Leaders and Leadership: Searching for Wisdom in All the Right Places

By Lee Thayer

In the West, and in America particularly, we have deep-seated beliefs in
1. Evolution the idea that all things are constantly evolving in the right direction;
2. Progress the idea that whatever is newer is better, whether it is a theory or a
technological tool; and
3. Consensus the idea that the more people who adopt a new idea or a new fashion in
clothes or cars, the greater the likelihood that they are right.
So we go from a new fashion to the next new fashion. We believe that change is progress. And
we have faith that the changes over which we have no control are taking us where we ought to
be going since evolving is inevitable.
These are beliefs that structure the core of our thoughts and our lives. These are beliefs that
lead us to see the world as linear and literal.
Most of the longest-running civilizations of the past native American Indian, for example
were cyclical. Every generation was expected to reprise and replicate the preceding generation,
with only minor changes in execution.
Those people were for thousands of years truth-keepers, carefully guarding the truths that had
been passed down to them from the past. By contrast, we are truth-seekers, forever inventing
newer truths in order to render the existing ones obsolete.
As a result, we look for the wisdom for living and for running our organizations in the most
recent emanations from our gurus and experts. In doing so, we miss the wisdom of the ages.
This book attempts to redress that fl aw in our thinking.
Lee Thayer shows us in this book how to fi nd the wisdom that could make a real difference in
our lives and our businesses. Few would be more qualifi ed to do so.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Sep 22, 2010
• ISBN: 9781453571644

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.

Book preview

Copyright © 2010 by Lee Thayer.

Library of Congress Control Number:       2010913129

ISBN:         Hardcover                               978-1-4535-7163-7

                   Softcover                                 978-1-4535-7162-0

                   Ebook                                      978-1-4535-7164-4

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.

To order additional copies of this book, contact:

Xlibris Corporation

1-888-795-4274

www.Xlibris.com

[e-mail]

82718

Contents

Acknowledgements

A Note on Gender . . .

Introduction

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

About the Author

Acknowledgements

I wish to acknowledge all of those wise and articulate people over all of human history who have spoken to us. They have provided us with more wisdom than we seem to be able to use.

I would like also to acknowledge my CEO clients and colleagues over the past forty+ years, with whom I have learned much. The only way to really understand the process of making a great organization, and the leadership required to make it happen, is simply to do it. It was never simple, but when my clients and I succeeded or failed our initiatives, we both learned much—about, seemingly, everything that really mattered.

A Note on Gender . . .

I would prefer this not be necessary. But it may be, for a few readers.

Following the conventional style, I have used the pronoun he in most cases, rather than alternating he and she.

Some of my best clients have been extraordinary women. Some of history’s best leaders have been women. So I in no way intend to depreciate women by failing to use her here and there. I have been told that trying to be politically correct actually hinders the reading of the text. I have been told by successful women that the conventional style of simply using he works for them.

My he’s are to be understood as gender neutral.

Introduction

There are two things that determine what you get out of a book.

• One is what you expect.

• The other is getting what you expect.

A few minutes here will clarify what to expect, and therefore maximize your return on your expectations.

What to Expect

If you are looking for the same-o seven easy steps for becoming a leader, you should probably look on the best-seller shelf. There you’ll find what others are buying. Then you can tell those authors that what they’re peddling doesn’t work with all people at all times in real life.

This is not a recipe book. It is a book that can give you lasting insights into how leaders need to look at the world in order to be successful in a leadership role.

If you are into celebrity-worship, you will not find what you want here. The great thinkers of history have almost never become celebrities. But if you want to be a successful leader, you will profit greatly from what they have had to say.

What’s offered in this book is a judicious sampling of the world’s wisdom about a life of leadership.

We will take a pivotal idea and unpack it—that is, explore how it might be used rather than just being struck by it. Great ideas are rare. And they often come in the form of quips and asides. They are elusive.

We will catch them in our net and examine them as we would a rare jewel. We will do that because that’s what they are.

You can expect to be enriched in your thinking about leadership beyond measure. What is possible here are rewards beyond your expectations.

All you have to do is be open to the riches in store for you as you study and imagine putting into practice the unique ideas in this book.

Getting What You Expect

If this tells you what to expect, the rest is up to you. Reading is like gambling. The better you know how to play the game, the more your winnings will be.

If you came upon this book looking for the solidest ideas about leading a leader’s life, you will get more than you expect.

Like the rest of us, leaders’ lives are the products of what they are thinking all day long. Yearning to have that kind of life, and learning how to create that life for yourself, are prerequisite.

You can’t simply learn how to be a leader. You have to live a life of leadership in order to be a successful leader.

So this is a bit like how-to-lead-a-life-of-leadership kind of book. It all begins with how you think about it—with who you are.

This book will provide you with endless insights about that.

Leadership is life. Learning = growth, and growth = life. Great leaders have more life than most other people. That’s the reason they do. And that’s the path.

How determined you may be is up to you. But being put on the right path is the least you should expect.

Lee Thayer

Flat Rock, NC

August 2010

1

The Leader’s Life

"Life consists in what a person is thinking all day."

That’s the way Emerson put it, Epictetus before him, and many others throughout history.

You are what you think about all day. Your destiny is forged in what you think about all day. You become what gets the most focus in your mind.

It is an observation that can be found in every culture in every part of the world. It is the kind of truism you can check out for yourself—but by then it’s too late. And you will never, ever beat it. If you are not thinking for yourself, you can be certain that someone else will be thinking for you.

What goes on in your mind determines what goes on in your life. Your destiny is forged in what routinely goes on in your mind. If it is trivial, your life will be trivial. If it is of little consequence, your life will be of little consequence. If you think in clichés, your life will become a cliché. If you are always dealing with what’s urgent and not what’s important, you will be like a tumbleweed, blown hither and yon. You will be full of anxiety, impatience, and disappointment.

If you are not constantly focused on what is important, your life will never have the feel of relevance—to you or to anyone else.

Most people prefer to think the way other people think. This herd mentality is far easier than actually thinking for oneself. It has similarly been observed that people think what is thought. That people say what is said. That people do what is done, and feel what is felt. Maybe those are just the fashions of the day. Or, just maybe, people are trying to avoid being regarded as different.

The way leaders think is different. They seem to know—either intuitively or from direct experience—that conventional thinking invariably leads to conventional results. If you or others in your organization think mostly along conventional paths, the outcomes of what is decided and what is done is will be conventional.

There is no competitive advantage in thinking conventionally. Those who think conventionally end up with the same problems and the same kinds of circumstances as everyone else who thinks that way. If you want to have a conventional marriage, one having the same conventional problems and outcomes, start with a conventional courtship and a conventional wedding. If you want to have the same problems that every other organization has, start with conventional ways of thinking about how to put it together and how to manage it.

Murphy’s Laws are mostly about the results of conventional thinking. The conventional problems that organizations have are a result of the conventional thinking that creates them.

For example, If things can go wrong, they will go wrong. True? It just works out that way in the world of conventional thinking. Conventional thinkers expect things to go wrong. And, therefore, things do. People don’t feel too badly about creating a problem out of stupidity or incompetence. That’s because the boss builds the likelihood of those problems into the operations and the economics of the system.

It’s sometimes called Business As Usual. Most organizations devote far more time (and money) in dealing with the aftermath of problems than they devote to preventing them. So, as Parkinson suggested (in the well-known Parkinson’s Law—this is a variation on it), problems will expand to fill the time and money made available for dealing with them. That doesn’t make any sense. It doesn’t have to. It’s merely conventional reality.

Now we come face to face with another challenge to our thinking. Einstein (rather uncharacteristically) put it roughly as follows:

It takes a certain mentality to create certain kinds of problems. Do you imagine you could effectively solve those problems with that same mentality?

What he may have meant by this off-hand remark is of course something that only Einstein knew. But we could guess at some interpretations that could be of practical value.

One of these is that any problem is best solved by preventing it from occurring. A way of thinking that could not anticipate and preclude a problem from happening is not likely to be able to provide an optimum solution to the problem when it occurs.

Or, consider this: Over the years, managers have trained their employees not to think. Managers have made it clear that they don’t want employees thinking, either because this would challenge the manager’s control or superior judgments. Then, when an employee screws up because he just wasn’t thinking, the boss buys signs for every cubicle saying THINK. A management-created problem is not readily solvable by managers sharing the same conventional ways of thinking.

Or, perhaps the simplest interpretation: If you created a problem by the way you think about things, could you actually create a sustainable solution with that same way of thinking?

Thinking clearly and objectively about issues and concerns which you participated in creating is a hard thing to do. As the old saying has it, if you are a part of the problem, can you effectively be a part of the solution? Leaders assume that being a part of the problem limits their potential for being a part of the solution.

So, they conclude, avoid being a part of the problem in the first place. They can do this only by not thinking conventionally, and by refusing ownership of problems that should belong to someone else.

There have been more than 12,000 books published in the last two decades or so about how to do it—about how to successfully manage an organization. It seems like all that tsunami of advice about how to do it hasn’t made our leaders much more capable.

Why is that? you may justifiably wonder.

How can so much advice have so little effect?

Well, as Yogi Berra quipped, If you don’t want no help, I guess I can’t stop you.

When it comes to thinking, most people don’t want no help. They simply want confirmation that their ways of thinking are in keeping with everyone else’s.

If you’ve attended even one or two meetings, then you know this is how it works. Meetings are typically not about thinking together to some valuable conclusions. They are like beauty contests, contests to determine whose thinking is to prevail.

The once famous quality guru Edwards Deming made this observation:

"Eighty percent of American managers cannot answer with any measure of confidence these seemingly simple questions:

What is my job?

What in it really counts?

How well am I doing?"

We’re all people. We all like to be around people who think as well—or as poorly—as we do.

It gives us a sense of being right. Because then our way of thinking must be right, because everyone else who agrees with us . . . agrees.

In his fun little book entitled Have Fun at Work, Bill Livingston observed:

When everyone thinks the same, no one has to think.

We strive for consensus. We are confident we’ve got the right strategy when everyone else agrees. If you want to accomplish certain things—

circumnavigating the world, for example—it helps to think of the earth as being round. But that way of thinking won’t actually help much walking down the street. It may, in fact, get in the way.

Just because a person disagrees doesn’t make him or her right. But just because everybody agrees on something doesn’t make that agreement right. Reality is in no way obligated to be consistent with the way everyone thinks about it.

As a practical matter, the second part of Livingston’s way of putting what is actually age-old wisdom may be more useful. Once a way of doing things in an organization becomes ingrained, those who work there assume that there is some tested wisdom behind it. They therefore don’t question it. You know how the folklore goes. Question: Why are you doing this that way? Answer: "Because we’ve always done it that way."

People don’t think unless they have to. And then they have to think with the only thinking apparatus they have aboard, enabled and constrained by the minds they have for doing so. People in conventional organizations aren’t thinking because they don’t have to. It is either because they can’t, or because they have for so long been discouraged from doing so.

It is assumed that the more position power you have in an organization, the more of that organization’s thinking you are entitled or obligated to provide. In a bureaucracy, which all organizations tend toward, we even tell the janitor how to sweep the floor. Don’t think about it, he is told. Just follow the procedures provided.

Here’s something to think about: Who is supposed to do the CEO’s thinking for him?

If he becomes the sole overseer of his own thinking—which is usually the case—then the prerogative for doing the thinking for the organization is a function of power and not necessarily of qualification. CEOs are more often than not considered omniscient, not because of how well they think, but of how much power they have. Confusing the two translates into a poor prognosis for both the CEO and the organization.

The average tenure of CEOs after having been successful elsewhere is less than 18 months. They fail because how they thought is not transportable to a different organization, a different set of circumstances. For poor thinkers, what eventually follows some more or less algorithmic model for success is, ultimately, failure.

Some managers and even some CEOs imagine they can outwit chance. Since your imagination is the key tool for thinking, being wrong there leads to all kinds of poor thinking and unwanted outcomes. As everyone who has ever been in love knows, imagination is a more seductive influence than are facts. It is no less so in organizations.

What you can’t imagine, you can’t do. What you can imagine, you can find a way to do.

Chance, or happenstance, is the eight-hundred-pound gorilla in life. It invariably plays the role of the heavyweight in every aspect of life. Along with your own competence, chance participates in calling the shots on every path between what you imagine you’d like the outcome to be—and what the outcomes actually turn out to be.

Poor thinkers imagine that they were the primary cause of any good results, but that poor results were due to circumstances beyond their control. Chance played its role either way. The only way you can get chance on your side is to acknowledge that it is always a player. Then you can at least imagine what might happen with that impact player on the field.

If there is anything to be learned from human history, it is that the imagination is limitless. The greatest works of art and science come from the imagination, just as the greatest successes of business come from someone’s imagination. Thinking relies on the imagination. What matters is not what the so-called facts are, but how you interpret them. Leaders are creators, as much as are poets or inventers or sculptors or composers.

They live by improvising, not by analyzing. They are bricoleurs, who accomplish what needs to be accomplished with the tools and resources at hand. They are not determined (a very modern pop psychology notion), but are determiners.

It makes a significant difference how leaders think about that.

About Thinking

No one can think just because he was told to do so, or because he wanted to. IBM was wrong. You can remind people to THINK (before they start talking, for example). But this works only if they are ready, willing, and able to think in the first place.

Thomas Edison suggested that

"5% of people think

10% of people think they think

85% would rather die than think."

And apparently do.

That’s why, where any complex problem is being addressed, there will always be a surfeit of simple, easy to implement, wrong solutions. It’s too complicated to think about complex things. So we go on applying solutions that are easy, because they require little or no thought, and we end up with the same problems we had last week or a millennium ago.

Complex situations—literally any situation that involves human beings doing their thing in organizations—have complex consequences. There is no single cause of anything, as the popular author Malcolm Gladwell encouraged us to think in his little book, The Tipping Point.

His main point is of course that fads are far more powerful than facts. But he also points out (which most literate people already knew) that small causes can have big effects. Erik Durschmied provided us with more useful ingredients for our thinking in his book The Hinge Factor: How Chance and Stupidity Have Changed History:

"The fate of nations [and of organizations] is determined less by the genius of their leaders than by the bizarre, the unexpected, and the incalculable—in short, the unpredictable ‘hinge factor.’"

If failure is attributable to as many causes as we claim, so is success. The business press would have us believe that Jack Welch by his own efforts caused what happened at GE. Maybe. But the economy surely played a role, as did the demand for certain products (especially financing?). You can’t sell jet engines to people who aren’t buying any.

Do CEOs control that?

We want heroes and we want scapegoats. But leaders seem to prefer thinking about how things actually work and not about the folklore and mythologies provided by the current pop culture. We may like to think (or, better, to imagine) that there is a single cause for things—especially where leadership is concerned. But hindsight is far better than foresight, as we all know.

There is precious little we can learn about how a particular leader did it that will enable someone else to be able to do it. Success in a leadership role is determined by factors within but mostly outside of the leader’s control. He cannot control circumstances. But he can determine how best to think about them, given his goals.

How one acts is a function of how one thinks. Improving how you think is the only certain leverage you have.

The Nobel-wining biologist D’Arcy Thompson offered up this bit of wisdom about his own field of biology:

Things are the way they are because they got to be that way.

Working in the highly rational world of biology, how did he have to think about things in order to come up with that?

But it isn’t how things got to be the way they are that concerns leaders. It is how things ought to be that orchestrates the thinking of great leaders.

It’s usually prudent to accept what happened simply because it happened. And to put most of one’s thinking effort into figuring out how to go on from there. Time and effort spent trying to figure out why something happened is a big drag on any organization’s efficiency. It should be a line item on the costs ledger. That same time and effort could be devoted to figuring out how best to get from here to where you want to go.

The argument is that knowing why or how something happened as it did and when it did will enable you to avoid that specific unwanted happening from occurring again. That makes perfectly good conventional sense. But most such happenings occur only once. No situation is ever the same as a past situation.

The world and everything in it is always changing. People change. If you change a process, you’ve changed a whole system. If nothing else, the fixes you put in place on the basis of an analysis of a root cause won’t make any future situation the same as the one in the past.

There is certainly value in analysis.

But no analysis of itself can ever tell you what to do.

Better to keep your eye on your goals than to divert your attention by doing archeology. That’s the way leaders think about it. They focus on what needs to be accomplished, not on what happened in the past.

It may be prudent to assume that things are the way they are simply because they got to be that way. Past history may bear upon the present or the future in some way. But you could never know exactly in what way happenings are going to occur. If you’re thinking all day about why something happened, you cannot be thinking about how to get from here to your goals.

The present situation is given. It is simply what it is because it got to be that way. You can’t change what’s already happened. Leaders think it is better to spend the time preparing for the unexpected (a la Weick & Sutcliffe’s book, Managing the Unexpected).

All industries—indeed all networks of people who interact directly or indirectly over time—will create a folklore that enables them to talk to one another about the world and the way it works. That way of thinking might be meaningful—but only to those talkers.

Those within an occupational group, for example, learn how to talk to each other, and thereby how to maintain the reality given by their folklore. Plumbers do it. Physicians do it. Hamburger flippers do it. Journalists do it. CEOs do it.

John McDowell once remarked that knowledge is a contagious disease. The world we know gets created by our talk