"It's up to each of us alone to figure out who we are, who we are not, and to act more or less consistently with those conclusions." - Tom Peters

I like that. It's from Tom Peters' 'Thought For The Day', which you can sign up to as a daily email here: Tom Peters site

Labels: authentic leaders, authentic leadership, Tom Peters

A lot of leadership lessons have come out of NASA over the years.


Teamwork and innovation: Leadership and innovation consultants often remind their clients that NASA would get two teams to compete on coming up with an innovative solution to a problem and that the competitive element accelerated the innovation process, for example.

Connecting everybody's job with the overall mission, vision and purpose: And then there's the probably apocryphal story of JFK visiting NASA HQ at Houston and stopping to talk to a man with a mop in the corridor and asking "And what do you do at NASA?" to be answered by the janitor with "I'm helping put a man on the moon sir" - often used as an example of connecting people's everyday jobs with the overall purpose of the organization and how critical it is for leaders to do that.

Set the vision even if you don't have all the answers already: And, of course, there's the famous promise by President Kennedy to 'put a man on the moon before the end of the decade' when the technology didn't exist to do that.

I heard once from Mike Harris, who was founding CEO of the UK bank First Direct, and who was originally a scientist specialising in boron chemistry (and who is a brilliant organizational leader in the mould of Jim Collins' Level 5 leadership) that Kennedy's scientists said, among other things "But, we don't even have a fuel that can take us to the moon and back!" And the answer was "Go and invent one, then", which led to the creation of a whole new field of chemistry - boron chemistry - which led to the creation of the right fuel. Now, I'm not a scientist so I hope I've remembered that right and not garbled the science.

But, we also learnt from NASA about crisis leadership: If you've seen the film/movie Apollo 13, you know what I mean. If we leave aside for the moment the tragic subsequent deaths in the space shuttle years later, the way that the NASA team at Houston was led to save the lives of the astronauts in Apollo 13 after an explosion in the oxygen tank - using duct tape, plastic hose and cardboard to rig up a contraption to increase the oxygen (or decrease the carbon dioxide - can't remember) in the Lunar module so they didn't run out before landing - was inspiring crisis leadership at its best - with everyone in the project team taking the lead at different times under the guidance of the overall team leaders to do what seemed impossible.

It was April 17th 1970 - 38 years ago today - that the Apollo 13 lunar module splashed down safely.

Great reminder of the dramatic story in Wired here (including the fact that no-one said "Houston, we have a problem." That was the movie version.)

We spend so much time planning, writing procedures, training people in competencies and so on for leadership. We forget how leadership in the field, in real life, often comes down to improvising with the resources you have available. And we forget just how powerful the ability to improvise can be in leaders at all levels during a crisis.

Labels: NASA, project management, purpose, team leadership. innovation, vision

I was just thinking about this, this morning for some reason: There's a scene in the film Casablanca that is an example of Jim Collins' Level 5 leadership (modest, courageous, ego-lite leadership).

When a group of German soldiers start singing about the Fatherland in Rick's nightclub, around the piano, the French people in the club, their homeland occupied, look downcast.

Victor Lazlo, the resistance leader husband (Paul Heinreid?) of Ingrid Bergman, walks up to the band and tells them to play the Marseillaise. The band leader glances across at Humphrey Bogart (Rick), sitting at a corner table. Bogart nods imperceptibly (well, it's perceptible to the band leader; stop being so picky).

It's his nightclub. This is a big risk for him to take. It's a hidden act of leadership. The band starts playing the Marseillaise, gradually drowning out the German soldiers as, led by the resistance leader, the audience stand up one by one and noisily sing along. The German soldiers give up. For now.

This has always been one of my favourite scenes in a film and I have always thought that the grandstanding leadership of the resistance leader - admirable though it was - inspired me less than the little nod given by the hidden leader in the corner, who let it all happen, taking on a risk to himself and his livelihood, and took none of the credit for it.

I don't completely get all the slides in this pecha kucha from Jurriaan Mous, but enough of the images ring true to me, and I love slide 14 on Workplace 2.0 with the guy sitting on top of the filing cabinet. Order from apparent chaos, self-organising systems (his weather slide), bottom up versus top down...there is enough in here to help us realise we need to think differently about what leadership is. So, I like it a lot...

Just a reminder that it was 40 years ago today that the world lost a great leader, at just 39 years old, in Martin Luther King. If you haven't yet viewed the moving and inspirational speech Robert Kennedy made on that night, it will be on The Leadership Hub home page for a few days more (top left on the Hub Home Page). After that you can find it by joining The Hub and clicking on 'view a video' in your profile page in The Hub, or by clicking on the little TV icon in the panel of icons down the right hand side of your profile page.

A little story I heard Rene Carayol tell, he having heard it from Rudy Giuliani, two-time Mayor of New Yorl: Giuliani's dad took him to see Dr. King speak, saying in advance something like "I want you to see what a dangerous man sounds like. America has to be careful of people like this." After they'd both listened to Dr. King speak for a little while, Giuliani's father leant down to him and said something like "Forget what I said. You are listening to a great, great man." Giuliani says there were tears in his dad's eyes.