is almost always more powerful than who they should be.

When it comes down to the wire, how people live is always a more potent force than how they should live. That is the leader’s first challenge. It is a theme that recurs in different contexts in the following pages.

It is a cultural invariant: people are more influenced by the people around them than they are by themselves. Or indeed by any leader who is trying to confer a benefit on them. The leader is never talking to just one person. He must necessarily be talking to that whole set of people who have a vested interest in the way that person is now. That’s challenge number two.

If people were not herd critters, they would not survive. People are hard-wired to imitate the others who collect around them.

People are built to be influenced. But by whom, or by what, or when? This is the human predicament. And this is the leader’s third challenge.

Leaders never confront a blank slate. They have to confront persons who are mid-stream in their own history.

If the leader does not understand how people are presently thinking and believing, those potential followers won’t be able to connect the dots between who they are and what the leader is saying about who they should be.

People are variously capable of following an idea, a myth, a belief, a sentiment, an image, or media-produced slogans, shibboleths, theories or philosophies about this or that. But influences are always person-specific.

People rarely pick their influences. They are stuck with interpreting them not according to what those are, but according to who they are. Leaders know that people live and act upon their interpretations—not upon what is said. That challenge (#4) is also interwoven throughout this book.

Interpretations, like habits, are mostly unconscious. The mind feeds upon what’s available. It puts its own spin on whatever it deals with.

We live in a world of influencing or being influenced. People are easy prey for what they already believe in, the way they already think. But people are resistant to what does not confirm them and the way they are.

Leaders are thus the makers of change. They disrupt what would otherwise be the normal and predictable evolution of things. Yet thinking differently alone will not make you a leader. It merely makes you a candidate. You have to be enfranchised by the people who would make you their leader.

Much of what follows in counter-intuitive. It is counter-intuitive because it is not conventional.

What’s on Offer in this Book

The best leaders always come from the ranks of the best followers of leadership thinking. That is why this book exists. It exposes you to how leaders think.

If you can’t think like leaders think,

you can’t do what leaders do.

What follows is a collection of concepts that collectively form the foundation for the development of leadership thinking. Leaders think differently—and they think differently even from each other. It is only when you make these concepts a framework for your own thinking that you can improvise on them.

That is what leaders do. They have mastered the discipline. All the rest is about improvising.

All masterful pianists have to perform with the same 88 keys as all other pianists do. And yet they can perform differently. The best have something the rest of us don’t have. Michelangelo said that creativity is a function of discipline.

It is the disciplined mind that is capable of creative thinking. It is only the discipline of mind that can be taught. The rest is up to you. It rests on passion and imagination.

The more disciplined your thinking, the better your thinking. And the better your thinking, the more effectively you can maneuver the world, and yourself in that world.

To the serious reader, what is offered in this book is an in-depth taste of how leaders think. Such a study has a beginning. But it has no end. The more you learn about how great leaders think, the more you can learn about how they think. You can start here. You can build on this beginning for the rest of your life.

This book is not simply to be read. It is written to be studied and applied. It is a sourcebook for your thinking, not a book of buzzwords.

None of us arrives on this earth as thinkers. It is the most difficult of human endeavors to be learned. It returns to you only what you put into it. No secrets, no tricks. Just honing the tool, along the lines of what follows.

A NOTE ABOUT GENDER:

We all know—especially me—that leadership is gender-blind. That is, leadership does not favor one gender over another.

This makes the use of gender pronouns difficult. The convention has always been to use a he where either he or she is concerned. Using both all of the time is cumbersome. Some of my readers have told me that alternatively using one or the other, which I have sometimes done, is confusing.

So here I will for the most part use