Welcome to IGW Insights Issue 5!
Many years ago, I had the honor of attending a lecture on leadership by the CEO Emeritus of a legendary Fortune 500 company. If my memory serves, he was the last member of the founding family to lead the corporation. He led it through countless rides on the global economic roller coaster. I only mention that because to paraphrase Nassim Taleb, his scars told his story. He was no mere theorist.
He told attendees that defining reality is the first principle of effective leadership.
What a profound and radical notion. At the time, I didn’t quite realize just how profound and radical, but over the better part of two decades of helping clients level up their leadership, this simple but powerful hypothesis consistently proves its centrality.
The dictionary has several definitions of ‘reality’. For our purposes, reality is certainly the conditions of our environment that we must have the courage to confront. But it is also a concise, imaginative, and sometimes impossible-seeming aspiration that could be actualized with the right investment.
There is a gap between those two realities, between the compelling one that does not yet exist but engages our idealism and the often painful and challenging ones that defy our idealism. Inherent in that very gap is the opportunity to bridge it.
We coach leaders to define reality, i.e., to help their teams understand with abundant clarity what their company’s aspirations are and what elements of the current environment stand in the way. If the leader has done this well – and has built a team of capable and creative people – then clear opportunities for innovation and execution will emerge.
At IGW we developed a simple framework for this: The Focus Equation.
Click here to read about the IGW’s simple framework for better focus as a leader.
Recommended Reading and Listening
There are two audiobooks I’ve finished recently, both of which made an impression on me. The first is The Parasitic Mind by Gad Saad. Not everyone likes being confronted with reality. Some will even argue that there’s no such thing. Professor Saad provides a compelling framing of the tradeoffs inherent in speaking the truth (i.e., defining reality) vs. avoiding doing so for whatever reason.
The second audiobook was Man’s Search for Meaning by Victor E. Frankl. I first came across this book about thirty years ago. It is on my very short list of books worth rereading. Frankl famously says he believes there are only two races of people: the decent and the indecent. While he doesn’t go so far as to define decency explicitly, Frankl writes in the same chapter about how the Nazi concentration camp prisoners faced tests of their character after their liberation.
One liberated prisoner wanted to drench his hands in the blood of Germans. Another wanted merely to trample crops in a field.
What values are you committed to no matter what, no matter who is watching, and no matter which laws are in force? When you get tested, will you be the best or the worst of yourself?
Will you be decent?
Leadership is that uniquely human energy that brings out the best contribution in others in service of a worthy aim.
When the world seems to be falling apart, will you lead yourself?
Journaling Exercise
In the spirit of a brutal assessment of the current state, think about Q2 of 2024, which is now just nine days old:
- What are you most afraid of?
- Does your organization lack processes or people/roles?
- Do you have flight risks?
- Who are the people in your business who most understand your processes, markets, and customers?
- When can you get them together to confront the risks in your business?
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Thank you for being a part of the IGW community.
Onward and upward,
Dan Weiss, CEO
