Leaders Read

In the ‘Leadership Wired’ newsletter of 11/24/08, Justin Pinkerman addresses the topic of reading and the influence it has on leaders.

The title of the piece is: Ideas - Vehicles from Present to Future

“Precious few leaders invest time to read books and extract ideas from them - to the detriment of the organizations they lead. Authors spend countless days fine-tuning their ideas into paragraphs and chapters before publishing them as a book. Yet, in a matter of a few hours, a leader can access and absorb those ideas. In turn, leaders can apply new found ideas in their strategy, systems, and organizational dynamics to positively alter the course of their business.

If you doubt the power of a written idea, consider this intellectual progression: Ralph Waldo Emerson's philosophical writings on self-reliance informed and inspired a young man named Henry David Thoreau. Thoreau's application of self-reliance to social injustice prompted him to pen an essay entitled "Resistance to Civil Government". Halfway around the world, Ghandi read Thoreau's essay, and it motivated him to organize India's peaceful protest of Britain's imperial rule. Decades later, Martin Luther King, Jr. would draw encouragement and strength from the writings of Ghandi as he coordinated non-violent resistance to the oppressive systems of racism in America.”

I have found that reading provides insight into living and leading. Your knowledge base expands as well as your ability to relate with and converse with many types of people. Do yourself a favor and read, or read more, and you will become a better leader.

Be Interested

Jim Collins, the author of ‘Good to Great’, was a speaker at this year’s Catalyst Conference.

One of Jim’s mentors gave him what he said was good advice.

“It’s better to be interested than interesting.”

Ask yourself, why would someone be interested in you if you don’t take the time to be interested in them?

How do they know that you aren’t interested in them, you ask? They notice that you don’t stop talking about yourself and what interests you.

It’s never too late to change. Your whole life can change if you start to get interested in others. You will have more friends and followers than you ever could have imagined. Your marriage and your relationship with your kids can improve.

If you are or want to be a leader, you can’t afford not to be interested in the people on your team.

Do you trust facts or hopes?

Michael Crichton, who died this week, addressed the issue of consensus and science in an address at the California Institute of Technology in 2003. Crichton attended Harvard and Harvard Medical School and was a successful writer and director (ER and Jurassic Park).

Crichton raises some interesting questions and challenges us to trust science based on analytical methods and not on opinions or hopes.

“I want to pause here and talk about this notion of consensus, and the rise of what has been called consensus science. I regard consensus science as an extremely pernicious development that ought to be stopped cold in its tracks. Historically, the claim of consensus has been the first refuge of scoundrels; it is a way to avoid debate by claiming that the matter is already settled. Whenever you hear the consensus of scientists agrees on something or other, reach for your wallet, because you're being had.

Let's be clear: The work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus.

There is no such thing as consensus science. If it's consensus, it isn't science. If it's science, it isn't consensus. Period. . . .

I would remind you to notice where the claim of consensus is invoked. Consensus is invoked only in situations where the science is not solid enough. Nobody says the consensus of scientists agrees that E=mc2. Nobody says the consensus is that the sun is 93 million miles away. It would never occur to anyone to speak that way. . . .

To an outsider, the most significant innovation in the global warming controversy is the overt reliance that is being placed on models. Back in the days of nuclear winter, computer models were invoked to add weight to a conclusion: "These results are derived with the help of a computer model." But now large-scale computer models are seen as generating data in themselves. No longer are models judged by how well they reproduce data from the real world -- increasingly, models provide the data. As if they were themselves a reality. And indeed they are, when we are projecting forward. There can be no observational data about the year 2100. There are only model runs.

This fascination with computer models is something I understand very well. Richard Feynman called it a disease. I fear he is right. Because only if you spend a lot of time looking at a computer screen can you arrive at the complex point where the global warming debate now stands.

Nobody believes a weather prediction twelve hours ahead. Now we're asked to believe a prediction that goes out 100 years into the future? And make financial investments based on that prediction? Has everybody lost their minds?”

See the piece at the following link: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122603134258207975.ht

You Say It's Your Birthday

Happy Birthday DK!

I love You.

E