So, this is what can happen when you combine a common purpose or vision, creative and collaborative teamwork, playfulness & creativity:

Ernest Hemingway was challenged to write a story in six words and eventually sent this in to the magazine that challenged him to do it:

For sale. Baby shoes. Never worn.

Isn’t that evocative, sad, moving, all in just six words?

It’s prompted a couple of people since then to use this ‘six-word’ exercise to focus you sharply on how you see yourself – who you are and how you lead.

The latest is John Baldoni, who in his Harvard Blog, says this:

“Clare Booth Luce once told President Kennedy that “a great man is one sentence.” It may feel impossible to sum up your accomplishments in a handful of words but it’s a good exercise in self-reflection. Ask yourself what you want to be remembered for, whether you left the organization or the world better than you found it, and how you influenced others. This exercise can guide your decisions about what you want to achieve and help you understand more clearly what work means to you.”

I remember Dan Pink doing something similar on his blog recently, prompted by the book “Not quite what I was planning: six word memoirs by writers famous and obscure“. He collected a whole load of comments from people summing up their life so far in six words or less.

How you apply it to distilling the essence of how you lead / how you live/ who you are is a neat challenge. What would yours be? Here are a couple of thoughts to start you off:

I’d like my legacy (though that sounds pompous) to be, maybe

“Brought out the best in others.”

Or, phrased in terms of my purpose, to…

“Bring out the best in others“.

Actually, I really like:

“Extraordinary performance levels from ordinary people”

…as I think that’s what we are all here for – to inspire ‘ordinary’ people to realize they are capable of extraordinary things. That includes ourselves.

But, I also always want to bring out the best in myself (it’s lurking in there somewhere), so those words aren’t the complete picture. They are also a bit generic and could apply to anyone. Maybe that’s the limit of a six-word thing – it won’t cover everything.

I had to do a ‘three word’ exercise once. The profile field I was filling in on an online community said “Three important words.” For me, the answer was “No-one is ordinary.”

If you apply the six word exercise to famous leaders from history, it’s actually easier, as you are summing up their legacy and achievements. So, Baldoni reports that Peggy Noonan, the columnist, says Lincoln’s six words would be:

“Preserved the Union. Freed the slaves.”

One that popped into my head this morning is Julius Caesar:

“I came. I saw. I conquered.”

In Latin it’s down to three words – Veni. Vidi. Vici.

So, what about you? Who are you or what do you want your legacy to be – what people would ‘label’ you as when looking back on you – in six words or less?

Here’s the John Baldoni blog to prompt your thinking.

Here’s the Dan Pink blog where lots of reader comments contributing their six words should jog your brain cells into coming up with six words for yourself.

Pic credit: www.obeythepurebreed.com

Overheard in the supermarket yesterday: Three-year-old sitting in shopping trolley/cart, says to his dad as I walk past them – “Wassat? Olives? I like olives. Get olives, dad.” Clunk goes olive jar as naive dad puts it into cart.

Five minutes later, on the other side of the supermarket, I pass the same leader and his dad. “Wassat?” says the driver as I pass them. “Purple hair dye,” says dad, suddenly aware of what’s coming next. “I like purp hair dye. Get purp hair dye, dad.”

As I looked over my shoulder, dad was suddenly realizing that half the contents of the trolley/cart would have to be put back due to mis-direction. Like many of us at one time or other, he’d been badly-led. And also like many of us, had no-one to blame but himself.

It’s not just kids who have mastered leading us where they want us to go. Cats apparently have learnt a particular new kind of purr to ‘enslave’ their owners, according to scientists. When we hear this particular purr (or you do, if you have one – our cat is under a little cat statue in the garden and has been for years, so we don’t any more) it triggers us to dish up food.

In The Leadership Hub this week, some things that you might like and find useful. No mis-leading cats or mis-directing babies, honest:

1. Hub TV: Ken Blanchard on leaving a legacy. What are the three things you want to be remembered for? Then it’s simple: consistently behave in a way that fulfills those three things and you will be (remembered for them, that is. Sorry, my syntax is turning to sand before my/your eyes).

2. Tom Schulte on ‘How to lead like cheese?’ What makes the cheeseburger a role model for leadership? It’s funny. And there’s a point at the end.

3. Oliver Mack, of the wonderful Common Purpose, on the problem with labels - how developing people as leaders shouldn’t be about training people to take up positions of authority: “It’s about creating people who can lead from wherever they are, regardless of position, or hierarchical power.” Amen to that, Oliver.

Oh, and our new quotes section is coming along nicely. The Architect has added one I’ve always loved*. Feel free to add your own. And use the new ‘events’ section to let people know of any events you’ve got coming up.

You can find all the above by clicking on this link www.theleadershiphub.com

*”The first responsibility of a leader is to define reality. The last is to say thank you. In between, the leader is a servant” – Max De Pree

The Net enables a new form of leadership – changing people’s behaviour/behavior through the viral spread of an idea or a ‘meme’ as Richard Dawkins and others have called it, at an accelerated pace compared with pre-Net days. The connectedness provided by the Net provides a kind of souped up medium or accelerator for leading changes in how people behave.

So, I’ll repeat a question I asked this time last year. ‘Talk like a pirate day’ took off from a spontaneous drunken conversation in a bar between two friends, who then put the idea on the Net, and claimed last year to have several million people involved. Net claims of ‘several million’ usually have to be trimmed back by 90% or so, but that still leaves a vast number of people who spent last Friday, September 19th, talking like a pirate.

Then there’s flashmobbing and other examples of de-centralized leadership, usually co-ordinated initially by one person, but quickly taken over by the collective, so there seems to be an act of ‘common mind’ going on: a group of people thinking and acting as one.

And here’s the ‘but’. So, if Talk Like A Pirate Day gets millions of people involved each year, how come The Hunger Site, where you click to provide food for hungry people at no cost, seems to have plateaued at around 150,000 clicks a day for the past few years?

What is it about talking like a pirate for a day that’s more compelling than clicking for a couple of seconds to stop someone being hungry? That’s not an outraged, self-righteous criticism of everyone who talked like a pirate. It’s just bafflement. When The Hunger Site first appeared, I was emailed about it by people from all over the world. And I did my share of excited “Hey have you seen this? The Net could change the world here?!” emailing myself.

But, millions of people don’t click each day. Curious.

And just to be a killjoy: The only reason pirates, in every film ever made since Robert Newton played the archetypal pirate Long John Silver in Treasure Island, speak with an ‘Ooohhh’ and an ‘Arrrrr’ and the word ‘matey’ and all those other piratical cliches the cast of Pirates of The Caribean adopted with zeal, and millions of people were using last Friday, is not because pirates really talked like that. It’s because Robert Newton chose to give his pirate an exaggerated Cornish (West of England) accent in the old black and white movie. And every actor who had to play a pirate in a movie after just copied Newton.